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2015

Resistance, Acquiescence or Incorporation? An

Introduction to Land Grabbing and Political
Reactions ‘From Below’
Marc Edelman
CUNY Graduate Center

Ruth Hall
University of the Western Cape

Saturnino M. Borras Jr.

International Institute of Social Studies

Ian Scoones
University of Sussex

Ben White
International Institute of Social Studies
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Recommended Citation
Ruth Hall, Marc Edelman, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Ian Scoones, Ben White, and Wendy Wolford. 2015. "Resistance, Acquiescence or
Incorporation? An Introduction to Land Grabbing and Political Reactions ‘From Below’," Journal of Peasant Studies 42(3) (May-
July): 467-488.

Cis Article is brought to you by CUNY Academic Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in Publications and Research by an authorized
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Marc Edelman, Ruth Hall, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Ian Scoones, Ben White, and Wendy Wolford

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The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2015
Vol. 42, Nos. 3–4, 467–488, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2015.1036746

Resistance, acquiescence or incorporation? An introduction to land

grabbing and political reactions ‘from below’
Ruth Hall, Marc Edelman, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Ian Scoones, Ben White and
Wendy Wolford

Political reactions ‘from below’ to global land grabbing have been vastly more varied
and complex than is usually assumed. This essay introduces a collection of ground-
breaking studies that discuss responses that range from various types of organized
and everyday resistance to demands for incorporation or for better terms of
incorporation into land deals. Initiatives ‘from below’ in response to land deals have
involved local and transnational alliances and the use of legal and extra-legal
methods, and have brought victories and defeats. The relevance of political reactions
to land grabbing is discussed in light of theories of social movements and critical
agrarian studies. Future research on reactions ‘from below’ to land grabbing must
include greater attention to gender and generational differences in both impacts and
political agency.
Keywords: dispossession; land grabbing; large-scale land acquisitions; land tenure;
peasants; resistance; contentious politics; agrarian change

Introduction
Critical scholarly analysis of processes of agrarian change has long emphasized peasant
agency and aimed to uncover forms of resistance, even in the midst of dispossession,
oppression and processes of social differentiation. This collection draws on the rich base
of existing scholarship to ask: in the midst of the ‘global land grab’, what are the political
reactions ‘from below’? While some reactions from people directly affected may involve
resistance, the essays in this collection suggest that understanding the diversity of reactions
from below requires critical empirical investigations of responses in specific situations. We
thus frame ‘political reactions from below’ in a wider way, to refer to responses that extend
far beyond ‘resistance’ in its many manifestations, and range from mobilizations seeking to
improve the compensation for people’s expulsion from their land to demands to be inserted
into land deals as workers or contract farmers to counter-mobilizations against land deal
resisters. Beyond the local level, highly varied responses by societies and states at national
levels and in international multilateral fora and transnational movements also call for more
detailed and critical assessment by social scientists.
In the midst of enclosures and commercialization of land and other natural resources
across the global South, tensions and synergies mark political reactions ‘from below’ to
global land grabbing. A fuller understanding of the politics from below around land
grabs brings us to some classic concepts in critical agrarian studies, including the dual
front of ‘struggle against dispossession’ and ‘struggle against exploitation’, as well as

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

468 Ruth Hall et al.

the question of the state. Yet even this classic political economy-based framing of people’s
struggles may not fully capture the range and complexity of the politics around contempor-
ary enclosures where the ecological dimension has become increasingly prominent. But an
important starting point is to draw on concepts and analytical tools in critical agrarian
studies, such as agrarian class politics and everyday forms of peasant resistance. Analyti-
cal tools from identity politics will also be relevant in understanding politics from below
around global land grabbing.
When land deals gain momentum, they trigger complex political dynamics – expected
and unexpected, intended and unintended – within the state and in society. Early media
reports, as well as activist and academic discussions, often assumed that land deals expel
people from the land and that those expelled – typically referred to as ‘local people’ or
‘local communities’ – engage in ‘resistance’. Recent research, however, indicates that
what happens on the ground is more varied and complex (e.g. White et al. 2012;
Wolford et al. 2013; Edelman, Oya, and Borras 2013). When land deals hit the ground,
they interact with social groups within the state and in society that are differentiated
along lines of class, gender, generation, ethnicity and nationality, and that have historically
specific expectations, aspirations and traditions of struggle. These reshape, limit or make
possible different kinds of land deals. As the contributions to this collection show, political
debates and academic research have increasingly picked up differentiated impacts and var-
iegated political reactions to land deals.
This collection addresses these questions and builds on a series of Journal of Peasant
Studies (JPS) editions over the past five years that have interrogated the phenomenon of
global land grabbing through the lens of critical agrarian studies. It brings together papers
originally presented at the Global Land Grab II International Conference1 organized by
the Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI2). This follows a JPS Forum on Global Land
Grabbing II which dealt with methodologies and the limits to existing approaches to enu-
merating, explaining and assessing the impacts of land deals (Scoones et al. 2013), and a
JPS collection on The New Enclosures: Critical Perspectives on Corporate Land Deals
(White et al. 2012) which drew together a broad spectrum of papers outlining the con-
tours of the phenomenon, and which drew from the Global Land Grab I International
Conference,3 also organized by the LDPI. These in turn followed the first JPS Forum
on Global Land Grabbing (Borras et al. 2011) which, ahead of the Global Land Grab
I conference, outlined a research agenda for understanding the current land grab.
This initial JPS collection of papers drew attention to the ways in which questions
and approaches from within critical agrarian studies could help to systematize our knowl-
edge and make sense both of the drivers of land grabbing and of the changes in agrarian
economies and societies that land deals set in motion. The current collection aims to
build on these contributions and to challenge dominant framings of rural and peasant
communities across the global South as either passive victims or unified resisters of
land grabs.

1
The Global Land Grab II International Conference was held at Cornell University, 17–19 October
2012 (see http://www.cornell-landproject.org/program/).
2
See the Land Deal Politics Initiative website (www.iss.nl/ldpi).
3
The Global Land Grab I International Conference was held at the Institute for Development Studies
at the University of Sussex, 4–6 April 2011 (http://www.future-agricultures.org/events/global-land-
grabbing).
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 469

