Land, politics and dynamics of agrarian change and resistance in North Africa

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Acknowledgements

This Forum was designed in the aftermath of the international workshop ‘The Land Question in North Africa in an Era of Global Resource Grabs and Ecological Crisis: Trajectories of Appropriation, Dynamics of Agrarian Change and Strategies of Rural Resistance’ held in Berlin on 25–26 September 2018. Earlier versions of the articles by Yasmine Moataz Ahmed, Francesco De Lellis and Saker El Nour were presented at the workshop. The organisation of the workshop was initiated and implemented by a committee composed of Joseph Désiré Som I, Mohammed Benidir, and the two authors of this introduction. In planning, presenting and delivering the workshop, the committee benefited from the financial and logistic support of the following organising institutions: the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), which hosted the initiative; the TARICA ERC programme, the French National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Institute of Research on the Contemporary Maghreb (IRMC); the University Paris Descartes, the Institute of Research for Development (IRD) and their Population and Development Research Centre (CEPED); the Department of Political and Social Sciences (DiSPeS) of the University of Calabria and its Centre for Rural Development Studies (CeSSR). The workshop received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (ERC TARICA, grant agreement no. 695674). It was also sponsored by the Review of African Political Economy; the International Centre for Advanced Mediterranean Agronomic Studies (CIHEAM); and the French Association Recherche sans frontières (Research without Borders).

Thanks to the other members of the organising group for having shared with us the experience of initiating and implementing the workshop, and to the organising and sponsoring institutions for their support. Thanks to all the participants of the workshop for their insightful comments and contributions to the debate that took place in Berlin. These were a source of great inspiration in the development of our own work. Thanks also to all the authors of the articles featured in this Forum. We learnt a lot from their brilliant work. Last but not least, thanks to Elisa Greco and Raymond Bush, the editors of this Forum of the Review of African Political Economy, for having believed in our editorial proposal and supported its realisation, and thanks to the two anonymous reviewers of our own article for their comments and revisions that helped us to greatly improve it. We alone remain responsible for our statements and any errors.

Notes

The two authors acknowledge that they have equally and jointly contributed to the design and writing of the present article in all of its sections, through a continuous dialogue and exchange. Consequently, they have opted to sign this article in a way that solely reflects the alphabetical order of their family names.