Life on the land: new lives for agrarian questions

ABSTRACT

The politics of food, climate, energy, and the yet unfinished work of ending colonialism run square through questions of land. The classical agrarian question has taken on new forms, and a new intensity. We look at four dimensions of the agrarian question today: urbanization and labor; care and social reproduction; financialization and global food systems; and social movements. On this 50th anniversary of JPS, we as the journal's editors invite more research, vigorous debate, and scholar-activism on these issues in agrarian politics and beyond. We move into the journal’s next era hoping we might continue to better interpret the world in order to change it..

KEYWORDS:

• climate change
• extractivism
• agrarian change
• agrarian question

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Mike Levien, Diana Ojeda, Amita Baviskar, Ian Scoones, Marc Edelman, and Jun Borras for their comments on earlier versions of this essay. The remaining shortcomings are all ours.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While the international press portrayed the protests as originating from small scale farmers, the reality was more complicated with dominant and landed castes primarily joining the protests, yet they managed to mobilize broadly (Baviskar and Levien 2021) – yet another example of how complex agrarian questions can be in our time.

2 See https://www.campaignfornature.org/why-30-1 for an overview of rationale for the 30×30 initiative

3 These remarks result from our conversation with Amita Baviskar.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Annie Shattuck

Annie Shattuck is an Assistant Professor in Geography at Indiana University in the United States. Her work spans food politics, agroecology, rural health, agrarian change, and social movements.

Jacobo Grajales

Jacobo Grajales is Professor of Political Science at the University of Lille, France, and Fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France. His current work deals with the ties between post-conflict politics and land policies through field research in Colombia, Côte d'Ivoire, and Liberia.

Ricardo Jacobs

Ricardo Jacobs is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research is on the global political economy of urbanisation, ecology, race, indigeneity, agrarian change, and emancipatory alternatives.

Sergio Sauer

Sérgio Sauer is professor of Political Sociology at the University of Brasília (UnB), in the Graduate Programmes of Environment and Rural Development (Mader-UnB) and Sustainable Development (CDS-UnB), Director of Terra de Direitos, researcher of CNPq, and leader of the Observatory of Social and Environmental Conflicts in the Matopiba (Cerrado biome), Brazil.

Shaila Seshia Galvin

Shaila Seshia Galvin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Her research focuses on intersecting processes of agrarian and environmental change, and seeks to understand the complex responses and modes of governance that these produce.

Ruth Hall

Ruth Hall holds the South African Research Chair in Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies supported by the Department of Science and Innovation and the National Research Foundation, and is a Professor at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Her research interests include land politics, tenure relations and food systems in Africa.