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

Abstract:

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.

Read their full article here: https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2026.2617431

Abstract: The Nobel Prize in Economics awarded to Claudia Goldin in 2023 has renewed attention on issues of women’s work. In this context, this article critically revisits the debate on the declining participation of women in the rural labor market in India, drawing on fieldwork data from two villages in Tamil Nadu. It explores the complexities of women’s labor force participation and argues that women’s work decisions are shaped by a complex interplay of economic necessity, societal prestige, and individual aspirations, all mediated by caste, class, and patriarchal norms. The withdrawal of women from the labor market is often viewed as a marker of social prestige and tends to occur as households experience upward economic mobility. Building on this insight, the article offers a nuanced understanding of how social norms and institutions shape women’s labor market outcomes, by tracing the factors and processes at play on the ground.

Read their full article here: https://doi.org/10.1177/22779760261434073

Abstract: In response to growing policy challenges, such as postconflict transitions and climate change, exceeding the scope of existing institutions, governments often enact extraordinary reforms—that is, nonincremental institutional innovations regulating state action through fast-tracking procedures, expanded mandates, and normative recalibration in previously unregulated domains. How do governments resolve policy conflicts when extraordinary reform collides with entrenched rules and interests embedded in previous institutional frameworks? We develop a theory of discretionary implementation, showing how governments use layering and conversion to diminish extraordinary reform. We examine Colombia’s ethnic land restitution program (2012–18), which clashed with extractivism, by employing process tracing of novel datasets on administrative cases and judicial rulings, and 14 in-depth interviews. We find that the administration of President Juan Manuel Santos delayed case processing via layering and restricted judicial discretion through conversion, effectively undermining restitution. Our findings extend theories of institutional change by revealing how governments mediate, and sometimes undermine, extraordinary reforms.

Read their full article here: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592725104301

Abstract: Maps are an essential tool to inform fire governance and management. For instance, they can highlight which areas are most vulnerable to adverse fire impacts or be used to plan interventions for risk reduction and prevention. In recent years, several studies have mapped the fire management activities and the networks between the multitude of involved actors. They build upon previous advances to combine quantitative and qualitative social network analysis with geographical analysis and cartography, aiming to highlight areas of opportunity to enhance fire governance. This paper continues this line of research, examining cooperation in fire management within the south-eastern part of the state of Chiapas. This area is the main fire risk area in Southern Mexico, characterised by the involvement of many different fire management actors. The paper proposes two advances to better visualise the networks between these actors—integration with modularity clustering and a thematic map integrating different spatial scales—and discusses the implications of these fire network maps for governance. The paper’s main results are, first, the confirmation of the considerable influence of spatial distance and aspects of human and physical geography on network formation. Second, it shows the capacity of mapping to inform regional fire management arrangements.

Read their full article here: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70040-y

Abstract: With intellectual rigor and ethnographic richness, Amy Zhang offers her much -anticipated monograph, Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China. In this book, she provides a comprehensive ethnography of Guangzhou’s ambitious attempt to engineer a ‘circular economy.’ Zhang’s central argument is that this grand techno-scientific project – designed to eliminate waste by transforming it into a resource – is far from a seamless, top-down success. Instead, she vividly illustrates how its implementation generates a cascade of social frictions, spatial displacements, and political contestations. Following the journey of waste itself, Zhang reveals how it acts as a ‘systemic irritant’ that forges new ‘circulations’ of value and harm, and gives rise to unexpected political ‘collectives’ that challenge, negotiate, and reimagine the state’s vision of a green future. Circular Ecologies is a timely and essential intervention into critical debates on political ecology, discard studies, and environmental governance.

Read the full review here: https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2026.2644490