Accumulation by Dispossession

En partant d’une enquête ethnographique au long cours (2014-2017) portant sur le mouvement « sur la voie 96 » d’Imider, cet article interroge les modalités de politisation des communautés marginalisées. Située au sud-est du Maroc, Imider est une petite commune rurale connue pour abriter le plus grand gisement d’argent en Afrique. L’exploitation du gisement minier par le groupe Managem, filiale de la holding royale, fait face à une contestation forte de la part des communautés locales depuis ses débuts dans les années 1970. Ce faisant, c’est à partir de 2011, que les habitants d’Imider se sont organisés autour d’un mouvement « sur la voie 96 » pour revendiquer d’abord, un droit à l’eau, puis, de manière générale, une juste répartition des richesses. Les militants ont occupé le « Mont Alebban » et fermé, durant les neuf dernières années, la principale vanne de la pompe à eau ravitaillant la mine. En partant d’une description des manières dont le mouvement « sur la voie 96 » a réussi à s’imposer dans l’espace public et plus largement dans le champ politique, l’objectif visé par cet article est d’inscrire l’étude des mobilisations des communautés marginalisées dans une analyse politique plus globale. L’hypothèse défendue vise ainsi à montrer en quoi une étude qui prend au sérieux les ressorts politiques des mobilisations des marges peut aider à comprendre le processus de changement et de transformation socio-politiques en cours au Maroc depuis 2011.

Large-scale arts-led urban regeneration strategies are typically distinguished from the grassroots authenticity of community art projects, but this article examines how the trope of community facilitates gentrification in Oakland, California.  Community murals of the 1960s to 1990s played a critical social role by making visible minority concerns and galvanizing movements for social justice, but questions emerge about contemporary community art in relation to neoliberal values and urban precarity.  The Black neighborhood of West Oakland has been resistant to gentrification due to decades of disinvestment and through robust activism against displacement in one of the most progressive cities in the United States.  Based on longitudinal ethnographic research and situated visual analysis, I show how neighborhood resistance was only overcome when change appeared to come from the ‘community’ itself, through the specific imagery and spatiality of community mural projects that resignify the neighborhood to accommodate gentrification.  I critique gentrification as a dualistic insider and outsider dynamic; such structural analysis elides ‘community’ as a contested category that may be complicit with urban restructuring.  Real estate interests also appropriate signifiers of ‘community’ to reshape neighborhood identity, valorize property, and police public space.  I argue that in West Oakland the ‘community mural’ is vertically integrated in municipal and capital logics that serve to dis-embed, rather than support, historic neighborhood populations.

This article examines the structures of international relations that facilitate political violence in postcolonial states. It explores the intersections of patriarchy and imperialism in the contemporary political economy to understand how armed conflict and political violence in postcolonial states form an integral element of the global economy of accumulation in deeply gendered ways. By focusing on the structural level of analysis, this article argues that the siting of armed conflict in postcolonial contexts serves to maintain neo-colonial relations of exploitation between the West and non-West, and is made both possible and effective through the gendering of political identities and types of work performed in the global economy. I argue here that armed conflict is a form of feminized labour in the global economy. Despite the fact that performing violence is a physically masculine form of labour, the outsourcing of armed conflict as labour in the political economy is 'feminized' in that it represents the flexibilization of labour and informalization of market participation. So while at the same time that this work is fulfilling hegemonic ideals of militarized masculinity within the domestic context, at the international level it actually demonstrates the 'weakness' or 'otherness' of the 'failed'/feminized state in which this violence occurs, and legitimizes and hence re-entrenches the hegemonic relations between the core and periphery on the basis of problematizing the 'weak' state's masculinity. It is through the discursive construction of the non-Western world as the site of contemporary political violence that mainstream international relations reproduces an orientalist approach to both understanding and addressing the 'war puzzle'.

This article intends to think the relationship between neoliberal capitalism and the common(s). First, it ties to define the common both in ontological and political terms, stressing the similarities and differences between the common, commons and common goods. Then, it characterizes their relationship with neoliberal capitalism in terms of dispossession, expropriation and configuration. Finally, it discusses if the common can be thought as an alternative form of cooperation and self-government with regards to neoliberalism and to what extent it can be posed as a complete alternative to the state.

