This study examines India’s deepening agrarian crisis through a conjunctural analysis framework that combines political economy, historical sociology, and critical policy analysis. Drawing on NCRB data, peer-reviewed field research, and secondary literature spanning 1967–2024, it investigates five interconnected dimensions of rural unrest: agrarian riots, farmer suicides, land dispossession, organized farmer movements, and left-wing armed insurgency. The article makes three original contributions: it shows, through cross-state comparison, that NCRB riot data measure the intersection of agrarian distress with state–farmer political relations rather than distress itself; it identifies and empirically documents five feedback mechanisms connecting the crisis dimensions; and it constructs a conservative quantitative estimate of the female farm-sector suicide undercount. Empirically, the article analyzes a 327% increase in recorded agrarian riots between 2014 and 2015 and 394,206 farm-sector suicides recorded between 1995 and 2023, and traces the evolution of farmer movements from the Shetkari Sanghatana to the 2020–2021 anti-Farm Law protests and the 2024 Delhi Chalo agitation. It concludes that India’s agrarian question is not a set of separable policy failures but a systemic condition in which each failure reinforces the others, requiring simultaneous, structurally coherent intervention.
Deglobalization describes a real but geographically partial crisis. It captures the retreat of North Atlantic liberal globalization, but not the world economy as a whole. This article reverses the standard analytical question. Rather than asking how globalization shapes developing societies, it asks how developing societies sustain globalization itself. The evidence shows that South–South trade, remittances, regional production networks, digital services, critical minerals, and infrastructure are rerouting rather than reversing global integration. The Global South has become indispensable to globalization’s operation. Rewiring is not a synonym for progress. It changes who sustains the world economy, not who governs its terms.
In 2013, Ethiopia unveiled a plan to expand its capital, Addis Ababa, by appropriating over 1 million hectares of rural land-almost seven times bigger than South Africa's metropolitan city of Johannesburg-from the surrounding Oromiya region. The plan, commonly known as the Addis Ababa Master Plan, was the then-ruling Tigray People's Liberation Front-dominated Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (TPLF/EPRDF) regime's signature developmental state project and aimed at doubling down Ethiopia's aspiration for structural transformation by establishing new urban and industrial centers. Nevertheless, farmers initially and subsequently students, youth networks, civil servants and other social groups from the surrounding Oromiya region resisted the plan because they believed it was the ruling elite's strategy of land annexation. This article broadly assesses the interplay between the politics of land and development in post-1991 Ethiopia. Specifically, it explores how the protests against the planned expansion of Addis Ababa fed into fragmentation within the ruling elite and aggravated the structural tension within Ethiopia's ethno-federal system and ultimately led to the collapse of the TPLF/EPRDF (1991-2019) regime-which was one of Africa's strongest authoritarian regimes in the post-Cold War era. Ethiopia's experience demonstrates the circumstances and implications of the perennial topic of "the land question" in contesting despotism and authoritarian political control by underscoring the significance of the interplay between national institutional factors, subnational identity politics and the contingency of intra-ruling elite dynamism.
Globally, the twenty-first century has developed enough to measure the happiness of its inhabitants by using multidimensional indicators. Different people resonate with the term "happiness" and the path to achieve it differently, and the same applies when we discuss countries at the macro-level. The World Happiness Report (WHR), prepared majorly after the 2020 pandemic by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, is based on the countries' understanding of what happiness means by considering their respective subjective approaches. India, the most populous country in the world with 1.43 billion people (UNFPA's State of World Population Report 2023), has been ranked relatively much lower than other developing nations in happiness ratings. This research explores how well the WHR's indicators align with Indian realities. The study facilitates the contemporary discourse around the adequacy and suitability of these reports to contribute to further assessment of the well-being of the people. It examines whether the indicators used in the WHR are suitable for ranking countries by their happiness levels.