Explaining resistance and its absence

Three broad models for explaining resistance and its absence dominate the scholarly litera-
ture: classical collective action paradigms, Marxism and heterodox theories of social move-
ments. First, in classical collective action paradigms, resistance is viewed as an exception,
and inaction as the norm. The ‘logic’ of this position derives from premises central to neo-
classical economics and rational choice theory, namely that individuals strategically weigh
potential benefits and risks of particular courses of action and then proceed in their own self-
interest. Because risks of collective resistance tend to be high – lost time, arrests, beatings
and assassinations – the calculating individual will likely sit on the sidelines as a ‘free rider’,
hoping to reap the gains of others’ risk-taking and sacrifices. As Mancur Olson, the founda-
tional theorist of this approach, argued, ‘When the class-oriented action Marx predicted
does not materialize, it does not indicate that the economic motivation is not predominant,
as some of his critics imply, but rather than there are no individual economic incentives for
class action’ (Olson 1965, 108, original emphasis).
Second, Marxists (unlike Olson) have generally supposed that there is a direct line from
shared grievances to collective action. While they acknowledge that some forms of resist-
ance are individual, they tend to assume that common oppression gives rise to class politics
and common political projects (Barker 2014). The Marxist canon is not, of course, entirely
consistent on this issue, but its numerous lamentations about ‘false consciousness’, ‘hege-
mony’ or failure to recognize the collective’s ‘true’ – i.e. proletarian – interests are sugges-
tive of lingering Hegelian teleological influences in Marxism.
Third, heterodox social movement scholars have taken issue with both the figure of
the rational, calculating Homo economicus in collective action theories and the Marxist
presumption of oppression inexorably producing proletarian consciousness and collective
struggle. Some have pointed out, for example, that the notion of ‘free riders’, and the
‘collective action problems’ that these supposedly produce, is based on a vision of
the isolated individual, lacking in kin, class, ethnic, religious, national or group identities
and loyalties. When scholars belatedly began to analyze the role of emotion in social
movements, they naturally found that affective ties and allegiances to other movement
participants were an essential ingredient in mobilization and frequently accounted for
why people unite and struggle in the face of daunting risks and unfavourable odds
(Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta 2001). The Marxists’ bemoaning of ‘false consciousness’,
similarly, gets turned on its head by the more perspicacious social movements theorists.
Burdick (1995, 367), for example, argues that as soon as analysts’ gaze shifts from the
‘individual toward collective patterns’, it permits posing a ‘highly constructive political
question: not why do people fail to come to the movement, but why is the movement
failing to reach more people?’.
Critical agrarian studies and particularly research on struggles around land have made
important – albeit frequently implicit – contributions to this theoretical discussion. Both
Marxists (e.g. Hobsbawm 1959) and social movements theorists (e.g. Tilly 1986) posited
a historical periodization of protest that distinguished ‘primitive’, ‘defensive’ and ‘pre-pol-
itical’ mobilizations from those in the nineteenth century and after that aimed at seizing or at
least influencing the state. Peasants’ ‘failure’ (for many Marxists) to manifest a proletarian
consciousness in contention over land, or to transcend ‘defensive’ local struggles (for social
movements theorists), became just one more indication of their atavistic politics and
culture. When struggles for land are seen in their own terms, however, it is obvious that
claiming land or defending the land one has often reflects clear class consciousness,
albeit of a smallholding peasant rather than a proletarian character.
470 Ruth Hall et al.

Of the papers in this collection, Natalia Mamonova’s makes the most significant and
original contribution to the discussion around the absence of resistance to land grabbing.
In her analysis of contemporary Ukraine, now home to some of the largest farms in the
world, Mamonova critiques the premises that resistance is the only or most likely response
of rural people to large-scale land acquisitions, that peasants are incapable of adapting to or
coexisting alongside large-scale industrial farms, and that ‘ideological concerns about the
“peasant way of life”, food and land sovereignty dominate in peasant struggles’. As an
alternative to these bedrock a priori assumptions of so much agrarian scholarship, she advo-
cates analyzing the terms of inclusion in land deals (see also Borras and Franco 2013), dis-
tinguishing between ‘illusive inclusion’ (where peasants, many of them elderly, receive
land from the state and then rent it to commercial farmers), ‘subordinate inclusion’
(where peasants rent or lose land and then go to work on large holdings) and ‘competitive
exclusion’ (where peasant farms are outcompeted by subsidized agroindustrial enterprises).
In all three cases, collectively patterned individual choices lead in directions other than
oppositional mobilization.
The outcomes Mamonova describes do not fit easily in any of the three broad explana-
tory frameworks outlined above. Ukrainian peasants are not eschewing collective action
because they hope, à la Olson, to free ride on others’ coattails. They are hardly a
Marxian class ‘for itself’ in any meaningful sense. They have not remained unorganized
because existing movements have failed to reach them. Mamonova intentionally shuns
explanations for the lack of mobilization against land grabbing that rely on the negative
legacies of 70 years of socialism (e.g. memories of the collectivization of agriculture,
which was especially brutal in Ukraine, or ongoing fears of political repression). Nonethe-
less, her argument relies on a historically-informed reading of the current moment. Rural
people in Ukraine, she says, perceive today’s large farms as a continuation of Soviet col-
lective and state farms – and refer to them as ‘kolkhozy’ and ‘sovkhozy’, respectively.
The weight of pre-existing class relations still looms large. Employment on large farms,
with their relatively high salaries and social wage, combined with income from tiny inten-
sively-cultivated private plots, appears to be a congenial alternative, familiar from Soviet
times and preferable to unequal and quixotic struggles with uncertain outcomes.

Class and identity politics, mobilizations and alliances

Borras and Franco (2013) suggest that understanding political reactions ‘from below’ to
land deals requires both locating the dynamics in broader agrarian transformation processes
and analyzing a main axis of political conflict. Let us look at the first question. When the
land is needed but labour is not, the most likely outcome is the expulsion of people from the
land (Li 2011). Those expelled may find jobs in other sectors of the economy. When they do
not, land grabs are implicated in the creation of a ‘relative surplus population’. On
occasions when investors need the land and the labour, peasants and villagers are not
expelled, but may be subsumed into corporate enterprises as workers (perhaps even
leasing their land to their employer) or as contracted small-scale farmers.
The second question involves the axis of political conflict. There are three main types:
poor people versus corporate/landed elites, poor people versus the state and poor people
versus poor people (Borras and Franco 2013; Borras, Franco, and Wang 2013). There
are many high-profile instances where poor people confronted corporate and landed
elites, such as the infamous case of Kampong Sugar in Cambodia (IDI 2014). Relatively
more common is a confrontation between affected villagers and the state, which can take
the form of organized national mobilizations by agrarian movements, such as occurred in
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 471

