New Frontiers of Land Control

Nancy Peluso, Christian Lund, Nancy Lee Peluso, Christian Lund

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135714475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Infrastruktur

Questions about land control have invigorated thinkers in agrarian studies and economic history since the nineteenth century. 'Exclusion', 'alienation', 'expropriation', 'dispossession', and 'violence' animate histories of land use, property rights, and territories. More recently, agrarian environments have been transformed by processes of de-agrarianization, urbanization, migration, and new forms of primitive accumulation. Even the classic agrarian question of how the social relations of agriculture will be influenced by capitalism has been reformulated at critical historical moments, reviving or producing new debates around the importance of land control.

The authors in this volume focus on new frontiers of land control and their active creation. These frontiers are sites where established power relationships are challenged by new enclosures and property regimes, producing new social and environmental dynamics in their stead. Contributors examine labor and production processes engaged by new configurations of actors, new agrarian and environmental subjects and the networks connecting them, and new legal and violent means of challenging established or imminent land controls. Overall we find that land control still matters, though in changed degrees and manners. Land control will continue to inspire struggles for a long time.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Introduction

Nancy Lee Peluso and Christian Lund

Land questions have invigorated agrarian studies and economic history, with particular emphases on its control, since Marx. Words such as ‘exclusion’, ‘alienation’, ‘expropriation’, ‘dispossession’, and ‘violence’ describe processes that animate land histories and those of resources, property rights, and territories created, extracted, produced, or protected on land. Primitive and on-going forms of accumulation, frontiers, enclosures, territories, grabs, and racializations have all been associated with mechanisms for land control. Agrarian environments have been transformed by processes of de-agrarianization, protected area establishment, urbanization, migration, land reform, resettlement, and repeasantization. Even the classic agrarian question of how agriculture is influenced by capitalism has been reformulated multiple times at transformative conjunctures in the historical trajectories of these processes, reviving and producing new debates around the importance of land control.

The authors in this collection focus primarily on new frontiers of land control and their active creation. These frontiers are sites where authorities, sovereignties, rights, and hegemonies of the recent past have been challenged by new enclosures, property regimes, and territorializations, producing new ‘urban-agrarian-natured’ environments, comprised of new labor and production processes; new actors, subjects, and networks connecting them; and new legal and violent means of challenging previous land controls. Some cases augment analytic tools that had seemed to have timeless applicability with new frameworks, concepts, and theoretical tools.

What difference does land control make? These contributions to the debates demonstrate that the answers have been shaped by conflicts, contexts, histories, and agency, as land has been struggled over for livelihoods, revenue production, and power.

Introduction

What difference does land control make? … to old and new agrarian questions, to growers and landlords, to land managers with various goals: extraction, production, accumulation, conservation, and governance? The ‘land question’ has invigorated agrarian studies and economic history since Marx and early twentieth century writers on agrarian questions. Various transformative ‘moments’ have inspired and revived debates around land control: the spread of colonialism, the rise of nation-states and nationalisms, the invention and triumphalism of global markets, collectivizations, and privatizations. Issues of land use, labor practice, and forms of social control have animated these contexts and questions, including engendered production, slavery, tied labor, Green Revolutions, the purported end of the peasantry, the future of family farming, and wage labor. Land control, alienation, and dispossession have played classic and contemporary roles in primitive and ongoing forms of accumulation, with new frontiers, various kinds of territories, and ethnic and racialized conflicts emerging at virtually all levels. Even the classic agrarian question of how agriculture is influenced by the capitalist economy has been reformulated multiple times (Aschmann 1988, Bernstein 2005, Byers 1991, Chayanov 1986, Kautsky 1988, Lenin 1956, Mann 1990, Watts and Goodman 1997). The creation of the idea of ‘natural resources’ and the mapping of state-controlled territories on the land for the purpose of their governance created new sorts of land control when they emerged, and have generated many pages in the literature.

By ‘land control’ we mean practices that fix or consolidate forms of access, claiming, and exclusion for some time. Enclosure, territorialization, and legalization processes, as well as force and violence (or the threat of them), all serve to control land. The mechanisms of land control need not always align, nor proceed in a singular, linear direction. They may be wielded in concert or competition with one another.

