The politics of the land rush. Scales of land contention and the reconfiguration of political authority

Abstract : Problems of agrarian social change have been recently re-evaluated in light of the growing interest of investors and international organizations in land ownership. At the same time, transnational mobilizations have shed light on the negative consequences of economic transformations on rural populations and their cultural and material well-being. The term “land grabbing” has proved useful by pointing toward diverse transformations in the political economy of land and has allowed the growing entanglement of local conflicts and global flows to be exposed. Yet, the frequent use of the term often conceals the diversity of social realities that it embraces, the historicity of these transformations and their articulation with local settings. This contribution proposes a focus on literature reflecting on shifts of scale in land control. As such, we argue that the assessment of current transformations of agrarian capitalism is fundamental to the understanding of the production of political authority in the Global South.