New Frontiers Of Land Control (critical Agrarian Studies)

Questions about land control have invigorated thinkers in agrarian studies and economic history since the nineteenth century. 'Exclusion', 'alienation', 'expropriation', 'dispossession', and 'violence' animate histories of land use, property rights, and territories. More recently, agrarian environments have been transformed by processes of de-agrarianization, urbanization, migration, and new forms of primitive accumulation. Even the classic agrarian question of how the social relations of agriculture will be influenced by capitalism has been reformulated at critical historical moments, reviving or producing new debates around the importance of land control. The authors in this volume focus on new frontiers of land control and their active creation. These frontiers are sites where established power relationships are challenged by new enclosures and property regimes, producing new social and environmental dynamics in their stead. Contributors examine labor and production processes engaged by new configurations of actors, new agrarian and environmental subjects and the networks connecting them, and new legal and violent means of challenging established or imminent land controls. Overall we find that land control still matters, though in changed degrees and manners. Land control will continue to inspire struggles for a long time. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies. -- back cover. Read more... Abstract: Questions about land control have invigorated thinkers in agrarian studies and economic history since the nineteenth century. 'Exclusion', 'alienation', 'expropriation', 'dispossession', and 'violence' animate histories of land use, property rights, and territories. More recently, agrarian environments have been transformed by processes of de-agrarianization, urbanization, migration, and new forms of primitive accumulation. Even the classic agrarian question of how the social relations of agriculture will be influenced by capitalism has been reformulated at critical historical moments, reviving or producing new debates around the importance of land control. The authors in this volume focus on new frontiers of land control and their active creation. These frontiers are sites where established power relationships are challenged by new enclosures and property regimes, producing new social and environmental dynamics in their stead. Contributors examine labor and production processes engaged by new configurations of actors, new agrarian and environmental subjects and the networks connecting them, and new legal and violent means of challenging established or imminent land controls. Overall we find that land control still matters, though in changed degrees and manners. Land control will continue to inspire struggles for a long time. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies. -- back cover 1. Introduction / Nancy Lee Peluso and Christian Lund -- 2. Conservation practice as primitive accumulation / Alice B. Kelly -- 3. Territorialization, enclosure and neoliberalism : non-state influence in struggles over Madagascar's forests / Catherine Corson -- 4. Making spaces, making subjects : land, enclosure and Islam in colonial Malaya / Amrita Malhi -- 5. Ceasefire capitalism : military-private partnerships, resource concessions, and military-state building in the Burma-China borderlands / Kevin Woods -- 6. The rifle and the title : paramilitary violence, land grab and land control in Colombia / Jacobo Grajales -- 7. Privatizing the Tzuultaq'a? Private property and spiritual reproduction in post-war Guatemala / Megan Ybarra -- 8. Emergent forest and private land regimes in Java / Nancy Lee Peluso -- 9. Land grabs, land control, and Southeast Asian crop booms / Derek Hall -- 10. Carbon forestry and agrarian change : access and land control in a Mexican rainforest / Tracey Mutto Osborne -- 11. Fragmented sovereignty : land reform and dispossession in Laos / Christian Lund. Land questions have invigorated agrarian studies and economic history, with particular emphases on its control, since inspiring nineteenth century thinkers. Words such as ' exclusion', ' alienation', ' expropriation', ' dispossession', and ' violence' describe processes that animate land histories and those of resources, property rights, and territories established, extracted, produced, or protected on land. Primitive and on-going forms of accumulation, frontiers, enclosures, territories, grabs, and racializations have long ..