Description
When the 2007-2008 food and financial crises triggered a global wave of land grabbing, scholars, activists and policy practitioners assumed that this would be met with massive peasant resistance. As empirical evidence accumulated, however, it became clear that political reactions ‘from below’ to land grabbing were quite varied and complex. Violent resistance, outright expulsions, everyday ‘weapons of the weak’ and demands for better terms of incorporation into land deals were among the outcomes that emerged. Readers of this collection will encounter a multinational group of scholars who use the tools of social movements theory and critical agrarian studies to examine cases from Argentina, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Uganda, Mali, Ukraine, India, and Laos, as well as the Rio +20 Sustainable Development Conference. Initiatives ‘from below’ in response to land deals have involved local and transnational alliances and the use of legal and extra-legal methods, and have brought victories and defeats. This book was first published as a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies.
Table of Contents
1. Resistance, acquiescence or incorporation? An introduction to land grabbing and political reactions ‘from below’
Ruth Hall, Marc Edelman, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Ian Scoones, Ben White and Wendy Wolford
2. Anything but a story foretold: multiple politics of resistance to the agrarian extractivist project in Guatemala
Alberto Alonso-Fradejas
3. Listening to their silence? The political reaction of affected communities to large-scale land acquisitions: insights from Ethiopia
Tsegaye Moreda
4. Land grabbing, legal contention and institutional change in Colombia
Jacobo Grajales
5. Resistance or participation? Fighting against corporate land access amid political uncertainty in Madagascar
Mathilde Gingembre
6. Policy processes of a land grab: at the interface of politics ‘in the air’ and politics ‘on the ground’ in Massingir, Mozambique
Jessica Milgroom
7. Resistance or adaptation? Ukrainian peasants’ responses to large-scale land acquisitions
Natalia Mamonova
8. Politics from below? Small-, mid- and large-scale land dispossession in Teso, Uganda, and the relevance of scale
Matt Kandel
9. Social struggles in Uganda’s Acholiland: understanding responses and resistance to Amuru sugar works
Giuliano Martiniello
10. Territorial restructuring and resistance in Argentina
Zoe W. Brent
11. Networked, rooted and territorial: green grabbing and resistance in Chiapas
Dianne E. Rocheleau
12. Guerrilla agriculture? A biopolitical guide to illicit cultivation within an IUCN Category II protected area
Connor Joseph Cavanagh and Tor A. Benjaminsen
13. Reclaiming the worker’s property: control grabbing, farmworkers and the Las Tunas Accords in Nicaragua
Bradley R. Wilson
14. The ‘Goan Impasse’: land rights and resistance to SEZs in Goa, India
Preeti Sampat
15. Oil palm expansion without enclosure: smallholders and environmental narratives
Antonio Castellanos-Navarrete and Kees Jansen
16. Rubber, rights and resistance: the evolution of local struggles against a Chinese rubber concession in Northern Laos
Karen E. McAllister
17. Space for pluralism? Examining the Malibya land grab
Nicolette Larder
18. The right to resist: disciplining civil society at Rio+20
Catherine Corson, Bridget Brady, Ahdi Zuber, Julianna Lord and Angela Kim