the Philippines in 2006–2007 over the allocation of 1.4 million hectares of land to Chinese
investors. The mobilizations in this case resulted in the cancellation of the investment agree-
ments. Villager–state conflict may also take the form of ‘everyday forms of peasant politics’
or individual protests directed at the local state bureaucracy (Scott 1976); indeed, this is the
most common form of land conflict in contemporary China (O’Brien and Li 2006). Prob-
ably the most frequent type of conflict is one that combines the first two: poor people versus
corporate/landed elites and the state. This is not surprising, because the state is almost
always implicated in the current land rush (Wolford et al. 2013). There is, however, the
third axis: poor-on-poor conflict. From one land deal site to the next, we see social
groups divided, not fully united, and with varied takes on engaging with land deals.
While some may invoke the principle of free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) to
justify opposition to a land deal, another group may use FPIC to justify their acceptance
of and incorporation into it – a conflict usually instigated and fanned by those behind
land deals (see Franco 2014). Poor-on-poor conflict is probably one of the most complex
and sensitive dimensions of land deal-related conflict to research, especially for outsiders.
The papers in this collection aim to redress this lacuna in the literature.
The two perspectives discussed above – the location of land deals in broader agrarian
transformations and the axis of political conflicts – provide a clearer picture of what is actu-
ally happening on the ground, as several contributions to this collection illustrate. This fra-
mework also facilitates a critical examination of class and identity politics and of
mobilizations and alliances for or against land deals. Such alliances – tactical or strategic –
may link groups with a common objective that nonetheless have different or even compet-
ing class or other interests and ideological leanings. They may be alliances against, alli-
ances for or alliances in the struggles within land deals. Typically, the boundaries
between these three ideal types are porous and flexible, with individuals and groups chan-
ging positions all the time.
Social groups that were expelled or threatened with expulsion by land deals, or whose
livelihoods are threatened more generally, do not automatically get organized and mount
resistance. We know from classic literature on agrarian politics that there are triggers of
and conditions for the emergence of these kinds of politics, and that the presence or
absence of allies may be key to the kind of reaction that emerges ‘from below’.4 Probably
most of those who suffer from ‘unjust land deals’ do not openly resist. Mamonova (2015)
has demonstrated this in the case in contemporary Ukraine (see also Visser et al. 2012).
More commonly, adversely-affected groups engage in ‘everyday politics’ – individual
covert and unstructured forms of contention, as in the case of Ethiopia (see Moreda
2015). The ‘rightful resistance’ type of defiance characteristic of most recent Chinese
land conflicts – i.e. individual, unorganized but noisy and overt protest (O’Brien and Li
2006) – may be gaining ground in places outside China, such as Vietnam (Kerkvliet
2014). Gingembre (2015), for example, analyzing local resistance to a land deal in Mada-
gascar, highlights the role of an alliance that involved key state and non-state actors from
local to international levels in the issue-analysis and demand-making processes among
affected social groups. External allies often are elites themselves, such as legal experts
who know both national and international laws and how these can be employed to reinforce
subaltern claims, as in the Colombian case examined by Grajales (2015). In confronting the
global land rush, local agrarian groups frequently find allies among the ranks of other social

4
For competing explanations, see Popkin (1979) and Scott (1976), as well as Wolf (1966), Paige
(1975) and Fox (1993).
472 Ruth Hall et al.

justice movements, such as the labour, women’s, environmental, food and human rights
movements.
But not all mobilizations and alliances are against land deals. Sometimes social groups
in local communities mobilize, seek allies and demand to be inserted into land deals. Larder
(2015) shows that in the iconic case of the Malibya land deal in Mali, which involved at
least 100,000 hectares, sectors of the local rice-farming population sought integration
into the project. Similarly, in the case of the Ecofuel sugarcane investment in northern Phi-
lippines, which involves 11,000 hectares, a significant number of those affected have mobi-
lized and forged alliances with local and national government agencies to participate in the
enterprise by renting out their land or engaging in contract growing schemes, or as planta-
tion workers (Franco, Carranza, and Fernandez 2011; Alano forthcoming).
Long histories of government neglect and a lack of alternative livelihood possibilities
suggest institutional and structural bases for these efforts at incorporation. Typically,
local communities that see no state support forthcoming are told that corporate investment
is the only option for their livelihoods, whether this is explicit, as in the Philippines case, or
not, as in the case of Mali. The subtle forms of coercion also have a clear class basis. The
Philippine case involves poor peasants who do not have other livelihood alternatives and
who welcomed the investment (Franco, Carranza, and Fernandez 2011) in direct opposition
to other members of their community and their outside allies, who are opposed to the invest-
ment project (Alano, forthcoming). This is a classic poor-on-poor conflict around land
deals, and it is not an isolated case. In many conflicts, smallholders whose subsistence is
threatened by a land deal, absentee plot holders who gladly agree to lease land to investors,
and landless and migrant workers rejoice at the entry of corporations that promise to
provide employment. Obviously, class interest does not automatically translate into class
politics.5
Moreover, class is not the only factor that shapes political contention from below. Other
intersecting identities are equally important: gender, generation, ethnicity, race, caste, reli-
gion and nationality (Edelman 1999). Additional fissures may separate those with or
without formal claims and those potentially entitled to land or not under particular laws
(see Grajales 2015). This intersection brings both synergies (as we see alliances forged
between peasants and indigenous peoples) and tension (as when divisions arise within
and between peasant and indigenous communities) (see Brent 2015; Alonso-Fradejas
2015, and Fontana 2014).
Struggles around land deals are not just either for or against land deals. Important
struggles by the working class are fought within land deals – to (re)negotiate the terms
of their incorporation into the emerging enterprises, whether as workers (through labour
justice demands) or as contracted small farmers (through agrarian justice or environmental
justice demands). Few systematic studies have addressed this theme. Pye (2010), however,
has noted the diversity among civil society groups working on the issue of palm oil, based
on their distinct ideological and political locations within and between labour, agrarian and
environmental justice movements. The Chikweti forestry project in the northern province of
Niassa in Mozambique is an important case illustrating a complex response by local people
to investments, which is neither for nor against land deals, but rather squarely in the cat-
egory of struggles within land deals. Here, social groups in local communities are demand-
ing more jobs within the enterprise alongside continued access to their plots for subsistence
production (FIAN 2012). These situations raise difficult political dilemmas: when a

5
For a general discussion with reference to India in the context of Green Revolution, see Byres (1981).
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 473

situation is acceptable in terms of labour justice, but not in terms of agrarian justice; when it
is acceptable in terms of agrarian justice, but not in environmental justice terms, and so on
(Borras and Franco 2012, 56–57). These dilemmas are partly manifestations of the intersec-
tion of class and identity, a theme central to this collection and addressed to varying extents
by the different contributors.

Transnationalization and diffusion: responses from the local to global

Mobilizations around land deals are animated by a range of state and societal actors at
different levels: local/subnational, national and international. At times, political contention
arises from local social groups and their efforts to find international and national allies –
whether against, for, or within land deals (see Gingembre 2015 on Madagascar). At
other times, political campaigns originate among international groups and diffuse to
local–national levels, as Corson et al. (2015) show in relation to alliances on climate
justice. The origin of political contention is important because it tells us about the dominant
framing of the issues and demands, while the trajectory is important as it may reveal the
strategies and objectives of campaigns. Real-life politics, of course, are not as neat as we
suggest here; real situations are probably more about the convergences and unique configur-
ations of various actors seeking allies than assumptions about one-way internationalization
or diffusion (see Edelman and Borras forthcoming).
Larder (2015) demonstrates how the difficult dilemmas outlined above can manifest in
conflicting narratives and claims among civil society groups working on land grabbing
issues. Concretely, she identifies a group of poor rice farmers mobilizing to be incorporated
into the Malibya project who would never think about it as a ‘land grab’, while international
social movement organizations claim it is an iconic land grabbing case and seek to stop and
roll it back. These local and international groups described by Larder are both likely on
solid moral ground – which is why such cases raise troubling political dilemmas and
why there are competing interpretations of the same or similar cases. These interpretations
frame divergent responses. International civil society organizations tend to demand land
reform as the most appropriate response to land grabbing. While this overarching frame
will gain political traction in societies marked by highly unequal distribution of access to
and ownership of land, the same does not occur in communities with customary tenure
or in pastoralist societies, as in much of Africa (Kandel 2015; see Borras, Franco, and Mon-
salve Suarez 2015 for a broader context).
Not all urgent land issues today are about ‘land grabbing’. Pre-existing concentration is
just as pervasive and compelling as the post-2007 enclosures. Some civil society groups
mobilize around land issues, but not necessarily around current land grabs. The coming
together of key civil society actors in a common campaign may not be as easy as activists
might wish. One key centre of gravity in international agrarian justice campaigns today is
the ‘Peasants’ Rights’ process within the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council
(HRC). It is framed broadly and strategically, and not on the urgent and narrow issue of
land grabs. The subjective forces behind the process are not all engaged in the anti-land
grabbing campaigns, and vice versa – despite the fact that their campaigns are closely
related (Edelman and James 2011).

