Zeynep Ceren Eren Benlisoy (CASAS’ member) has reviewed this book authored by Deniz Pelek (also a CASAS’ member) in The Journal of Agrarian Change.

Zeynep wrote in her review: “Rural Turkey has long been grappling with multiple crises. Neoliberal restructuring, forced displacement, conflict and war have resulted in the mass migration and dispossession of groups within the country and across borders. The entry of highly vulnerable groups into rural labour markets has been facilitated by domestic and foreign policy interventions characterised by authoritarian and expansionist ambitions of the Turkish government. As a result, rural Turkey, already characterised by immense ethno-religious diversity and socio-economic inequalities, has been further devastated by these migrations and mobilisations. In this context, I consider Pelek’s work to be a valuable and timely contribution to Critical Agrarian Studies and Migration Studies. The book skillfully brings together significant themes such as labour, ethnicity, migration, mobility and space in rural areas. And it also invites us to rethink on the conventional conceptualization of the “seasonal” agricultural labourers by considering the deseasonal and perpetual character it has taken today in rural Turkey.”

Read her review here: https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70105

The book is available here: https://akmb.gov.tr/e-yayinlar/migrant-workers-in-turkish-agriculture-patterns-of-mobility-and-dispossession-1990-2018/

Kapil Yadav (CASAS’ member) has published this article in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers.

Abstract: This study examines forest fires in the Indian Himalayan state of Uttarakhand by shifting attention from ignitions to the historical production of flammable landscapes. It situates contemporary fire regimes within longer histories of landscape transformation and everyday forest use. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic field work, this study employs the plantation–plot binary to examine how state-led plantation forestry and community practices have materially shaped forest vegetation, fuel loads, and fire regimes. Plantation forestry expanded pine dominance and institutionalized fire suppression, producing landscapes with fuel continuity and high flammability that persist long after timber extraction ended. At the same time, everyday practices of rural communities in collecting grass, leaf litter, and fuel wood, conceptualized as plot making, have reduced understory biomass and kept fire intensity low. Plantation and plot are more than competing perspectives; they are two distinct ways of materially making forests that overlap and intersect in the study region. Their interaction helps explain why fires in the region are widespread yet typically remain low-intensity surface fires. By highlighting the role of plantation logics in shaping fire regimes, the article brings plantation studies into dialogue with political ecology and critical human geography of fire. It concludes by arguing that sustainable fire futures depend not only on climate change mitigation but also on how land is used and governed, including the recognition of community forest dependence as a key strategy for reducing fire risk.

Read his article here: https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2026.2688348

CASAS’ member Usman Ashraf has published this article in The Extractive Industries and Society journal.

Abstract: This research demonstrates that co-option and resistance in extractive sectors are not mutually exclusive, but rather, they are co-produced and coexist as messy entanglements. The type of resistance analyzed here did not seek a mine closure but was instead about (re)negotiating the terms of insertion into the mining enterprise. In such resistance efforts, the on-the-ground realities do not neatly fit into normative conceptualizations of co-option and resistance. Local people tactically switch between co-option and resistance to achieve their objectives, which involve a complex calculus of self-interest, social obligations, (re)negotiations, livelihood improvements, and altruistic acts for the greater good. The key aspect of such resistance is that it uses low-intensity, everyday forms of resistance in which the tactical use of escalation, framing of claims as human rights, and litigation play an important role. My argument is based on qualitative research carried out in the coal mining areas of Tharparkar under Belt and Road Initiative in Pakistan, in 2022 and 2024. The study concludes that a nuanced analysis of different types of mobilizations and their objectives is necessary to differentiate between the workings of different types of resistance

Read his paper here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2026.101966

Abstract; Thirty-eight years after the signing of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), the quest to democratize land politics in the Philippine countryside remains fraught with persistent and developing challenges. This paper draws on participatory action research with Kilusan para sa Repormang Agraryo at Katarungang Panlipunan (KATARUNGAN), a national movement of peasants, farmworkers, fisher peoples, Indigenous Peoples, and other rural working peoples, to identify four challenges shaping rural-agrarian struggles in the Philippines today: 1. Reform reversals and land reconcentration; 2. Contestations over conflicting land laws and overlapping claims; 3. Escalating capitalist land grabs and violence; and 4. Worsening scissors crisis and loss of agrarian livelihoods. The movement’s experience reveals that CARP’s focus on land redistribution, while securing significant gains during periods of strong peasant mobilization and coalition-building with state reformers in the 1990s, has been undermined by neoliberal agricultural policies and aggressive reversals of land reform. These developments emphasize the limits of redistribution alone, especially without sustained state support for beneficiaries’ economic viability and ecological regeneration. The paper argues that agrarian reform must transcend the traditional paradigm by grounding it in the holistic framework of the 4Rs: Redistribution, Recognition, Restitution, and Regulation.

