Abstract:

This article examines how agrarian movements in Southern Africa – particularly in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and South Africa – confront the corporate model of food production and trade. It highlights La Via Campesina Southern and Eastern Africa and the Rural Women’s Assembly as key actors that demand justice beyond the limits of Corporate Social Responsibility and actively construct agroecological economic alternatives that challenge corporate power within the agri-food system.

Read their full paper here: https://doi.org/10.33956/ryqr5941

Abstract:

Broad analyses of social change often overlook the lived experiences of rural Indigenous communities. This paper connects historical agroecology with Participatory Action Research, through collective memory and historical analysis, to examine agroecological transitions in Indigenous communities in Ecuador and Bolivia. The study uses decolonial inquiry to investigate how historical events and sociocultural dynamics shape contemporary food systems, employing river-of-life exercises (with 25 and 27 participants, respectively), 15 interviews per country, participant observation, and archival research. Results highlight that reciprocity-based customary institutions guide social and ecological dynamics shaping landscape and connecting the local to broader solidarity economies. Findings reveal that Caliata adopts a transformative, self-determined path, while Chigani Alto follows an incremental, reformist trajectory within institutional structures. These cases confirm that agroecological transitions are historically grounded and culturally rooted, the ancestral “past” is present. We propose that this approach to Historical Agroecology provides a replicable, culturally appropriate framework for guiding food system transitions.

Read their full article here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-026-10865-x

Abstract:

Indonesia’s new capital city is designed to become a green and sustainable city. In this article, we examine the (un)sustainability of the process through which the city is coming into being. Using the sociospatial theory of planetary urbanization, we trace the dialectical relationship between the new city and sites beyond it to show how bringing a sustainable city into being in East Kalimantan requires other sites to become unsustainable. Through multi-sited fieldwork in Kalimantan and in extraction locations in the adjacent province of Sulawesi, we demonstrate how the making of a sustainable city relies on an unsustainable process of rock extraction elsewhere, reproducing the operational landscape from Kalimantan to Sulawesi. This highlights the importance of translocal geography perspectives for understanding official claims of sustainability in the new city vis-à-vis the grounded realities of planned urban development that generate unsustainability in other places. In terms of theory, we foreground the role of temporality in analyses of planetary urbanization, as reflected in the geological time formation of mined rock transferred to the new city and in the current and future environmental risks incurred in the reproduced operational landscape.

Read their full article here: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.70102

Abstract:

Through the analysis of official documents, the notion of security is identified as central to characterizing the corporate-military dictatorship. By examining the conceptions and demands put forward by rural landowners, bureaucratic technicians, and military officials, we highlight the class and racial dimensions of the dictatorship and its autocratic and paternalistic project of development historically colonial and white.

Read their full article here: https://doi.org/10.25091/S01013300202600010005

While sitting in the Ministry of National Food Security in Islamabad, the Food Commissioner said during the interview:

“There is something called food security, and there is something else too, called food sovereignty and we have to understand both of these things.”

I was really impressed and became extra attentive, thinking that the Pakistani state was making that effort. Great.
Then the Commissioner went on to explain food sovereignty. He said:

“Food sovereignty is this: I am a food-sovereign country in two ways. Number one, I produce my own food and I don’t need to import anything. I am not dependent on anyone. Number two, I don’t produce my own, but I have enough money to import my food items. So these two things provide you with food sovereignty.”

I was confused and started wondering whether I had misunderstood the term. I asked him to clarify, and he then explained food sovereignty (the “something else,” not food security) using mainstream, orthodox economic ideas. I continued to ask myself: was this an appropriation of the term, or did the Food Commissioner simply not understand what food sovereignty actually means?

Boy Dominguez (BoyD) has been creating the cover art for JPS since the special issue on biofuels in 2009. Since then, his paintings have shaped the journal’s visual identity and served as a constant reminder of the political struggles that animate and motivate activist scholarship. BoyD’s work has shaped not just JPS, but the intellectual community of Critical Agrarian Studies more broadly. For decades, he has inspired scholar-activists across our networks through paintings that distill complex political economy into urgent visual testimony. For additional context on BoyD’s life and work, you can read the profile and interview published in JPS in 2022.

BoyD now urgently needs our help. He has been diagnosed with a rare and progressive neurodegenerative disease that has made painting impossible. He and his family are struggling to afford the medical care and 24/7 support his condition now requires. We invite you to donate to the crowdfunding campaign organized by the Philippine Knowledge and Activity Center Netherlands and BoyD’s family.

Learn more about BoyD and donate here:

Thank you for standing with us and with BoyD.

• CASAS collective

Abstract: In Uttar Pradesh, the largest producer of sugarcane in India, the crop is grown on family farms and marketed under an outgrower model with state regulation. Higher productivity and production from a new ‘wonder’ variety, an expansion of private mills and modernisation of infrastructure has led to a new wave of commercialisation. This paper examines implications for agrarian structure and agrarian relations in a village in western Uttar Pradesh, drawing on secondary sources of data, two rounds of village-level quantitative surveys (2006 and 2023) and insights from qualitative fieldwork (2022–2024). Three findings are of note. First, contrary to the received literature, the sugar boom has not led to a further concentration of landownership. Secondly, while corporate control over mills has grown, it has not led to corporatisation of production. Thirdly, even as absolute incomes rose, returns per hectare varied systematically across socio-economic groups with the highest returns among landowning dominant-caste households. These differences, we argue, arise out of unequal forms of exchange linked to tenancy arrangements and interlinked transactions.

Read their full article here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joac.70086

Abstract:

Recurrent disasters such as wildfires are increasingly attributed to anthropogenic climate change, but this broad explanation often obscures the political choices that shape how disasters are recognised, governed, and instrumentalised. Focusing on the Uttarakhand Himalaya in India, where forest fires have become a near-annual phenomenon, this article examines how disaster management is deeply entangled with state-making practices in political forests. Drawing on interviews, policy documents, and media articles, it highlights how the 2016 Uttarakhand fires marked a turning point in the formal inclusion of forest fires within India’s disaster policy. Since then, the spectacle of fire, amplified through media coverage, remote sensing technologies, and smoke spreading to distant urban centres, has helped normalise the framing of fire as a disaster. This spectacle is often disconnected from the social and ecological realities of fire in the region. It also enables the Uttarakhand Forest Department to access emergency resources, distribute blame and responsibility, and consolidate territorial control. Yet rather than reducing fire risk, disaster management interventions reinforce a suppression-oriented approach and lock the region into a firefighting trap. The study argues that disaster management in Uttarakhand is not simply a response to environmental crisis, but a political project that governs through crisis, produces risk, and deepens the state’s authority over forests. It suggests that managing wildfires as disasters can, in certain contexts, serve as a renewed site of state-making in political forests, complicating accounts of state retreat advanced in scholarship on green neoliberalism and disaster capitalism.

Read their full article here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2026.103539