Enclosures versus integration: dilemmas of adverse incorporation

The global land grab has been widely represented as an enclosure dispossessing local
people – often peasant or family farmers – and privatizing and commodifying common
474 Ruth Hall et al.

property resources such as rangelands, water and forests. Yet land grabs are not all about
displacement and expulsion. Since the term ‘land grab’ became mainstream shorthand
denoting the corporate scramble for land and water, it has become apparent that much of
what has been included under this rubric does not involve corporations taking direct
control of land. Rather, as this collection shows, more complex processes are underway,
with new value chains emerging, often as family farmers are induced to take up cash-
crop production on contract for processing companies.
Discussing the centrality of labour in understanding land grabs and their effects, Li
(2011) asked, ‘What happens when the land is needed and the labour is not?’ Here we
need to invert the question: What happens when the land is needed and the labour is
needed? In such contexts, capital tends to incorporate rather than exclude. Some have ques-
tioned the term ‘land grab’ in cases where farmers have been incorporated into corporate
agribusiness, not only because accumulation proceeds without dispossession but also
because peasants actively seek incorporation into new corporate value chains. Such pro-
cesses may not involve ‘enclosure’ or ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2005).
Yet, even in the absence of dispossession, the penetration of corporate capital into rural
economies may nonetheless have profound impacts on class formation and commodity
relations.
Why does dispossession not always occur? Reasons may include the existing tenure
regime, state restrictions on the terms of corporate penetration, and the interests of compa-
nies seeking flexible investments and risk-sharing. In Chiapas, Mexico, as Castellanos-
Navarrete and Jansen (2015) point out, the ejido system provided secure tenure for
farmers and limited the expansion of oil palm companies, forcing them to engage with
peasant farmers. Mamonova (2015) argues similarly that ‘the way land tenure systems
and informal markets work, the type of land investments, and the implementation of small-
holder development schemes in villages are critical factors that influence the exclusion or
inclusion of local people in land deals’.
The ‘land grab’ thus involves not only displacement of populations, but also the exten-
sion of value chains and corporate control over production and territories. The extension of
domestic and global capital in controlling land and its uses might, drawing on Peluso and
Lund (2011), be more accurately termed ‘land control grabbing’ rather than ‘land grabbing’
per se. The terms of inclusion are, as a result, crucial, and may be on more or less adverse
terms. Peasant attitudes to land grabs, then, may be conditioned by the ‘terms of inclusion’
(McCarthy 2010). Central to understanding these processes is the concept of ‘adverse incor-
poration’ (Hickey and du Toit 2007) – in other words, the manner in which people may be
incorporated into corporate agribusiness and even global value chains while simultaneously
being excluded from processes of capital accumulation. The term ‘adverse incorporation’
itself draws attention to the exploitative character of such relations even where people
seek inclusion in them, and so redirects attention to the structural transformations underway
and their relationships to reactions and responses from below.
Such distinctions between enclosure and incorporation, specifically through contract
farming, have been extensively documented and analyzed even outside and prior to the
current land rush. In much of Africa, a long history of failed attempts at establishing
large-scale commercial farming – through coercion as well as direct or indirect subsidies –
has seen contract farming and outgrower schemes emerging as a key way in which peasants
have been incorporated in circuits of capital accumulation (Little and Watts 1994; Oya
2012; Baglioni and Gibbon 2013). Contract farming is one solution to the problems of sour-
cing and disciplining labour while extending the territorial reach of corporate capital. Even
in the absence of dispossession, such incorporation may produce social differentiation
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 475

processes similar to those arising from enclosure and dispossession, as families with more
resources and larger landholdings may be better able to reap the benefits of contract farming
and emerge as medium- or large-scale producers, while others may enter into debt, may
experience land loss and may or may not be incorporated as wage labour (Smalley 2013).
Land deals that start out as enclosures can also be transformed, sometimes in response
to resistance, to incorporate rather than exclude local farmers. This is evident in the Malibya
project, where resistance and bad publicity prompted state authorities to make some of the
irrigated land in the new canal system available to local rice farmers (Larder 2015). Such
efforts underscore the ways in which ‘reformist’ positions by farmers’ associations and
social movements may preserve or promote production by family farmers even while locat-
ing this within corporate agriculture (see Holt Gimenéz and Shattuck 2011). Incorporation,
even on less-than-adverse terms, does not challenge the overarching direction of agrarian
change or the wider structures of capital within which it may be located. As Castellanos-
Navarrete and Jansen (2015) emphasize, the ‘overemphasis on enclosure limits our under-
standing of the ways capitalism impacts rural livelihoods and environments’. To deepen our
understanding of the agrarian transformations underway, more analysis is needed about
‘how and why rural people engage with capitalism’. Addressing the ways in which land
deals incorporate local people – who, how, why and on what terms – can help us to under-
stand what conditions responses, including resistance of various kinds as well as the
absence of resistance, and so deepen our critical inquiry into the global land grab.

Engagements with the state

Scholarly and activist work on land grabbing initially had a Manichean perspective on
the state. Nation-states were either ‘target countries’, too weak to defend their borders
from the threat of foreign investment, or ‘host countries’, either directly sponsoring
land grabs through state-owned enterprises or indirectly sponsoring them by providing
infrastructure for accumulation. As scholars and activists alike grappled with the
dynamic phenomenon of land grabbing across regions and historical periods, their
research has proven the Manichean perspective to be problematic. Land grabbing has
provided an impetus and opportunity for an increasingly sophisticated body of research
on relationships between states, governance and authority over land (Margulis,
McKeon, and Borras 2013; Wolford et al. 2013). The papers in this collection make
several contributions to this discussion.
States are not coherent, unified entities that consistently act with premeditation, compe-
tence or consensus. They contain multiple actors, factions and interests, many of which are
in direct competition for political influence. As Milgroom’s paper (2015) on Mozambique
demonstrates, policies may be crafted at a high level but their effects depend on how they
are implemented or, as she says, how they are ‘enacted’. In Mozambique, government offi-
cials deploy sophisticated technologies, such as remote sensing and global positioning
systems (GPS), to gather and present data, but they often do so in an ‘ad hoc fashion’ so
that the seemingly scientific results suit their particular interests. Competing forces
within the state are not always easy to see, since official discourses tend to project an arti-
ficial coherence. Corson et al.’s paper on the Rio+20 meetings suggests that the most effec-
tive sites for seeing and enacting governance – at the national and international levels – are
informal, everyday spaces rather than official texts or meeting halls. Corson et al. (2015)
quote a participant at Rio+20 as saying, ‘A lot of the UN negotiation never really
happens on the floor; it always happens in the corridors … . So we sit one on one …
catch them when they’re going to the toilet, or when they’re walking to coffee’.
476 Ruth Hall et al.