Read their full paper here: https://cids.up.edu.ph/discussion_paper/where-are-we-now-state-agrarian-reform-rural-agrarian-struggles-philippines-perspective-contemporary-agrarian-movement

Cane Does Not Make Soup is a film by Lorena Arias Solano (CASAS’ member), as a is part of her doctoral research project “Violent Landscapes, Sugar Plantations in Southwest Colombia”, Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University, Sweden.

Cane Does Not Make Soup tells the story of Afro-descendant communities living surrounded by sugarcane plantations in the south of Valle del Cauca, Colombia. The sugar industry consolidated the power of the plantation that arrived during colonization, when sugarcane was introduced through enslaved labor. Today, that same crop occupies 86% of the land and consumes 97% of the available water, cornering the communities who descend from those who freed themselves from the imposition of colonial plantation labor, and leaving them with no space to grow food, no clean rivers to fish in, and no place to stay. The documentary follows Afro-descendant women who hold leadership and cultural authority in these territories, and narrates their everyday practices: kitchen meetings, communal meals, and the collective sowing of seeds as forms of communal reproduction that sustain life and resist the advance of the sugarcane monoculture. These practices are not merely acts of subsistence; they are the foundation from which these communities have built collective power, defended their territory, and recovered a wetland that the sugar industry had taken from them. This is their story.

Watch the film here: https://youtu.be/q_gTWKY1nrk

Credits:
Script and Direction: CINESPINA. Eugenio Gómez Borrero
Director of Photography and Camera: Juan Pablo Marín
Editing and Montage: Cinespinólogos Collective
Research Supervision:
Danielle Drozdzewski
Anders Wästfelt

Featuring;
Obdulia Tovar Viafara
Mariela Pacheco Carabalí
Rubiela Manzano
María del Socorro Reyes Andrade
María Elsy Valencia Moreno
Clara Ruby Alzate Lugo

Special Thanks:
Local Collective Land Authorities
Consejo Comunitario AfroTiple
Consejo Comunitario de la comunidad negra Cabuyal y sus veredas
Grassroots Organizations
Fundación de Mujeres Afrotipleñas Raíces Fuertes “Funmuafrot”
Afrocabuyal – Asociación Comunitaria para el desarrollo integral de nuestras comunidades negras, afrodescendientes y raizales

Research Contributors:
Edulfanit Díaz Gil, Consultivo Departamental y representante en el Espacio Nacional de Consulta Previa
Yudith Gallego, profesional social, Candelaria

This film was funded by:

The Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry (Kungl. Skogs- och Lantbruksakademien).

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (Kungl. Vetenskapsakademien).

Abstract:

Given China’s expanding presence in Africa’s extractive industry, this article considers why China is benefiting more than Zimbabwe from the significant increase in Chinese investment in the latter’s lithium megaprojects. The article explores energy colonialism and new patterns of accumulation in the extraction, beneficiation and export of Africa’s critical minerals, drawing on Contreras et al.’s six-dimensional energy colonialism framework to enhance our understanding of the debilitating effects of these phenomena. This framework illuminates the novel extractivist logic of green extractivism that fosters economic dependency and power asymmetries to sustain and reproduce transnational capitalism. The article considers four case studies where Chinese ownership, investment and operations are substantial. The findings show that energy colonialism underlies China’s significant increase in investments in Zimbabwe’s lithium megaprojects. The Chinese extractivist and colonial model of mining promotes the accumulation of wealth on one side and the accumulation of tragedies on the other.

Read their full article here:

https://doi.org/10.62191/ROAPE-2026-0015

Amrita Sharma is an Associate Professor at O P Jindal Global University in Haryana, India. She teaches political studies and works across political economy, political anthropology, political ecology, critical agrarian studies, and political geography. Her research examines the everyday politics of conflicts, resistance, and social movements, with a sustained focus on sovereignty, development, extractivism, nationalism, markets, corruption, infrastructures, states, and militarization.

