Land has long been bound up with war in the production of states and markets, but this articulation is being reconfigured: a neomercantilist turn in global capitalism, the open revival of imperialism and irredentism, and the climate crisis are unsettling the parameters that once governed that nexus. Introducing the forum on war, land, and agrarian change, this article argues that contemporary theaters of war are not marginal to the global order; they are laboratories where more predatory forms of political and economic power are forged. Bridging critical agrarian studies and peace and conflict studies, this article traces how land serves as a mechanism for violent mobilization and a site for claiming political authority; how wars accelerate social differentiation and shape extractive frontiers; and how peacebuilding agendas legitimize and consolidate wartime dispossession. In doing so, it offers a framework connecting today's territorial destruction, annexation, and genocide to long-term processes of state power and capitalist development.
A scalar contradiction exists between agroecology's three goals: while ecological sustainability is best pursued at the landscape scale, social equity and livelihood goals often require organizing production at the small scale of family farms. In China's 'industrial agriculture of small farmers', ecological farming practices became economically unviable at small farmers' minuscule scales. Agroecological transitions almost always first go through a scale expansion, a process fraught with tension. The empirical analysis focuses on three 'ecological farms' that enjoyed favorable conditions unattainable to smallholders. Yet, lock-ins across five dimensions have either made their operations economically unsustainable or forced compromises in agroecological principles.
A highly corporate-concentrated global food system generates large-scale financial uncertainties, especially in food import-dependent countries. In Africa, such uncertainties are managed through social protection schemes, supported by international financial institutions. Yet this model of crisis management can also intensify dependence and extend new modalities of control. The global food crisis, and the speculative corporative practices associated with it, therefore provide a case onto what I conceptualise as capital accumulation by (un)certainty. Drawing on the Kenyan case, this article examines how cash transfers schemes act as a form of 'de-risking' that mobilises and safeguards international capital, while reshaping state-market relations.
Seeing like a State continues to hold valence today, reminding us of the dangers of high modernist schemes that aim to improve the human condition but end up simplifying and flattening diversity. In this article, the author looks at how contemporary authoritarian states have improved on the power held by these former regimes, co-inhabiting with digital capital to nestle ever deeper into the lives of citizens and transform them.
Agricultural practices across rural India have changed markedly, and the interlocking temporalities of agrarian life have grown in complexity. Fieldwork from rural Maharashtra demonstrates how farmers now seek to manage the temporal strains of increasingly unreliable seasonal patterns of weather alongside the cyclical rhythms of commodity markets, pressing obligations of credit and debt, the ebb and flow of labour availability and off-farm work. Working in contexts of highly uneven power relations, smallholder reproduction increasingly depends on the strategies employed to manage these temporal rhythms and ensure they do not fall out of synch.
Historically, war-making and state-making have facilitated resource extraction and capital expansion through colonialism and global food regimes. Weaponization and financialization of food systems perpetuate rural vulnerability amidst violent conflicts, undermining food sovereignty. Yet, despite territorializing logic of state and capital, sovereignty can also emerge 'from below' in relational and decentralized ways in contexts of war through insurgent everyday territorialities. Adopting a scholar-activist approach and drawing on experiences from Kashmir, Pakistan, Palestine, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Lebanon, Yemen, and Egypt, we propose the concept of 'insurgent food sovereignty' and reflect on building food sovereignty in contexts of war and violence.
Across Southeast Asia, national imaginaries of progress and modernity have fuelled the construction of large dams, generating political conflict and social disruption in their wake. This article examines the political struggles surrounding the establishment of the San Roque Multi-Purpose Dam project in the Agno River Basin, Northern Philippines. Drawing on mix-methods fieldwork, we analyse the local 'repertoires of resistance'involving We interpret these strategies as a Gramscian 'war of position' showing how resistance mobilized indigeneity, counter-knowledge, memory and emotion to reshape state-society relations in changing democratic contexts.