A common division within the state, highlighted by several of the papers, occurs
between officials at local, regional and national levels. Competition between these actors
sometimes provides opportunities for land deals to move forward but may also create the
political space or opportunity for resistance. Moreda’s paper (2015) on land deals in
lowland Ethiopia indicates that contemporary investment needs to be situated in a long
history of domination in the lowlands by national (highlander) and foreign (Sudanese)
elites. Partly to remedy this history of subordination, the 1995 Ethiopian constitution
devolved considerable power to states to administer their own land. With the recent rise
in land values, however, the national government has again become involved in local
land affairs, not least through a highly disruptive programme of villagization. In a paper
on Colombia, Grajales (2015) makes a different but related point, suggesting that while
the national government has devolved power to local regions and elites, this has given
rise to ‘subnational authoritarianism’ and made it more difficult for villagers to fight
dispossession.
At times, differences between levels of the state are exacerbated by transnational com-
mitments. In the papers in this collection, the importance of notions of universal human
rights, identity and land use are especially salient. In Argentina, Brent’s paper (2015)
suggests, provincial governments privilege the sanctity of private property while the
national government privileges territorial, cultural or ethnic claims to land. As a result, indi-
genous land titles are promised by the national government and undermined by the provin-
cial government. Differences between local- and national-level officials do not necessarily
preclude collaboration. Moreda (2015) highlights, in Ethiopia, ongoing partnerships
between local chiefs and central authorities, where the chiefs maintain their positions by
exploiting their own communities and kin. In some cases, the central state appears
absent altogether, leaving local authorities considerable space to govern, as in Mamonova’s
account (2015) of land deals in post-socialist Ukraine.
States also change their orientations, as Wilson’s study of the Las Tunas movement in
Nicaragua suggests. In the 1980s, the revolutionary Sandinista state distributed over 2.5
million hectares of land to farming collectives, individual peasant farmers and state-
owned enterprises, but after the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) – the
Sandinistas – lost the 1990 presidential elections, many aspects of these reforms were
reversed. In a paper on Special Economic Zones in the Indian state of Goa, Sampat
(2015) similarly indicates that states need to be seen as contested sites in which ‘land
grabbers don’t always win’. In Goa, mobilization by a cross-class, cross-society coalition
led to the cancellation of 15 approved SEZs, some of which had already begun to
develop the land.
Working with rather than directly confronting state authority may also be effective for
those too remote and marginal to mount direct resistance to threatened dispossession. In
Laos, an ethnic-minority Khmu community invoked state development discourses to chal-
lenge a concession to a Chinese company that intended to plant rubber trees on over half
their territory (McAllister 2015). This state attempt to allocate community land for commer-
cial purposes was justified with arguments that the land was degraded and formed part of
‘state forests’. The reactions ‘from below’ ranged from ‘anonymous acts of sabotage,
refusal to work for the company, identification of powerful allies in the government and
civil society, and recourse to law and state institutions’. Informed by perceptions of risk
and opportunity, this Khmu community was able to stall the planned plantation by
working with state structures in a process that underlines the degree to which forms of
resistance are often unrecognized as such, occurring as they often do in remote locations
far from public view.
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 477

Understanding reactions to land deals in geographically remote locations is a theme also

highlighted by Martiniello (2015). He locates community reactions to an impending land
deal in northern Uganda within a long history of resistance to central state control and
efforts to establish commercial agriculture, from colonial times to the present, in a region
that is economically and geographically peripheral to the Ugandan state. He shows how
the Ugandan government’s attempt to provide land for a sugar plantation to the Madhvani
Group provoked a range of social struggles that echo and are locally understood as building
on this history of resistance to state authority and violence. Here, too, responses ‘manifested
in both everyday, hidden, practices of resistance and moments of open, militant, contesta-
tion [that] are aimed at (re)establishing and securing access to means of social reproduc-
tion’. Cumulatively, these diverse forms of resistance represent both opposition to an
imminent dispossession and claims to land sovereignty and autonomy.
As a collection, the papers also highlight the importance of seeing states as relationships
rather than discrete institutions. States are grounded in particular places and times and are
constituted through relationships with society. And just as there are multiple perspectives
within the state, there are multiple relationships between state and society. The border
between the two is dynamic and porous; state actors are often civil society actors and
vice versa in different times or spaces. Protestors or actors who work closely with the
state sometimes have more influence over land deals than those who work ‘outside’. As
Castellanos-Navarrete and Jansen (2015) point out for Chiapas, ‘Environmentalists
within the state were able to make a concrete difference while radical organizations
outside the state were never able to build alliances’. At the same time, both Castellanos-
Navarrete and Jansen as well as Corson et al. show how state–society collaboration can dis-
cipline the latter, such that civil society is always just that – ‘civil’ – and playing by existing
rules of the game.
In democracies, a key component of state–society relationships is the electoral process
and, in most of the cases analyzed in the papers, elected politicians manifest responsiveness
to popular discontent. Gingembre’s contribution (2015) on Madagascar shows this, albeit in
a very particular way:

Political uncertainty in the wake of the coup against the Ravolmanana government provided
more space for civil society, which organized quickly because of empowerment and a sense
of having ‘missed the boat’ during the [2009] Dae Woo [anti-land grab] protests.

Gingembre indicates that the timing of parliamentary elections made ‘officials even more
sensitive to the whiff of protest’ but, ironically, this sensitivity was so influenced by mem-
ories of the 2009 coup that local leaders disregarded those people who would have liked to
be involved in the Lalifuel land deal. Wilson (2015) argues that in Nicaragua, elected
leaders were forced to cede to mobilization once the images of protest focused more on
the daily trials of survival than on military or guerrilla war: ‘The material reality of
hungry children and hungry women struggling to feed them established some credibility
of the movement within the media outlets and created a powerful symbol with which to
shame the government’. Sampat’s (2015) research in Goa similarly suggests that successful
negotiations with the state hinged on the electoral – and physical – power of the people.

Rights and legal repertoires

Can contesting land grabs through invoking ‘rights’ and legal repertoires stop or reverse
them? Several of the papers in this collection explore how people in diverse situations
478 Ruth Hall et al.

