Blog

The JAC Blog hosts posts on agrarian and rural issues, both contemporary and historical.

It covers book reviews, photo essays, research essays and field notes. We welcome blog submissions.

Marx in the Field (Anthem, 2021): Book Launch Video

August 5, 2021

Marx in the Field has been edited by Alessandra Mezzadri, Senior Lecturer Development Studies, SOAS. The book launch was organized on June 11th, 2021 as a friendly conversation between her…

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AQs Shorts: Vikas Rawal

July 23, 2021

In our fifth AQs Shorts video, Vikas Rawal speaks about the historic farmers’ protests in India – the role of a prolonged agrarian and employment crisis and of neoliberalism in…

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Who is a farmer in India?

June 30, 2021

SEJUTI DAS GUPTA AND ISHITA MEHROTRA The farmers’ protests in India since November 2020 has resurrected the question ‘who is a farmer?’, and with it, the agrarian political economy exercise…

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AQs Shorts: Teo Ballvé

June 20, 2021

Our fourth video in the AQs Shorts series features Teo Ballvé. He speaks about how narco capital accelerates processes of agrarian change in the Colombian countryside, especially through land dispossession…

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Book Review: Penelope Anthias’ Limits to Decolonization

May 25, 2021

ENRIQUE CASTAÑÓN BALLIVIÁN   Limits to Decolonization is a rich ethnographic account of an indigenous struggle for territorial recognition in a context of intensifying extractivism. It traces the historical demand…

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AQs Shorts: Lucilla Salvia

April 1, 2021

In the third video for our interview series ‘AQs Shorts‘, Lucilla Salvia discusses how agricultural commodity chains in central Italy have been reconfigured under neoliberalism and its implications for labour…

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AQs Shorts: Tania Li

February 20, 2021

In the second video for our interview series AQs Shorts, Tania Li reflects on the nature of ‘development’ ensuing as a result of corporate plantations and agribusinesses, on the question…

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The Bernstein & Byres Prize in Agrarian Change 2019

February 6, 2021

LIAM CAMPLING, CRISTÓBAL KAY, JENS LERCHE, BRIDGET O’LAUGHLIN, CARLOS OYA, JONATHAN PATTENDEN AND HELENA PÉREZ NIÑO We are pleased to announce that Sébastien Rioux has been awarded the 2019 Bernstein…

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AQs Shorts: R Ramakumar

January 6, 2021

Agrarian Questions is pleased to announce a new series of short video interviews with eminent and emerging scholars in the field of agrarian political economy, AQs Shorts. In our first…

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Peasant politics, criminal persecution and authoritarianism in Colombia

December 21, 2020

SERGIO CORONADO   The irregular arrest of three renowned leaders of the agrarian social movements in Colombia needs to be analysed as a counter-reaction against the recent wave of contentious…

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Land questions in the 21st Century Postcolony

November 8, 2020

M VIJAYABASKAR   Labour may have become less relevant to capital accumulation in the 21st century as scholars like Sanyal, Li and Ferguson suggest. The recent spate of literature on ‘land…

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Book review of Pablo Lapegna’s Soybeans and Power

October 4, 2020

CARLA GRAS   In Soybeans and Power, Pablo Lapegna offers a thorough and challenging analysis of the contested terrain of Genetically Modified (GM) crops in Argentina. Drawing upon long-term ethnographic…

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Rule by Bosses? Criminal Political Economies in South Asia

July 19, 2020

MICHAEL LEVIEN   In the past few decades, the term “mafia” has gained widespread usage across South Asia, and particularly India and Pakistan where there are said to be a…

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Lockdown Chronicle: The Story of a Migrant Workers’ Platform Across India’s Lockdown

July 9, 2020

ORLANDA RUTHVEN   Editors’ Note: In one of the most brutal lockdowns prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, India witnessed the haunting spectre of scores of migrant workers walking back to…

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‘Problems in the Empirical Analysis of Agrarian Differentiation Processes’: A Reflection

May 30, 2020

BEN WHITE   The ideas in this book chapter published in 1989 began to form themselves in the 1970s. Under the guidance of cultural materialist Marvin Harris, I had written…

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Covid-19. Crisis, Agrarian Issues, Rural Livelihoods: An Agrarian Questions Resource

April 22, 2020
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Book Review of Xavier Lafrance & Charles Post’s Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism

February 27, 2020

ERIC MIELANTS   This is an interesting book which focuses on an old but very important topic: the origins of capitalism.

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Gendering Peasant Household Surveys: Who to interview?

February 11, 2020

CARMEN DIANA DEERE   The use of household surveys to analyse the economic activities of peasants has become much more commonplace since Alain de Janvry and I published ‘A Conceptual…

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Vegans should target the corporate food system, not just dairy and meat!

January 30, 2020

BENJAMIN SELWYN The rise of veganism represents a step change for campaigners who have long sought to highlight links between the food we eat and the fate of the world’s…

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Book Review of Yi Wu’s Negotiating Rural Land Ownership in Southwest China

December 15, 2019

XU SIYUAN Negotiating Rural Land Ownership in Southwest China: State, village, family, by Yi Wu. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.  2018. Pp. xiii+282. $ 80 (hb); $28 (pb). ISBN-13: 9780824846770 and…

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