Her current project studies the political economy of horticulture in Kashmir that approaches political conflict through an embedded understanding of markets and the economy. Drawing on over ten years of immersive ethnographic and comparative fieldwork across the Himalayan regions of Kashmir and Himachal, her work traces agrarian production, trade networks, market practices, bureaucratic regimes, and spectacular surveillance in militarized settings. It foregrounds the materialities of state-making by interrogating the paradoxes of routine and exception. She is presently completing her first book manuscript.
Her writing has appeared in Projections: MIT Journal of Urban Planning, Human Geography, History of the Present, Journal of Peasant Studies, Wasafiri, and The Caravan. She received the Institute of Human Geography Research Grant in 2023 and the NIF Book Fellowship in 2025.

Today, August 6, the Argentine Congress will debate a bill aimed at flexibilizing and eventually eliminating National Law 26,737, enacted in 2011, which restricts foreign ownership of land. From the Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Activists from the South (CASAS), we express our strong rejection of this initiative and deep concern about its territorial, social, political, and environmental implications.

Land is not merely an economic asset. It is the material basis for the reproduction of peasant and Indigenous life, food sovereignty, the conservation of commons, and the self-determination of peoples. Weakening regulations that limit foreign land ownership would open a new cycle of territorial concentration, private appropriation of strategic resources, and loss of sovereignty—whose significance transcends national borders.

For more than a decade, Law 26,737 has functioned as an institutional tool to preserve Argentina’s territorial sovereignty by establishing limits on the acquisition of rural land by foreign individuals and corporations. This legislation did not prohibit foreign ownership but set a 15% cap at the national, provincial, and municipal levels, recognizing the strategic nature of land and its associated resources. However, various surveys indicate that this limit has been reached or even exceeded in multiple local jurisdictions, particularly in border areas and regions rich in natural resources and biodiversity. Current initiatives to relax or eliminate these restrictions represent a significant setback in territorial governance and public-interest protection.

Currently, approximately 13 million hectares of rural land in Argentina—about 5% of the national territory—are in foreign hands. The main countries of origin include the United States, Spain, and Italy, with the United States alone accounting for around 2.7 million hectares. Moreover, more than one million hectares are registered through tax havens, further complicating effective regulation. This land grabbing has not been random; it has been concentrated in highly strategic areas, including border zones, glaciers, water basins, native forests, logistical corridors, and regions with high mining potential.

These territories are also home to numerous Indigenous communities. Argentina has 1,779 Indigenous communities, many located in regions where disputes over land, water, biodiversity, and other strategic commons converge. In this context, further liberalization of the land market could intensify tensions over their territorial rights. This convergence reveals that deregulating foreign land ownership affects not only land tenure regimes but also the governance of territories where strategic resources, extractive activities, and collective rights intersect.

The push to dismantle land regulation in Argentina is not an isolated event. It is part of a long-standing historical pattern of land concentration in private and foreign hands dating back to the late 19th century during the consolidation of the nation-state. Today, we are witnessing a new global wave of land and commons grabbing that, since the 2007–2008 food and financial crises, has enabled transnational corporations, investment funds, and financial actors to appropriate millions of hectares worldwide.

These processes are accelerated in contexts of economic deregulation and increasing concentration of political power, where the weakening of public controls and territorial rights facilitates new forms of accumulation by dispossession. The recent arrival of Peter Thiel (owner of Palantir and a key Pentagon contractor) and his interest in Argentine Patagonia—particularly investments aimed at maximizing the exploitation of the Vaca Muerta formation (a major unconventional hydrocarbon reserve)—along with the visit of IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva to this strategic geological region, illustrate the renewed dynamics of colonialism affecting Argentina and the broader region. It is also important to note that Argentina is currently the IMF’s largest debtor.

The attempt to dismantle the current land regime is not merely an administrative reform to attract investment; it constitutes a structural transformation in territorial governance that could deepen land concentration, expand private control over strategic resources, and weaken sovereignty in a global context marked by competition over freshwater, critical minerals, biodiversity, and food.

These concerns are heightened by the broader context in which these reforms are being promoted. Argentina is experiencing a rapid expansion of extractive activities—particularly mining, hydrocarbons, agribusiness, and large-scale infrastructure projects—across territories inhabited by peasant, Indigenous, and rural communities that have historically sustained essential forms of production for food security and ecosystem care.