have used the language of rights and legal institutions to advance their struggles. Many
states do not adequately protect customary and informal land tenure in their statutes, so
land deals that dispossess people of such rights can be legal under national law, even
while violating human rights principles (Wily 2012). Efforts led by states and elites to
reform, formalize, individualize and register land and property can legalize theft of poor
people’s land. While neoliberal institutions and theorists (e.g., de Soto 1989) frequently
hail property deeds as protection for the very poor, in historical perspective formal titles
are also a central tool in land rushes (Wily 2012). Several assertions used in prior rushes
are again evident in the past decade, including the notion that unfarmed lands are vacant
‘wastelands’, that customary and informal occupation does not confer rights, and that
mass individualization and titling programmes should be at the centre of state land
policy. The result is that land deals often proceed in ‘legally binding’ ways that protect
the rights of investors and elites, but not those of the rural poor. In the face of these
threats, social movements have adopted diverse positions, either contesting the legal
terrain or rejecting state power as anathema to their interests.
The move towards legalizing land titles has been used to ambiguous effect in different
contexts. Alonso-Fradejas’ paper on Guatemala after the mid-2000s argues that national
land titling programmes, originally seen as a ‘good governance fix’, were increasingly
used to provide factors of production for ‘well-capitalized outsiders’. The illegal appropria-
tion of titles, he indicates, paved the way for elite resource accumulation and concentration.
Grajales (2015), however, describes a Colombian case in the Lower Atrato where collective
organization allowed a community to resist displacement and win meaningful collective
land rights. Gingembre (2015) raises a complementary point and suggests that in Madagas-
car formal legal norms were less important than the content of claims to land based on ‘cus-
tomary, local discourses and identities’. Brent (2015) suggests, similarly, for Argentina, that
legal ownership may be less important than control. The Argentinean state has made media
headlines for restricting foreign land ownership in the wake of concerns over land appro-
priation, but the focus on ownership obscures the more important aspect of who actually
controls the land and its production. This extinguishes grassroots voices and livelihoods
even more effectively than outright ownership in a context where power derives from
force rather than consent.
In many countries, the absence of democratic local land governance institutions consti-
tutes a major stumbling block. There are exceptions, however, as in Tanzania, where village
councils established through Nyerere’s Ujamaa policy administer land at the local level.
The ‘rights’ approach and the use of formal legal institutions are perhaps most effective
in collective resistance to large land deals, rather than smaller and more localized ones.
Nonetheless, local elites and politically-connected national businesses often grab signifi-
cantly more land – at least cumulatively – than transnational actors do (Jayne, Chamberlin,
and Headey 2014; Kandel 2015).
Critiques of the global land grab initially focused largely on rights violations: land dis-
possession and displacement of people from land they considered they owned. Concern
with rights violations prompted a proliferation of regulatory initiatives to complement
and shape national laws. At the global level, the UN Committee on World Food Security
(CFS) Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Land, Fisheries and Forests
in the Context of National Food Security (‘Voluntary Guidelines’) are the most comprehen-
sive, and are the outcome of several years of intense negotiation between states, civil
society and development agencies (FAO 2012). While ‘voluntary’, the Guidelines reference
existing binding international law and human rights norms, and so constitute the most
definitive global framework regarding land and related natural resource rights. The seven
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 479

Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment (RAI), endorsed by the World Bank, the
International Fund for Agricultural Development and the UN Council on Trade and Devel-
opment, on the other hand, are a framework for self-regulation by investors. Following the
adoption of the Voluntary Guidelines, the CFS initiated consultations that gave rise to Prin-
ciples for Responsible Investment in Agriculture and the Agro-food System (FAO 2014 –
the ‘CFS–RAI’) as an alternative to the World Bank-sponsored RAI.
The political and ideological bases of alliances and campaigns both unite and divide the
ranks of actors working around land deals, giving rise to three main approaches to regulat-
ing land grabbing: regulate to facilitate, regulate to mitigate negative impacts and maximize
opportunities, and regulate to block and roll back land grabs (Borras, Franco, and Wang
2013). Agrarian social movements such as La Vía Campesina and critical agrarian scholars
have debated how to respond to this ‘land governance rush’ and whether these frameworks
can gain traction. Controversies centre primarily on three issues. First, were the guidelines
premised on human rights and property rights (as in the Voluntary Guidelines) or self-regu-
lation by corporate investors (as in the RAI)? Second, what were the roles of civil society,
farmer associations and social movements in the process of developing these frameworks,
and how legitimate and inclusive are the results? While civil society and farmers’ groups
were integrally involved in drafting the Voluntary Guidelines, the RAI were the product
of the development agencies themselves, led by the World Bank. The third question was
the extent to which these frameworks address only procedural questions of governance
and transparency – to make land grabbing ‘responsible’ – or whether they provide a
basis for more substantive forms of agrarian change (Holt Gimenéz and Shattuck 2011).
What partly explains the momentum that the CFS has gained among progressive and
radical social movements, such as the International Planning Committee (IPC) for Food
Sovereignty and La Vía Campesina, is that the Voluntary Guidelines cut across broad
‘resource control’ issues and invoke a variety of international laws and treaties. They are
an international governance instrument that can be flexibly used by those confronted by cor-
porate land grabs (White et al. 2012), green grabs (Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012) and
water grabs (Mehta, Veldwisch, and Franco 2012) – as well as by those who are outside the
ambit of the global land rush (Seufert 2013; McKeon 2013; Monsalve 2013). How and
within what framework to bring together all social forces confronting a variety of land ques-
tions, and not just those directly provoked by the current land rush, is an urgent political
question for all those who work around social justice issues, and an urgent agenda for
inquiry by ‘engaged researchers’.
Do human rights frameworks serve as an effective tool in local struggles? Very few of
the contributions in this collection suggest that transnational governance has had any real
influence. It is too early to tell if the Voluntary Guidelines or other international instruments
will have any effect, or if the transnational scale is one better suited to framing issues than to
adjudicating conflicts. Franco’s discussion of FPIC demonstrates both the potential and pit-
falls of depending on a regulatory tool with limited authority (Franco 2014).
Rights frameworks in international law often coexist with national laws as well as local
practices that contradict them. Alonso-Fradejas (2015) draws attention to how, in Guate-
mala, the ‘repertoire of contention’ included strategic litigation as a form of ‘politico-
juridical advocacy “from above”’ alongside ‘grounded practices of resistance “from
below”’. Despite obvious limitations, he argues, as long as the state remains an arena of
contention, legal repertoires can be put to work. Invoking human rights frameworks, pea-
sants in Colombia have simultaneously recognized the institutionalized violence of the state
and taken their struggles to state institutions and the judiciary (Grajales 2015). Here, both
investors and rural people resisting them have engaged in ‘legal contention’. The
480 Ruth Hall et al.

Colombian experience represents a paradox where widespread lawlessness and violence

either inflicted or condoned by the state and corporations exists alongside legal institutions
that, while constrained by this wider political economy, offer some opportunities for legal
remedy.
This ‘judicialization’ of politics may not necessarily entail the displacement of political
struggles into legal institutions, but rather a more complex navigation of multiple avenues
of struggle. In Colombia, the association of corporate interests with paramilitaries, drug
traffickers, money laundering and extra-judicial killings has led rural populations to
respond with direct resistance and with legal strategies aimed at establishing land grabbing
not only as a property infringement issue but as a human rights one (Grajales 2015). In such
situations, international human rights instruments, such as the CFS Voluntary Guidelines,
may provide important leverage for resistance. Human rights-based responses to global
land grabbing can gain traction only through a concerted effort by state and non-state
actors operating at international, national and local levels (Golay and Biglino 2013). For
effective use of legal repertoires, whether in national courts or multilateral fora, mass mobil-
ization and pressure from below are essential.

