Wendy Wolford

In This Land Is Ours Now, Wendy Wolford presents an original framework for understanding social mobilization. She argues that social movements are not the politically coherent, bounded entities often portrayed by scholars, the press, and movement leaders. Instead, they are constantly changing mediations between localized moral economies and official movement ideologies. Wolford develops her argument by analyzing how a particular social movement works: Brazil’s Rural Landless Workers’ Movement, known as the Movimento Sem Terra (MST). Founded in the southernmost states of Brazil in the mid-1980s, this extraordinary grassroots agrarian movement grew dramatically in the ensuing years. By the late 1990s it was the most dynamic, well-organized social movement in Brazilian history. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Wolford compares the development of the movement in Brazil’s southern state of Santa Catarina and its northeastern state of Pernambuco. As she explains, in the south, most of the movement’s members were sons and daughters of small peasant farmers; in the northeast, they were almost all former plantation workers, who related awkwardly to the movement’s agenda of accessing “land for those who work it.” The MST became an effective presence in Pernambuco only after the local sugarcane economy had collapsed. Worldwide sugarcane prices dropped throughout the 1990s, and by 1999 the MST was a prominent political organizer in the northeastern plantation region. Yet fewer than four years later, most of the region’s workers had dropped out of the movement. By delving into the northeastern workers’ motivations for joining and then leaving the MST, Wolford adds nuance and depth to accounts of a celebrated grassroots social movement, and she highlights the contingent nature of social movements and political identities more broadly.

Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil

This Land Is Ours Now

Ben White

Ian Scoones

Marc Edelman

Ruth Hall

Saturnino M. Borras Jr.

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.

Global Land Grabbing and Political Reactions 'from Below'

This collection explores the complex dynamics of corporate land deals from a broad agrarian political economy perspective, with a special focus on the implications for property and labour regimes, labour processes and structures of accumulation. This involves looking at ways in which existing patterns of rural social differentiation – in terms of class, gender, ethnicity and generation – are being shaped by changes in land use and property relations, as well as by the re-organization of production and exchange as rural communities and resources are incorporated into global commodity chains. It goes further than the descriptive ‘what’ and ‘who’ questions, in order to understand the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of these patterns. It is empirically solid and theoretically sophisticated, making it a robust and boundary-changing work. Contributors come from various scholarly disciplines. Covering nearly all regions of the world, the collection will be of interest to researchers from various disciplines, policymakers and activists. This book was originally published as a Special Issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

The New Enclosures: Critical Perspectives on Corporate Land Deals

Lyda Fernanda Forero

The rise of authoritarian, nationalist forms of populism and the implications for rural actors and settings is one of the most crucial foci for critical agrarian studies today, with many consequences for political action. Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World reflects on the rural origins and consequences of the emergence of authoritarian and populist leaders across the world, as well as on the rise of multi-class mobilisation and resistance, alongside wider counter-movements and alternative practices, which together confront authoritarianism and nationalist populism. The book includes 20 chapters written by contributors to the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI), a global network of academics and activists committed to both reflective analysis and political engagement. Debates about ‘populism’, ‘nationalism’, ‘authoritarianism’ and more have exploded recently, but relatively little of this has focused on the rural dimensions. Yet, wherever one looks, the rural aspects are key – not just in electoral calculus, but in understanding underlying drivers of authoritarianism and populism, and potential counter-movements to these. Whether because of land grabs, voracious extractivism, infrastructural neglect or lack of services, rural peoples’ disillusionment with the status quo has had deeply troubling consequences and occasionally hopeful ones, as the chapters in this book show. The chapters in this book were originally published in The Journal of Peasant Studies.

Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World

Saturnino M. Borras, Jr.

This collection of essays in Governing Global Land Deals provides new empirical and theoretical analyses of the relationships between global land grabs and processes of government and governance. Reframes debates on global land grabs by focusing on the relationship between large-scale land deals and processes of governance Offers new theoretical insights into the different forms and effects of global land acquisitions Illuminates both the micro-processes of transaction and expropriation, as well as the broader structural forces at play in global land deals Provides new empirical data on the different actors involved in contemporary land deals occurring across the globe and focuses on the specific institutional, political, and economic contexts in which they are acting

The Role of the State in the Rush for Land

Governing Global Land Deals

Sharad Chari

Susanne Freidberg

Vinay Gidwani

Jesse Ribot

Chapter 13 Reclamation, Displacement and Resiliency in Phnom Penh -- Land Reclamation and Racial Quarterization in Colonial Phnom Penh -- Land Reclamation as Nation Building Apparatus in the Post-Colonial City -- Accumulation by Land Reclamation in the Post-Socialist City -- Resiliency in the Time of Climate Change -- Notes -- References -- Index -- EULA

The Influences of Michael Watts

Other Geographies

Angus Lindsay Wright

In the country with the widest income gap between rich and poor and where millions of children fend for themselves on city streets, one of the world's most successful grassroots social movements has arisen. To Inherit the Earth tells the dramatic story of Brazil's Landless Workers' Movement, or MST-millions of desperately poor, landless, jobless men and women who, through their own nonviolent efforts, have secured rights to over 20 million acres of farmland. Not only are the MST fighting for their own rights, they are transforming their society into a more just one-and their approach may offer the best solution yet to Brazil's environmental problems in the Amazon and elsewhere. Authors Wright and Wolford put the movement in its historical, political, and environmental context, trace its growth, and address the issues the MST faces going forward. And throughout, they share dozens of personal stories of people in the movement--stories filled with tremendous courage, personal sacrifice, faith, humor, drama, and determination.

Wendy Wolford

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