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.
AQs Shorts: Carla Gras
In our new video for the AQs Shorts series, Carla Gras speaks about the challenges of capital accumulation in the Chaco region in Argentina and the strategies used by corporate agribusiness to overcome these challenges. She also reflects on how agribusiness expansion in shaping labour regimes, social differentiation and social reproduction. Carla Gras is Senior…
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JAC Paper Receives Honorary Prize for Agrarian History
We are pleased to share that Fernando Collantes’ paper titled ‘From organized to disorganized capitalism? Market versus non-market coordination in Spain’s dairy chain‘, published in the Journal of Agrarian Change 19(2) has received an Honorary Prize or Mention (Accésit) by the jury for the ‘XV Prize in Agrarian History Ramón Garrabou’. The prize was awarded…
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Marx in the Field (Anthem, 2021): Book Launch Video
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 and the contributors, who include Henry Bernstein, Barbara Harriss-White, Muhammad Ali Jan, Susan Newman, Adam Hanieh, Ben Selwyn, Satoshi Miyamura, Farai Mtero, Brittany Bunce and…
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AQs Shorts: Vikas Rawal
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 giving rise to the protests as well as their social, class and regional basis. Vikas Rawal is Professor of Economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University,…
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Who is a farmer in India?
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 of identifying rural classes and examining their nature. In classical agrarian political economy scholarship in India, the capitalist classes or the rural rich are variously…
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AQs Shorts: Teo Ballvé
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 and deforestation, and about his concepts of ‘narco-frontiers’ and ‘Magical Marxism’. Teo Ballvé is Assistant Professor in Peace and Conflict Studies and Geography at Colgate…
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Changes in the Editorial Team
The editorial team at Journal of Agrarian Change are delighted to announce that Dr Carla Gras is joining us as an editor. Carla is based at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and University of San Martin in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Dr. Gras, a rural sociologist, combines her work on the political economy…
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Book Review: Penelope Anthias’ Limits to Decolonization
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 of Guaraní communities to regain control of their ancestral territory in the Bolivian Chaco where most of the country’s gas extraction takes place. While the…
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AQs Shorts: Lucilla Salvia
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 relations and labour contracting. And she reflects on whether the term ‘modern slavery’ is applicable to these labour relations. Lucilla Salvia teaches at ‘La Sapienza’…
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AQs Shorts: Tania Li
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 of ‘surplus populations’ and smallholders for the agrarian question, and class differentiation – all drawing on her work on oil palm plantations in Indonesia. Tania…
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The Bernstein & Byres Prize in Agrarian Change 2019
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 & Byres Prize for his article ‘Capitalist food production and the rise of legal adulteration: Regulating food standards in 19th‐ century Britain’, Journal of Agrarian…
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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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