The papers in this collection demonstrate that land control continues to be important in the twenty-first century, even though the nature of its importance, how it is struggled over, and the effects of these struggles are largely products of their times and geographic locations. The relative importance of land control to household or individual economies changes in the wake of changing political economies and ecologies and with shifts in the historical trajectories of various actors and the sites within which they produce and trade. Agrarian environments have been transformed by so many processes: de-agrarianization, protected area establishment, urbanization, migration, land reform, resettlement, and re-peasantization. These and other processes have transformed land uses and the sites and sources of employment and income, reconfiguring access to and relative dependence on land for livelihoods (Rigg 1998, 2003). Our contributors reexamine some of these historical processes, policies and politics, pose new critical questions, and document entangled trajectories, thus reviving and producing new debates around the importance of land control.

New mechanisms of land control and new actors notwithstanding, practices and technologies of governance and control, subtle or violent, are still employed to acquire, secure, and exclude others from land in intense competitions over control. In many cases, the competition for land control has become no less important to its contenders with the passage of time. This may be so despite the changing contexts, terms of contestation, mechanisms, and stakes of control.

In this introduction we focus on our argument that new frontiers of land control are being actively created, through struggles involving varied actors, contexts, and dynamics. These created frontiers are not sites where ‘development’ and ‘progress’ meet ‘wilderness’ or ‘traditional lands and peoples’. They are sites where authorities, sovereignties, and hegemonies of the recent past have been or are currently being challenged by new enclosures, territorializations, and property regimes. What is new is not only land grabbing or ownership but also new crops with new labor processes and objectives for the growers, new actors and subjects, and new legal and practical instruments for possessing, expropriating, or challenging previous land controls. In addition, the collection contains studies that demonstrate new frontiers in the scholarship on land control. Topics that seem to have been timeless, or well understood, are challenged with new frameworks or new theoretical tools for exploring them. For example, land control can be understood as embedded within broader political struggles over identities – religious, ethnic, racialized, or gendered – and change the ways we think about enclosure, territorialization, and property as iterative processes productive of environmental subjects.

A few of the cases refer explicitly to what has been generally dubbed ‘the global land grab’, but most of them do not. The contemporary conditions for large-scale land acquisitions are certainly specific to our time, and their scope is daunting (Borras et al. 2011). Yet, we argue that there is no one grand land grab, but a series of changing contexts, emergent processes and forces, and contestations that are producing new conditions and facilitating shifts in both de jure and de facto land control. Moreover, while the ‘grab’ itself is important, it only marks the beginning of a process of gaining (or grabbing) access (Ribot and Peluso 2003).

‘Land control’ directs our attention to how actors are able to hold onto the land, and to the institutional and political ramifications of access, claims, and exclusions. Furthermore, land control implies a historical dimension as ‘new’ frontiers challenge, transform, or extinguish previous ones. The extent and variety of the transformations involved or implicated in these created frontiers calls for, we argue, more in-depth understanding of the historical trajectories and specific tactics and instruments used by powerful and less powerful actors to enclose, exclude, territorialize, and challenge the moment’s ‘common sense’. Indeed, this collection of studies reveals important nuances that should be recognized in making generalizations about global land grabbing. And, although we recognize that these components are deeply connected, we try in the remainder of this introduction to draw apart some of the mechanisms of land control discussed by this collection’s contributors.

