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.
Book review of Pablo Lapegna’s Soybeans and Power
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 fieldwork in the province of Formosa, in the North East of that country, he addresses key issues regarding the new landscapes produced by the expansion…
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Rule by Bosses? Criminal Political Economies in South Asia
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 variety of sector-specific ones: “land mafia,” “sand mafia,” “coal mafia,” “timber mafia,” “water mafia,” “contractor mafia,” and so on. The sum total of these mafia…
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Lockdown Chronicle: The Story of a Migrant Workers’ Platform Across India’s Lockdown
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 their villages hundreds of kilometres away along highways and railway lines. A critical agrarian political economy lens must recognize the multitude of ways in which…
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‘Problems in the Empirical Analysis of Agrarian Differentiation Processes’: A Reflection
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 a mainly quantitative dissertation based on detailed time-budget analysis of small-peasant and landless households in a Javanese village. From 1975 to 1980, I was back…
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Book Review of Xavier Lafrance & Charles Post’s Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism
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?
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 Framework for the Empirical Analysis of Peasants’ in 1979. However, an issue that has received insufficient attention until recently is that of who should be…
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Vegans should target the corporate food system, not just dairy and meat!
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 environment. Headlines such as ‘Avoiding meat and dairy is the ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth’ point to the immensely damaging impacts…
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Book Review of Yi Wu’s Negotiating Rural Land Ownership in Southwest China
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 9780824876807 This is an excerpt of the review of the book. Read the complete review here. In Negotiating Rural Land Ownership in Southwest China,…
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An Interview with Bridget O’Laughlin
Bridget O’Laughlin is among the leading Marxist intellectuals and anthropologists of our times and a major contributor to the field of agrarian political economy. With a life and scholarship spanning three continents (North America, Africa and Europe), Bridget’s oeuvre is not just varied in terms of the subjects and regions covered but also analytically and…
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An Interview with Henry Bernstein
The editors of the Journal of Agrarian Change are pleased to present an interview with Henry Bernstein by Subir Sinha. Henry Bernstein is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies at SOAS University of London and one of the founding editors of the Journal of Agrarian Change. Subir Sinha is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Development…
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The Bernstein & Byres Prize in Agrarian Change for 2018
LIAM CAMPLING, CRISTÓBAL KAY, JENS LERCHE, BRIDGET O’LAUGHLIN, CARLOS OYA We are pleased to announce that Enric Tello, Gabriel Jover, Ivan Murray, Onofre Fullana and Ricard Soto have been awarded the 2018 Bernstein & Byres Prize for their article ‘From feudal colonization to agrarian capitalism in Mallorca: Peasant endurance under the rise and fall…
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Colombia’s new peasantries and social-territorial movements
KYLA SANKEY In Colombia, agrarian social movements have been at the forefront of struggles against neoliberalism and war. The rural poor have borne the brunt of half a century of civil war, which caused 260,000 deaths, 60,000 disappearances and 7 million displacements. They also suffered the worst effects of free market policies, which have resulted…
Read MoreMarxist methods corner
This space on our website is intended to be a place where researchers in and around the Marxist tradition can critically discuss problematic issues in methodology and research methods. We are good in critique of dominant paradigms and misleading concepts, but how do we get beyond critique to substantive research that addresses politically relevant issues?…
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Land reform in South Africa in 2018
BEN COUSINS Land reform has recently become an explosive political issue in South Africa. Progress in transforming racially unequal patterns of land ownership in rural and urban areas has been painfully slow since the transition to democracy in 1994.
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Social reproduction and women’s work in the Global South
This post is written by Sara Stevano who is Lecturer in Economics at UWE, Bristol. When I began my research in Mozambique, in August 2011, I wanted to understand women’s participation in remunerated work.
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The Bernstein & Byres Prize in Agrarian Change for 2017
We are pleased to announce that R. Ramakumar, School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, has been awarded the 2017 Bernstein & Byres Prize for his article ‘Jats, Khaps and Riots: Communal Politics and the Bharatiya Kisan Union in Northern India’.
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Book review of Nandini Sundar’s The Burning Forest
This post is written by Christian Lund who is Professor of Development, Resource Management, and Governance, at the Department of Food and Resource Economics, at Copenhagen University.
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The Bernstein and Byres Prize in Agrarian Change for 2016
The ‘Bernstein & Byres Prize’ has been awarded since 2008 by the Journal of Agrarian Change (JAC) to the best article published in that year.
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Book Review of Bina Agarwal’s Gender Challenges
An activist scholar and former President of the International Association for Feminist Economics, Bina Agarwal is best known for her (1994) monumental A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia.
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