Green politics from below

Linked to wider concerns over ‘land grabbing’ are forms of resistance around environ-
mental issues. The ‘financialization’ of nature and resources – widespread in contemporary
neoliberal capitalism (Büscher et al. 2012) – involves imposing ‘environmental’ agendas
around such labels as ‘green economy’, ‘low-carbon transitions’ or ‘sustainable intensifica-
tion’. The expansion of quasi-privatized national parks, tourist zones and other ‘protected
areas’ is part of this, as are ‘payment for ecosystem services’, biodiversity offsets or the pro-
motion of biofuels or carbon forestry schemes in the name of climate change mitigation
(Matondi, Havnevik, and Beyene 2011; McAfee 2012; Dietz et al. 2014; Leach and
Scoones 2015). Collectively, these phenomena have often been described as ‘green grab-
bing’ – ‘the appropriation of land and nature for environmental ends’ (Fairhead, Leach,
and Scoones 2012, 238). But just as with ‘land grabbing’, ‘green grabs’ take multiple
forms and result in diverse politics from below, as several papers in this collection point out.
The expansion of oil palm plantations for biofuels in Guatemala (Alonso-Fradejas
2015) represents a classic ‘agrarian extractivist project’, like those in much of the land
and green grab literature. The ‘repertoires of contention’ range from the everyday to the
more structured. Long histories of agrarian politics give rise to these patterns of resistance
and the contests between different actors as a result of the intervention. Resistance has
emerged across diverse axes as Q’eqchi lowlanders articulate a discourse around ‘the
defence of territory’. This promotes indigenous identity and a sense of community, and
also generates support for local land use and agricultural practices. This language facilitates
alliances with human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the Catholic Church
and others, in turn nurturing multiple forms of politics from below.
Yet oil palm development does not always result in confrontational politics when
embedded in smallholder settings. Castellanos-Navarrete and Jansen (2015) offer a con-
trasting case from Chiapas, Mexico, where a state-supported oil palm programme has
involved smallholders and indigenous peoples. In this instance, peasant engagement with
capital accumulation has undermined environmentalists’ efforts to restrict the spread of
oil palm. Castellanos-Navarrete and Jansen argue that ‘a green agrarian question solely
focusing on enclosure is unable to explain agrarian environmental processes’. Large-
scale land grabs may involve the willing co-optation of peasant producers, who are then
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 481

able to improve their livelihoods. In this case, radical environmental organizations that used
global green narratives around climate change, biodiversity and land-use change were
unable to forge coalitions at the local level to resist oil palm. Instead, actors within the
state forged alliances that adopted environmental arguments, but linked these to the oil
palm project and the interests of local producers and indigenous peoples. By reconfiguring
old forms of clientelist politics, the oil palm programme created a new network of support,
involving actors within and outside the state. No classic oppositional politics emerged, but
rather one rooted in much more complex engagements with the state and capital that would
be obscured by a simplistic focus on enclosure and ‘grabbing’.
Similarly, Cavanagh and Benjaminsen (2015) explore the ‘biopolitics’ of protected
areas and the dispossessions these provoke. Focusing on the case of conservation initiatives
at Mount Elgon in Uganda, they identify responses that include nonviolent, militant, discur-
sive and formal-legal tactics. In this case, and more broadly, they argue, rural populations
faced with enclosure of farmlands and rangelands respond not only with overt resistance but
through illicit cultivation in territories earmarked for conservation – a kind of ‘guerrilla
agriculture’. These reactions do not merely represent survival strategies by supposedly
passive victims of land enclosure but form a part of struggles in the face of direct and indir-
ect violence to establish spheres of existence autonomous of both conservation authorities
and the national state. In these ways, they ‘circumvent policies that bolster the global public
good of biodiversity at the expense of local and traditional livelihoods’ and challenge the
‘naturalization of dispossession’.
Rocheleau (2015), in a paper on Chiapas, analyzes the use of ‘networked, distributed,
rooted and territorial power’ – by investors and by resistance movements – around a number
of ‘green’ investments, including a major tourism project. Again, compared to classic ‘land
grabbing’, there is a ‘fog of greening’, involving networked assemblages spread across a
wide territory. The network of actors promoting such investments links tourism to reserves,
and connects the state, security forces and corporate investors. State agents regularly foment
rural violence, and the process of ‘restoring order’ provides a pretext for evictions that make
an area ‘safe’ for investment. Rocheleau maintains that ‘Disneyland in the forest and
Cancún in the forest are a prelude to pipelines in the forest, plantations in the forest, high-
ways in the forest, paradise for sale in the forest’ and more.
‘Politics from below’ and resistance to green discourses and practices may not always
occur, however. In a ‘collaborative event ethnography’ of the Rio+20 conference in 2012,
Corson et al. (2015) show how opponents of the ‘green economy’ discourse mobilized in an
international setting. NGOs, mostly from the global South, energized a movement inside
and outside the UN process, labelled ‘rights at risk’, and deployed multiple forms of mobil-
ization, such as ‘side-events, morning meetings, thematic clusters, letters, petitions and pro-
tests’. The ‘green economy’ became the key signifier in debates at Rio and many viewed it
as ‘selling nature to save the economy’, invoking crisis and scarcity to create new forms of
privatization of nature, and thus conditions for ‘green grabbing’. The ‘rights-at-risk’ move-
ment made some headway, though Corson et al. (2015) observe that ‘it is not always
through the official structures of participation or orchestrated resistance that progressive
action takes place’. Instead, it may be that change happens through ‘unforeseen moments
of opportunity’.
These papers show how so-called ‘green grabs’ involve enclosure and expropriation of
land and resources, but the politics of contestation around environmental questions may
also operate in more complex and subtle ways, through networked forms of resistance
and via discursive battles operating across scales over the meaning of environment and sus-
tainability. The ‘politics from below’ around environmental issues are perhaps especially
482 Ruth Hall et al.

varied, as agrarian and environmental movements have distinct – sometimes converging

and at over times diverging – agendas.

Silences: gender and generation

Two important dimensions of ‘political responses from below’ – their gendered and genera-
tional dynamics – are largely missing from this collection. Although the Land Deal Politics
Initiative (LDPI) explicitly included gender (and, more recently, generational) dynamics in
its calls for research proposals and conference papers, the response has been rather modest.
This, we feel, reflects the general state of the art. The importance of analyzing the gendered
dimensions of large-scale land deals was rightly flagged some years ago (Behrman,
Meinzen-Dick, and Quisumbing 2012), and a few articles and chapters on this have
appeared in recent years (e.g., Doss, Summerfield, and Tsikata 2014; Julia and White
2012; Tsikata and Yaro 2014; White, Park, and Julia 2014). However, work in this area
has been slow to emerge, and also the balance of its focus has been on gendered impacts
and vulnerabilities resulting from land deals rather than gendered agency, responses and
resistance (but see Edelman and León 2013).
Gender relations also structure both the varied experiences of land deals and
responses to them, as shown in the case of oil palm in Indonesia (Morgan 2013).
Loss of common property resources may dispossess women of resource rights on
which they depend, while simultaneously incorporating men in commodity relations
(Tsikata and Yaro 2014). Incorporation is virtually always a gendered process,
shaped by historical and existing gender relations and divisions of labour, and in turn
entrenching or ameliorating gendered inequalities. Reactions too are gendered, with
women and men responding, both individually and collectively, in diverse ways to
the promises and threats of land deals. In the case of a sugar plantation in Amuru District
in northern Uganda, described by Martiniello (2015), women were at the forefront of
community opposition. To prevent state surveyors and company representatives from
demarcating land for the plantation, women protestors stripped naked, in a confronta-
tional act of resistance that mobilized the cultural symbolism of women’s bodies and
reproductive roles, and which proved effective – along with several legal challenges
– in stalling the land deals for several years.
Researchers have given even less attention to generational differences and tensions in
local people’s engagement with corporate land deals and agribusiness. This neglect is sur-
prising. Intergenerational relationships and tensions have been a recurring theme in studies
of agrarian change, especially in Africa, but they consistently receive less notice than class
and gender relations (Sumberg et al. 2012). A youth and generational perspective adds
another powerful reason to De Schutter’s arguments that large-scale land deals (whether
for purchase or long lease) should be seen as the ‘last and least desirable option’ (De Schut-
ter 2011) because they close off the smallholder option, not only for today’s farmers but
also for members of the next generation, who face permanent alienation from land on
which they, or their children, might want to farm, and in the absence of livelihood oppor-
tunities elsewhere (White 2012).
While smallholder dispossession for plantation agriculture or contract farming schemes
may make some provision for existing smallholders in terms of (reduced) land allocation,
generally there is no provision for the next generation. Following the Scottish Highland
Clearances of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, dispossession often left the
older generation of crofters and cottars ‘hanging on’, despite the onslaught on their land
and livelihoods, but still reluctant to leave. The next generation, however, was less
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 483

