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: Lucilla Salvia
In the third video for our interview series ‘AQs Shorts‘, Lucilla Salvia 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’ University…
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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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‘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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[CfP for Symposium] Capitalism, Crisis and Covid: Agrarian Political Economy in Disrupted Circuits of Capital and Labour
The Journal of Agrarian Change seeks contributions to a symposium on Capitalism, Crisis and Covid: Agrarian Political Economy in Disrupted Circuits of Capital and Labour. Covid-19 is re-configuring the global capitalist system. It has disrupted the functioning of capitalism in unprecedented ways. The flow of commodities has slowed dramatically, and labour has experienced a mass…
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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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CfPs on Agrarian Change, IIPPE Conference 2020
The IIPPE 11th Annual Conference 2020 will be held in Ferrara, Italy between September 9 and 11. The Agrarian Change Working Group, sponsored by the Journal of Agrarian Change, calls for papers and panels under three different rubrics. 1. Agrarian Change Working Group As the crisis of neoliberal capitalism deepens and rightwing populisms engage…
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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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