General
Agrarian Change Webinars | Spring 2021
The Journal of Agrarian Change and SOAS Department of Development Studies have been organizing an annual Agrarian Change Seminar Series since 2008. This year this series has been organized as a series of webinars and is open to the public across the world. Please note: registration links for each webinar will be made available here…
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AQs Shorts: R Ramakumar
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 interview, R Ramakumar speaks about the multi-dimensional impact of COVID-19 on the Indian countryside, on the nature of India’s agrarian crisis (differentiated by crop, class,…
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Peasant politics, criminal persecution and authoritarianism in Colombia
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 politics in the countryside. It also points to increasing authoritarianism in Colombian politics. On December 15th and 16th 2020, three well-known defenders of Colombian land…
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Land questions in the 21st Century Postcolony
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 grabs’ has, however, made the role of land in capital accumulation much more visible now than it was in the latter half of the last…
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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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Agrarian Change Webinars | Autumn 2020
The Journal of Agrarian Change and SOAS Department of Development Studies have been organizing an annual Agrarian Change Seminar Series since 2008. This year this series has been organized as a series of webinars and is open to the public across the world. Please note: registration links for each webinar will be made available two…
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Launch of a new journal on the Agrarian History of Latin America
Historia Agraria de América Latina (HAAL) is an academic journal of the Centro de Estudios de Historia Agraria de América Latina (CEHAL), an autonomous institution established in Santiago de Chile in 2017. HAAL aims to promote and disseminate research and interdisciplinary debate on the history of the rural societies of Latin America and the Caribbean. The…
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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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