El centro del presente trabajo es el manejo de los conceptos de acumulación originaria o primitiva en el sentido de lo que podemos denominar como “mercantilización de los bienes comunes” (common goods). Para ello tomamos la sugerente propuesta de conceptualizar a la acumulación originaria como algo más que un momento histórico del nacimiento del capital, su proceso de acumulación a escala ampliada y el nacimiento del sistema capitalista, sino como algo mucho más actual y contemporáneo. Nuestro objetivo en el presente trabajo es establecer una vinculación entre lo que comúnmente se suele denominar “mercantilización” con el concepto de acumulación originaria. Esto es lo primero que analizamos en nuestro trabajo. Seguidamente, haremos referencia a la agenda del libre comercio a nivel global –particularmente establecida dentro de la Organización Mundial del Comercio (OMC), pero no únicamente en ella- y su relación con el avance de la mercantilización, con especial enfoque hacia la negociación del área de servicios y su vinculación con el agua potable. Posteriormente trataremos a los bienes comunes como objetos incorporados a la expansión del capitalismo, lo que es lo mismo hablar del actual proceso de acumulación originaria sobre los bienes naturales, y debatiremos un poco acerca del carácter “constante” de esta acumulación. Esta reconceptualización, su aplicación al caso de los ámbitos de libre comercio e inversiones (OMC, TLCs, TBIs, etc.) y su vinculación con la mercantilización del agua potable, reviste de importancia a partir de la aplicación de un conjunto de normas jurídicas de carácter internacional y el nivel de conflicto que despierta respecto de otro tipo de normativas internacionales, como son declaraciones internacionales en el ámbito de la ONU o distintos tratados internacionales en materia de Derechos Humanos. Con ello intentaremos exponer la existencia de un “derecho comercial global”, de mayor eficacia real y mayor aplicabilidad coercitiva, versus normas de Derecho Internacional Público, de carácter más laxo. Con ello intentamos exponer la existencia de una preocupante asimetría normativa a favor de sectores empresariales transnacionalizados y en desmedro de derechos sociales internacionalmente reconocidos.

When a U.S. resident is arrested by immigration authorities, significant financial losses immediately begin to accumulate to themselves and to their immediate family. Drawing on a survey of 125 households in Pima County, AZ, this paper examines the scope of these financial losses; the strategies that household members deploy to absorb and manage these losses; and their downstream repercussions for those activities and infrastructures associated with everyday and generational household social reproduction. Attention to these issues foregrounds the collective dimensions of harm-e.g., how the destabilizing effects of arrest, detention and/or deportation are never experienced by any individual in isolation, but rather multiply across those persons and relationships of dependency, care and support to whom these individuals remain connected over time. Given the disproportionate concentration of U.S. immigration policing on communities of Latin American origin, these outcomes carry important implications for the articulation of everyday conditions of labor, inequality and accumulation under racial capitalism. At the same time, people respond to the disruption of relationships of home and family through new practices, relationships and institutions of mutual aid, solidarity and struggle. What results is movement: novel patterns of collective life that transform the very communities whose members the state is attempting to violently separate. By exploring this latter dynamic, the paper contributes to emerging literatures on carceral and abolition geographies, connecting everyday conditions of social reproduction and the production and circulation of value to a broader dialectic of community resistance against state violence and material dispossession.

In 2009, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food Olivier De Schutter, warned of the increasing trend of “land grabbing” that violates the human rights of indigenous people for the benefit of private investors (De Schutter, 2009). While there are many contested definitions of the term land grabbing, I define land grabbing as the large- scale investment or acquisition of land located primarily in the Global South by private or national investors located primarily in the Global North (Martiniello, 2015: 1; Nkansah- Dwamena, 2017: 82). The majority of global land grabbing since the 2007/2008 food crisis has occurred in Southern Africa, which will, therefore, be the focus of this essay (Moyo, 2011: 258; Clements & Fernandes, 2013: 42). Land grabbing in Southern Africa has three main purposes: extraction/mining, tourism, and agribusiness (Moyo, 2000: 151; Hall, 2011: 198). For the purpose of this essay, I will focus on land grabbing by agribusinesses, which I define as agriculture for commercial purposes (Hall, 2011: 198).
Arguments in favour of land grabbing, which use the term “responsible agricultural investment” (RAI) focus on food security, job creation and poverty reduction as being positive outcomes (La Via Campesina, 2018; McMichael, 2012: 694; Nkansah-Dwamena, 2017: 3). The empirical evidence provided in this essay will counter much of these purported benefits by demonstrating that, in many cases, RAI actually worsens food security, increases poverty and causes unemployment (Chambati, Mazwi & Mberi, 2019: 1; Li, 2009: 74; McMichael, 2012: 694). Furthermore, the fact that the majority of the land involved in large- scale deals in African countries is used to grow crops for biofuel which is exported rather than for domestic food consumption puts the argument of food security further into question (International Land Coalition, 2011).
One school of land grabbing critics operate in the agrarian political economy framework (Borras Jr, McMichael & Scoones, 2013). They argue that the current era of land grabbing is occurring withint the so-called corporate food regime that has been operating since the late 1980s (McMichael, 2013: 47). Thus, they fail to analyse the distinct wave of land grabbing that has been occurring since the global food crisis of 2007/2008, which has very innovative characteristics. Furthermore, in their analysis they overemphasise the role of “sub-imperial” actors like China, Brazil and post-Apartheid South Africa in perpetuating the land grabbing wave (Richardson, 2013: 351). This is countered by evidence showing that sub-imperial corporations are often subsidiaries of companies emanating from the Global North (Chambati, Mazwi & Mberi, 2019: 15).
Therefore, I establish the need to continue emphasising the centrality of North-South power relations (as opposed to sub-imperial power relations) whilst viewing the current wave of land grabbing as distinct in form, thus potentially representing the emergence of a new “food regime”. In order to demonstrate these two points, I will use the framework of primitive accumulation by dispossession (PABD) (Moyo, 2011: 258). PABD builds on David Harvey’s (2003) accumulation by dispossession (ABD) thesis, which holds that the dispossession of peasants from their land for it to be used for capital accumulation purposes has been an integral part of the capitalist system from its onset. The PABD thesis builds on this framework by emphasising the importance of taking into consideration power relations between the Global North and the Global South, suggesting that the process of ABD is disproportionately carried out by actors from the Global North dispossessing peasants from the Global South.