Family, peasant, and Indigenous agriculture remains a strategic actor in food production and regional economies, despite occupying a very small share of agricultural land. According to a study by the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) based on the 2018 National Agricultural Census, small producers represent 63.7% of agricultural units but control only 13.4% of the land. Between 2002 and 2018, the total number of agricultural holdings declined by 25%, reflecting a persistent trend toward land concentration. Although updated data are lacking, this trend has likely continued—and even intensified—after the pandemic and the policy shifts introduced in 2023.

Since March 2026, more than 15 legislative proposals have been introduced to modify or repeal Law 26,737, many of which have been revised in response to pressure from peasant, Indigenous, academic, and political organizations. This dynamic demonstrates widespread social opposition to a model that undermines territorial sovereignty.

This issue cannot be reduced to a debate over investment or property rights. It concerns who controls access to water, critical minerals, biodiversity, and territories that are strategically vital in the context of the global climate crisis and the crisis of the agri-food system.

As an international community of scholars committed to agrarian justice, environmental justice, and the sovereignty of peoples, we recognize that decisions about land have consequences that transcend national borders. The growing financialization of natural resources, the expansion of transnational capital, and global competition over strategic resources make it essential to strengthen—not weaken—democratic mechanisms for territorial regulation.

We therefore express our solidarity with peasant, Indigenous, rural dwellers, environmental, labor, academic, and human rights organizations defending the social function of land and the commons in Argentina.

We call on the international community to:

• Publicly reject any initiative aimed at eliminating or weakening restrictions on foreign ownership of rural land;
• Support the efforts of Argentine peasant and Indigenous organizations in defending their territories and ways of life;
• Promote respect for Indigenous and rural territorial rights in accordance with international human rights standards;
• Demand that any regulatory reform ensure transparency, effective public participation, and evaluation of social, environmental, and territorial impacts;
• Reaffirm that land, water, and the commons cannot be reduced to commodities governed solely by market logic.

Defending land is also defending democracy, food sovereignty, environmental justice, and the possibility of building more just rural futures.

International solidarity is more necessary than ever.

You can download and share the statement here:

Abstract:

The Landless Rural Workers Movement of Brazil (MST) primarily organized occupations of large-scale farms, forcing the redistribution of land for creation of agrarian reform settlements. In the past 20 years, however, land occupations and the establishment of new agrarian reform settlements have consistently declined, while the MST shifted strategies to strengthening existing agrarian reform settlements, increasing marketing mechanisms through government purchasing programs and direct rural–urban connections, cultivating new financial instruments, advancing agroecological transformations to strengthen production and contesting space in governance and discourse about sustainability, rural development and socio-ecological wellbeing. We argue this shift represents not an abandonment of the agrarian question but its adaptation, reflecting transformations of agrarian capital and social, ecological and political dynamics nationally and internationally rather than internal decisions within the MST alone. Thus, we theorize why, where and how new agrarian questions change in specific places over time, transforming and being transformed by social movements.

You can find their paper here:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joac.70100

This contribution draws on a feminist experience developed in 2025 as part of the Omega Resilience Awards initiative and rooted in a broader process of university extension and collaborative knowledge production with grassroots collectives across Uruguay. Using body-territory mapping as a collective feminist methodology, we examine how women narrate and make visible the impacts of land and water dispossession, environmental contamination, and multiple forms of violence, while highlighting the networks of care, resistance, and solidarity through which life is sustained in their territories. This piece contributes to broader debates on territorial defense, feminist struggles, and alternatives to extractivist development models in the Global South, while offering insights into feminist methodologies that foster collective reflection, situated knowledge production, and processes of resistance and collective care.

Abstract:

In Uruguay, a series of transformations have taken place that threaten the sustainability of family, peasant, and community-based agriculture, agroecology, and careful ways of inhabiting territories, in the face of the dominant extractivist model. These are contexts in which extractivist practices have caused varying degrees of harm to the fabric of life—impacting communities and the ways in which relationships between human and more-than-human lives are built. Focusing on social struggles in recent years, we observe that resistance to dispossession and structural crises is becoming increasingly central. In particular, the leading role of women has become more visible in defending life, the health of territories, land, and water—denouncing contamination and poisoning in the hands of agribusiness, as well as land concentration in the hands of real estate speculation. Our aim has been to make visible the ways in which life is sustained and territories are inhabited through the networks woven by the women with whom we have been working. We understand these networks as ties and spaces of encounter built throughout their lives.

Read their full paper here: https://www.agrariansouth.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/ASN-RB-April-June-2026_1.pdf