Suchergebnisse

ABSTRACT
In the last three decades, Egypt's rural population has experienced different types of struggle over land as a result of neoliberal land reforms, which have favoured landowners and marginalised tenants' interests. While the literature highlighted the negative effects on the tenants, little attention was given to what landlords did with the land after the reforms. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2013 in five Egyptian villages, the article addresses this lacuna by investigating tenants' understanding of land-use change. Using a revised conceptualisation of Marx's metabolic rift, the article shows that evicted tenants understand this shift as part of a domestic land grab that disrupted the ecological system. The article therefore conceptualises land dispossession and domestic land grabs as mutually reinforcing processes and draws particular attention to the sensorial dimensions associated with domestic land grab, in addition to the political and economic dimensions.

AbstractThis paper offers a sociological interpretation of the Canadian Comprehensive Land Claims (CLC) process, arguing that CLC is a strategy used by the state to dispossess Aboriginal peoples. CLC does this through leveraging the cession of Aboriginal rights and the relinquishing of indigenous lands. Drawing upon the ongoing Innu Nation Tshash Petapen ('New Dawn') agreement, I examine four related aspects of the process and the agreement which operate to dispossess the Innu: (1) the undemocratic social and political contexts in which agreement is elicited, (2) the depletion of Aboriginal rights of the indigenous party, (3) the depletion of indigenous lands, and (4) the creation of wealth and debt. Finally, I will interpret these processes as building on social changes inflicted on the Innu. These are characterized by imposed law and the state of exception.

Land grabs -- whether initiated by multinational corporations and private investment firms emanating from the capitalist core, sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East, or state entities such as China and India -- are now in the news constantly. What is going on today must be placed in the historical context of the continuous development of capitalism. In order for capitalism to develop many changes were needed in feudal society. Attitudes toward society, money, and obligations to others had to be changed. Money had to be retained, instead of solely used for consumption, as was the norm during feudalism. Land grabs in colonies continued in the twentieth century up until independence. For much of the twentieth century the practice of actually producing food was a poor investment for capitalists, because of low prices for both crops and animals. For most of the twentieth century the real money in the agricultural system was not to be found on the land and in farming, but rather in the non-farming agricultural industries. Adapted from the source document.

It is acknowledged that conflict over land is a major source of violence in various parts of Mindanao, particularly the prosed Bangsamoro region. Historical accounts trace the root cause of land issues and identity-based conflict to the introduction of the Regalian doctrine of land ownership by Spanish colonizers. During the American colonial regime at the turn of the 20th century, dispossession of land held by the original inhabitants of Mindanao accelerated, with an emphasis of titling lands for private ownership that clashed with the tradition of ancestral domain. This was further exacerbated by migration instigated by the central government, starting with the development of "agricultural colonies: in the early 1900s to 1940s, to the passage of a series of land reform laws from the 1960s until the end of the 1980s to encourage individual land titling as a strategy for agricultural development. These evens radically altered land ownership patterns in Mindanao, as communal ownership of land by its original inhabitants gave way to individual titles in the possession of settlers from Luzon and the Visayas.

Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in the north-eastern borderlands of Bangladesh, this book focuses on the everyday struggles of indigenous farmers threatened with losing their land due to such state programmes as the realignment of the national border, ecotourism, social forestry and the establishment of a military cantonment. In implementing these programmes, state actors challenge farmers' right to land, instituting spaces of violence in which multiple forms of marginalisation overlap and are reinforced. Mapping how farmers react to these challenges emotionally and practically, the book argues that these land conflicts serve as a starting point for existentially charged disputes in which the survival efforts of farmers clash with the political imaginations and practices of the nation-state. The analysis shows that losing land represents more than being deprived of a material asset: it is nothing less than the extinction of ways of life.

In Dispossession as Delivery, Zachary Levenson explains why post-Apartheid South Africa continues to evict land occupations. Levenson shows that the government does this in the name of preserving the order they imagine is necessary to deliver housing to its citizens. Based upon a decade of participant observation in two land occupations in Cape Town, this book provides a novel, relational understanding about group formation and how collective actions interact with the state.

ABSTRACTThis article compares land dispossession for industrial development under state‐developmentalism and neoliberalism in India. Drawing on interviews, ethnography and archives of industrial development agencies, it compares earlier steel towns and state‐run industrial estates with today's Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and argues that they embody different regimes of dispossession. While steel towns and industrial estates reflected a regime of land for production with pretensions of inclusive social transformation, SEZs represent a neoliberal regime of land for the market in which 'land broker states' have emerged to indiscriminately transfer land from peasants to capitalist firms for real estate. The present regime has been unable to achieve the ideological legitimacy of its predecessor, leading to more widespread and successful 'land wars'. The article argues more broadly that variations in dispossession across space and time can be understood as specific constellations of state roles, economic logics tied to class interests and ideological articulations of the 'public good'.

Seeking to make sense of the Greek crisis Odyssey and the attendant restructuring of the economy, this article focuses on the spatial dynamics of the crisis. To this end, it builds on Harvey's concept of accumulation by dispossession and Gramscian hegemony to evaluate the crisis remedy administered to Greece. An attempt is made to demonstrate dispossession of land, public resources and natural assets as a hegemonic project, as it takes place, linked to specific 'spatio-temporal fixes' of capital during and after the crisis, to be either welcomed or opposed by different stakeholders in civil society and local communities. Assessing the new institutional setting that was enforced upon Greece by its creditors, the Greek case of land dispossession and grabbing is discussed, focusing on representative 'optimum' investment instances to question the rationale and the effectiveness of the emerging post-crisis neoliberal model of economic development.