Browsing by Author "White, Ben"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Emancipatory rural politics: confronting authoritarian populism
    (Taylor & Francis, 2016) Scoones, Ian; Edelman, Marc; Borras Jr., Saturnino M.; Hall, Ruth; Wolford, Wendy; White, Ben
    A new political moment is underway. Although there are significant differences in how this is constituted in different places, one manifestation of the new moment is the rise of distinct forms of authoritarian populism. In this opening paper of the JPS Forum series on ‘Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World’, we explore the relationship between these new forms of politics and rural areas around the world. We ask how rural transformations have contributed to deepening regressive national politics, and how rural areas shape and are shaped by these politics. We propose a global agenda for research, debate and action, which we call the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI, www.iss.nl/erpi). This centres on understanding the contemporary conjuncture, working to confront authoritarian populism through the analysis of and support for alternatives.
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    Forum on Global Land Grabbing Part 2: The politis of evidence: methodologies for understanding the global land rush
    (Routledge Taylor Francis Group, 2013) Scoones, Ian; Hall, Ruth; Borras Jr., Saturnino M.; White, Ben; Wolford, Wendy
    The most recent ‘land rush’ precipitated by the convergent ‘crises’ of fuel, feed and food in 2007–2008 has heightened the debate on the consequences of land investments, with widespread media coverage, policy commentary and civil society engagement. This ‘land rush’ has been accompanied by a ‘literature rush’, with a fast-growing body of reports, articles, tables and books with varied purposes, metrics and methods. Land grabbing, as it is popularly called, is now a hot political topic around the world, discussed amongst the highest circles. This is why getting the facts right is very important and having effective methodologies for doing so is crucial. Several global initiatives have been created to aggregate information on land deals, and to describe their scale, character and distribution. All have contributed to building a bigger (if not always better) picture of the phenomenon, but all have struggled with methodology. This JPS Forum identifies a profound uncertainty about what it is that is being counted, questions the methods used to collate and aggregate ‘land grabs’, and calls for a second phase of land grab research which abandons the aim of deriving total numbers of hectares in favour of more specific, grounded and transparent methods.
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    Governing global land deals: The role of the state in the rush for land
    (Wiley, 2013) Wolford, Wendy; Borras Jr., Saturnino M.; Hall, Ruth; Scoones, Ian; White, Ben
    Over the past decade, there has been a dramatic increase in large-scale land deals, often from public lands to the hands of foreign or domestic investors. Popularly referred to as a ‘global land grab’, new land acquisitions are drawing upon, restructuring and challenging the nature of both governance and government. In the Introduction to this special issue, we argue for an analysis of land deals that draws upon the insights of political ecology, cultural politics and agrarian studies to illuminate the micro-processes of transaction and expropriation as well as the broader structural forces at play. We argue that ‘the state’ is often invoked as a key player in land grabbing but states never operate with one voice; rather we need to unbundle the state, to see government and governance as processes, people and relationships. To develop this approach, we focus on territory, sovereignty, authority and subjects not as static objects but as relationships produced in and through place, property, power and production. Understanding the dynamic nature of these relationships is critical to understanding the highly variable form and content of large-scale land deals in different settings around the world. The papers in this special issue help to develop this perspective and this Introduction highlights important areas of convergence among them.
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    The politics of evidence: A response to Rulli and D'Odorico
    (Routledge Taylor Francis Group, 2013) Scoones, Ian; Hall, Ruth; Borras Jr., Saturnino M.; White, Ben; Wolford, Wendy
    We welcome Rulli and D’Odorico’s response to our introduction to the Journal for Peasant Studies (JPS) Forum on Global Land Grabbing(Scoones etal.2013) in which we discussed the ‘literature rush’ that has accompanied the global ‘land rush’. We outlined a series of concerns with the data being used in this literature – concerns both with the data itself and with its uncritical deployment in popular and academic studies. We called for a second phase of land grab research that would ground abstract calculations of imprecise global averages in favour of concrete, situated and transparent research that could address critical questions such as what is actually happening, who is winning and losing, and why. With our discussion of the ‘politics of evidence’ we called for research that would extend beyond the fixation on ‘killer facts’–the headline-grabbing numbers. Instead, ground-truthing and generating traceable datasets are essential.