willing to acquiesce to these straitened circumstances, often made trouble, and was encour-
aged and sometimes forced to migrate to the south, or to North America. No land at all was
made available for young couples wanting to marry (Napier Commission 1884). Young
people may have different interests in land deals (pro or con), and different ways of promot-
ing their interests and engaging with state and corporate power. We hope to see work on
these generational issues in the next few years.

Conclusion
This collection draws attention to a spectrum of reactions to land deals which extend far
beyond resistance per se, and collectively constitute the ‘politics from below’ of the
global land grab. What explains successful resistance, and what does resistance produce?
Some of the papers show how cross-class, identity-based and even transnational alliances
mounted effective resistance to land deals, while others focus on engagement with the state
and private capital rather than direct confrontation. Reactions are shaped by and in turn
shape social differentiation, shifting the contours of and possibilities for political alliances.
Less clear are the alternatives that emerge, and that are proposed. While some of the papers
depict rural communities mounting powerful counter-narratives to land enclosures, commo-
dification and commercialization, and seeking land sovereignty and autonomy from the
state and markets, others point to demands from below for incorporation, or changed
terms of incorporation, in land deals and the tenure arrangements, production systems
and value chains that they produce.
We emphasize how the framing of research on land deals is enriched by explicit con-
nection to the scholarship on the peasantry and to critical agrarian studies. Conceptual
and analytical frames from the agrarian literature are helpful in illuminating the range
of reactions to land deals. Key concepts include repertoires of contention, exclusion
versus incorporation, disciplining, defensive versus propositional practices, Polanyian
counter-movements and governance fixes, among others. Methods and disciplinary
approaches from various traditions and schools of thought – ranging from political
ecology to geography, rural sociology and anthropology – shape the questions we ask
about the politics of land deals, the methods we use and the understandings we
derive. The papers we present here also highlight differences in terms of spatial dimen-
sions and the scale at which land deals and reactions to them are analyzed – from trans-
national, to national, regional, local, community, kinship, household and individual
levels, with the latter requiring further disaggregation to account for gender and genera-
tional differences.
What does this current state of research on the ‘politics from below’ in response to
land grabbing imply for future research agendas? This collection suggests that the ‘poli-
tics from below’ is not just the reactions of local communities to the expansion of corpor-
ate and state control over community land and territory in the global South. Importantly,
‘politics from below’ is also constitutive of trajectories of agrarian change. To deepen our
understanding and to sharpen analysis in critical agrarian studies, we need signposts for
future research. First is the urgent need to address the near-total absence of critical analy-
sis of gendered differences. While there is a growing literature on gendered impacts of
land deals, there is little empirical work and even less analytical and theoretical treatment
of gendered responses to land deals. Second is the continued silence on the intergenera-
tional dynamics of land deals and the responses to them, including inter-generational
conflict, and implications for future generations and the possibilities for agrarian
livelihoods.
484 Ruth Hall et al.

Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge the generous support provided to the Land Deal Politics Initiative
and its convenors’ institutions, both during and after the Global Land Grab II conference at Cornell
University in 2012, from the Ford Foundation, Future Agricultures Consortium, UK Department for
International Development, Transnational Institute, Misereor, Austrian Development Cooperation,
Interchurch Organization for Development Cooperation, Institute for the Social Sciences at
Cornell, Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell and Department of Development Soci-
ology at Cornell, and especially from the faculty, staff and graduate students who put in so much time.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Ruth Hall is an associate professor at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at
the University of the Western Cape, and holds a DPhil in politics from the University of Oxford. Her
research focuses on land and agrarian reform in South Africa, and she also does research on land
rights, agricultural commercialization and ‘land grabbing’ in Africa. She is a founding member and
co-convenor of the Land Deal Politics Initiative and the BRICS Initiative in Critical Agrarian
Studies, and is the coordinator of the Future Agricultures Consortium’s work on land in Africa and
coordinator of its regional hub for Southern Africa. Email: [email protected]

Marc Edelman is professor of anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York. His books include The logic of the latifundio (1992), Peasants against glo-
balization (1999), The anthropology of development and globalization (co-edited 2005), Social
democracy in the global periphery (co-authored 2007), Transnational agrarian movements confront-
ing globalization (co-edited 2008), and Global land grabs: history, theory and method (co-edited
2015). Email: [email protected]

Saturnino M. Borras Jr. is a professor of agrarian studies at the International Institute of Social
Studies (ISS) in The Hague, the Netherlands, an adjunct professor at China Agricultural University
in Beijing, and a fellow of the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute (TNI) and of the Califor-
nia-based Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First). He is a founding member and
co-convenor of the Land Deal Politics Initiative. His contribution to this introductory essay has
been partly enabled by, and draws insights partly from, ongoing collaborative research on the inter-
connections between climate change mitigation policies, land grabbing and conflict in Myanmar and
488 Ruth Hall et al.

Cambodia (2014–2018), which has been funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific
Research (NWO; see www.iss.nl/mosaic). Email: [email protected]

Ian Scoones is a professorial fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of
Sussex, and Director of the ESRC STEPS Centre. He works on land, agricultural and agrarian and
environmental change in Africa. He is a founding member and co-convenor of the Land Deal Politics
Initiative. His most recent book is The politics of green transformations (edited with Melissa Leach
and Peter Newell, Routledge, 2015). Email: [email protected]

Ben White is an emeritus professor of rural sociology at the International Institute of Social Studies
(ISS) in The Hague. His research has focused mainly on processes of agrarian change and the anthro-
pology and history of childhood and youth. He has been engaged in research on these issues in Indo-
nesia since the early 1970s. Recent books include Governing global land deals: the role of the state in
the rush for land (2013, co-edited), and Growing up in Indonesia: experience and diversity in youth
transitions (2012, co-edited). He is a founding member and co-convenor of the Land Deal Politics
Initiative. Email: [email protected]

Wendy Wolford is Polson Professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University, USA. Her
research interests include the political economy of development, social movements, land distribution,
agricultural knowledge and the politics of land management. She has written two books on the
struggle for land in Brazil: To inherit the earth (with Angus Wright, 2003) and This land is ours
now (2010). She is a founding member and co-convenor of the Land Deal Politics Initiative and a
member of the editorial collective of the Journal of Peasant Studies. Email: [email protected]