Sam Moyo

Paris Yeros

Reclaiming the Land brings together original investigations of the new generation of rural social movements in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Dispossessed peasants and unemployed workers of diverse political and ideological orientation have used land occupations and other tactics systematically to confront the neoliberal state. This book provides both national and micro-level case studies of these movements. They seek to identify their social composition, strategies, tactics, and ideologies; to assess their relations with other social actors, including political parties, urban social movements, and international aid agencies and other institutions; and to examine more closely their most common tactic, the land occupation, as well as the responses of governments and landowners.

The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America

Reclaiming the Land

Praveen Kumar Jha

Walter Chambati

This book brings together renowned scholars from four continents to celebrate the lifelong and seminal contribution of Professor Sam Moyo to the social sciences. Moyo was a Zimbabwean scholar whose intellectual trajectory was part of the emergence of a critical scholarship based in the realities and traditions of Africa and the Third World.

Rethinking the Social Sciences with Sam Moyo

Rural movements have recently emerged to become some of the most important social forces in opposition to neoliberalism. From Brazil and Mexico to Zimbabwe and the Philippines, rural movements of diverse political character, but all sharing the same social basis of dispossessed peasants and unemployed workers, have used land occupations and other tactics to confront the neoliberal state. This volume brings together for the first time across three continents - Africa, Latin America and Asia - an intellectually consistent set of original investigations into this new generation of rural social movements. These country studies seek to identify their social composition, strategies, tactics, and ideologies; to assess their relations with other social actors, including political parties, urban social movements, and international aid agencies and other institutions; and to examine their most common tactic, the land occupation, its origins, pace and patterns, as well as the responses of governments and landowners. At a more fundamental level, this volume explores the ways in which two decades of neoliberal policy - including new land tenure arrangements intended to hasten the commodification of land, and new land uses linked to global markets -- have undermined the social reproduction of the rural labour force and created the conditions for popular resistance. The volume demonstrates the longer-term potential impact of these movements. In economic terms, they raise the possibility of tackling immiseration by means of the redistribution of land and the reorganisation of production on a more efficient and socially responsible basis. And in political terms, breaking the power of landowners and transnational capital with interests in land could ultimately open the way to an alternative pattern of capital accumulation and development.

Paris Yeros

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