Against colonization and rural dispossession : local resistance in South and East Asia, the Pacific and Africa

Under the guise of 'development', a globalizing capitalism has continued to cause poverty through dispossession and the exploitation of labour across the Global South. This process has been met with varied forms of rural resistance by local movements of displaced farm workers, small and landless (women) peasants, and indigenous peoples in South and East Asia, the Pacific and Africa, who are resisting the forced appropriation of their land, the exploitation of labour and the destruction of their ecosystems and ways of life. In this provocative new collection, engaged scholars and activists combine grounded case studies with both Marxist and anti-colonial analyses, suggesting that the developmental project is a continuation of the colonial project. The authors then demonstrate the ways in which these local struggles have attempted to resist colonization and dispossession in the rural belt, thereby contributing essential movement-relevant knowledge on these experiences in the Global South. A vital addition to the fields of critical development studies, political-sociology, agrarian studies and the anthropology of resistance, this book addresses academics and analysts who have either minimized or overlooked local resistances to colonial capital, especially in the Asia-Pacific and Africa regions. Waponhahki anti-colonial resistance in North American colonial contexts: some preliminary notes on the coloniality of meta-dispossession / Rebecca Sockbeson -- Sovereignty politics in Samoa: fa'asamoa, fa'amatai, and resistance to colonial capital and dispossession of customary land and place / Naomi Gordon -- Adivasi, Dalit, and non-tribal forest dweller (ADNTFD) resistance to bauxite mining in Niyamgiri: displacing capital and state-corporate mining activism in India / Dip Kapoor -- Our crops speak: small and landless peasant resistance to agro-extractive dispossession in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia / Hasriadi Masalam -- Dispossession and neoliberal disaster reconstruction: activist NGO and fisher resistance in Nagapattinam, Tamil Nadu / Raja Swamy and Prema Revathi -- Lumad anti-mining activism in the Philippines / Robyn Magalit Rodrguez -- Coal power and the Sundarbans in Bangladesh: subaltern resistance and convergent crises / Souryan Mookerjea and Manoj Misra -- Resisting accumulation by dispossession: organization and mobilization by the rural poor in contemporary South Africa / Lalitha Naidoo, Gilton Klerck, and Kirk Helliker -- Food sovereignty through ecofeminism: re-commoning as resistance to agribusiness dispossession in Kenya / Leigh Brownhill, Wahu Kaara, and Terisa Turner -- Guided by the Yomo spirit: resistance to accumulation by dispossession of the Songor salt lagoon in Ada, Ghana / Jonathan Langdon and Kofi Larweh -- Contesting dispossession: land rights activism in Gambella, Ethiopia, and Pujehun, Sierra Leone / Rachel Ibreck -- Local resistance to large-scale agricultural land acquisitions in the Benishangul-Gumuz region, Ethiopia / Tsegaye Moreda -- All that glitters: neoliberal violence, small-scale mining, and gold extraction in northern Tanzania / Zahra Moloo -- 'Oloibirinization', collective identity, and the future of multilocal resistance in the Niger Delta / Temitope B. Oriola Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession argues that many economic initiatives undertaken in the global South in the name of development are actually a form of continued colonization of these regions. Instead of creating stronger economic communities, this development has actually exacerbated poverty and led to the exploitation of labor across the global South. As the contributors show, this process has been met with varied forms of rural resistance by local movements of displaced farm workers, landless peasants, and indigenous peoples. Combining local case studies with Marxist and anti-colonial analysis, the essays collected here demonstrate the ways in which these local struggles have attempted to resist colonization and dispossession. The result is a vital addition to the fields of critical development studies, political-sociology, agrarian studies, and the anthropology of resistance, particularly in overlooked areas of Asia-Pacific and Africa regions. A provocative study of the ways in which peasantand indigenous movements across Africa and Asia are resisting globalcapitalism.