Creating frontiers of land control

New actors

A quick review of the key topics of our contributors provides an overview of the nuances in new relations of land control and suggests ruptures in processes that seem to be continuances of past relations. The importance of land use when large tracts are acquired to produce industrial crops for export is one such process that often combines with new sorts of actors brokering new practices and global relationships. Hall’s article (2011) on ‘new’ boom crops in Southeast Asia is a case in point. Export crops are certainly not new to Southeast Asian fields nor to other sites that were agricultural colonies producing ‘tropical crops’ or crops of dependence and addiction, i.e. coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco and opium (Elson 1984, Fasseur 1992, Mintz 1983, Reid 1988, 1993, Wolf 1982). However, today’s boom crops are as likely to be highly industrialized (rubber, pulp) or energy crops (oil palm, jatropha/castor oil). Today’s landlords are more likely to be corporate or state actors rather than local elites, making them less known personally to land users, yet highly powerful claimants (Lucas and Warren 2003, McKeon, Watts and Wolford 2004). Producing trees as commodities takes on new meaning in forests that are ‘sold’ for their carbon content and are meant to provide income for growers who protect rather than cut them. As Osborne (2011, this collection) shows, this has serious implications for growers used to being decision-makers, who now see their land tied up for longer times by landlords far distant, sacrifice compensation at moments it is most needed, and often enable entrepreneurial middlemen (carbon traders and NGOs) to benefit from long distance land control. New actors, such as new kinds of globally operating NGOs, are playing (and creating) more roles in global transactions, brokering, and markets, thereby creating new terms of land control.

While some actors seem perennial participants in agrarian transformations, other actors in these dramas are different than those documented during either colonial agrarian adventures or the agrarian/peasant studies research period of the 1960s and 1970s. In the historical shadows of these haunting figures, contemporary actors were in the process of establishing themselves – alternatively inching and leaping forward – or merely simmering and percolating during the authoritarian communist, socialist, and capitalist state-led development regimes dominant in the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, the nascent conservation movement produced the contexts for present interactions before it became Big Conservation (Corson 2011, Kelly 2011, and Ybarra 2011, all this collection); the emergent agrarian reformers were reorganizing before they became the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), Zapatistas, the Sundanese Peasants Union (SPP), or Via Campesina in and across post-authoritarian regimes (Bachriadi 2011; Borras 2007, Borras et al. 2008, Borras and Franco 2011, Kay et al. 2011, Rachman 2011; Wright and Wolford 2003). Small NGOs and pioneering human rights activists began with relatively ‘straightforward’ calls for human rights but soon added land control or land reform, privatization and ‘secure’ tenure, or even resource access, to the strategic tool kits they use in advocating for collective and individual social and economic rights in post-socialist and post-state-led development societies (Lund 2011; Woods 2011, this collection; Johanes and Riepen 1995, Lund 2008, Sikor and Lund 2009, Sturgeon 2005, Sturgeon and Sikor 2007, Verdery and Humphrey 2004). Agrarian advocate NGOs or new ‘peasant’ organizations began to emerge where they had been unimaginable before – in political forests, in war-torn countries, and among Islamic environmental subjects (Malhi 2011, Peluso 2011 and Ybarra 2011, all this collection; Edelman 2008, McMichael 2008, Peluso et al. 2008). For most previously underground or nascent movements, the late 1980s and 1990s were formative times, when they created alliances and strategies to oppose the oppressive elements of national land control regimes: to change them, not to topple them (McKeon et al. 2004). The current contexts and content of opposition, acquisition, allocation, and access have since become quite different than they were in those earlier decades. Today nation-states and institutions or individuals within nation-states make alliances that cut across national boundaries, defying old ‘state-to-state’ or ‘business-to-business’ combinations.

Several of the land authorities analyzed in the contributions to this collection play a dual role as regulators and rent seekers. Ministries of agriculture and forestry, or the military (e.g. in the cases of Burma, Guatemala, and Laos here), allocate land and resource rights, frequently in intimate collaboration with companies, international organizations, and transnational NGOs – all of whom want a part of the global terrestrial pie (Lund 2011, Woods 2011, Ybarra 2011, all this collection). However, many of these new actors are concurrently beneficiaries of more or less illicit transactions involving land concessions on not-so-empty land, timber trading of not-so-legally acquired logs, fulfillment of carbon sequestration quotas from deals with those who did not have the land rights nor would they bear the opportunity costs (Grajales 2011, Osborne 2011, both this collection; Lohmann 2006). Elites who control legislative, regulatory, and armed branches of the government apparatus can engineer oppressive land control, and they are by no means only part of ‘history’. Their power bases have shifted.

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