Paraísos del ocio que albergan infiernos criminales: éste es el diagnóstico que emerge de testimonios directos, prensa local y nacional y datos estadísticos sobre la transformación que, a la par del crecimiento económico, han sufrido las ciudades icónicas del Caribe mexicano, en particular Cancún y Playa del Carmen, ya rebautizada por los quintanarroenses como “Playa del Crimen”. La realidad de violencia criminal, desigualdad y despojo, que priva en los destinos turísticos desde su creación, es bien conocida por quienes habitan la región, la estudian o tan sólo consultan los medios de información; y, a pesar de ello, el megaproyecto Tren Maya pretende vincular a la economía turística muchas regiones aún marginales en ella, e impulsar la urbanización y la economía de servicios.
Este texto analizará la transformación de los contextos sociales de los centros urbanos y zonas que recibieron el impulso gubernamental para activar el turismo como principal actividad económica. Observar las evidencias de la situación social en las ciudades hiperturísticas del Caribe mexicano (principalmente Cancún y Playa del Carmen, en la llamada Riviera Maya), así como del municipio de Bacalar y la región fronteriza, puede prefigurar escenarios posibles para los nuevos centros turísticos que las instancias gubernamentales (in primis el Fondo Nacional para el Fomento al Turismo, Fonatur) desarrollarían en regiones aledañas.

En este artículo reflexionaré a partir de las expresiones gráficas de los estudiantes universitarios producidas en la movilización del 2018 a propósito de la des financiación de la educación superior pública en Colombia. Me interesa pensar la potencia de lo común de cara a la crisis social, económica y política en relación directa a las universidades. Las claves de interpretación de los fenómenos y de las piezas gráficas producidas durante estas movilizaciones (grafitis y pancartas) serán las siguientes: despojo, protección de lo común y resistencias. Para esto: primero, hablaré la crisis y la manera como esta afecta a la universidad y la sociedad; segundo, pensaré, con las expresiones gráficas, la protección de lo común en relación directa a las resistencias al despojo en su forma de privatización; por último, avanzaré en la reflexión sobre el lugar de la universidad para actuar, intervenir e investigar.

SIERRA, LUIS. (2019). Crisis del capitalismo y potencias de lo común. Expresiones gráficas, universidad y movimientos estudiantiles en Bogotá – Colombia. Mester, 48(1). Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/81s2n1md

This thesis uses the theoretical lens of hegemony to examine why communities respond differently to diverse forms of land grabbing. To this end, I reinterpret extra-economic oppression using the Gramscian notion of coercion, consensus, and corruption. I underscore that to fully comprehend the extra-economic nature of contemporary forms of land grabbing, one must study pre-capitalist forces of accumulation. In continuation, I present a matrix indicative of allied and adversarial relations shared by diverse dominant/subaltern groups of a social formation: (a) dominant allied set (DAS); (b) subaltern allied set (SAS); (c) dominant adversarial set (DARS); (d) subaltern adversarial set (SARS). I argue that every attempted use of extra-economic oppression by the deputies of dominant groups to further their accumulation interests at the expense of subalterns is a form of ‘hegemonic accumulation.’ Using this conceptual framework, I explain different responses to land-use changes in the eco-sensitive mountainous state of Sikkim in India. Here, secondary and primary data analysis connects historicity with subjectivity and theory with practice. Though the 333-year-old feudal theocratic Sikkim ceased in 1975, the hegemonic influences of pre-capitalist forces manifest in ‘modern’ times. Sikkim’s transition to a ‘democratic’ Indian state resulted from the legitimisation of selected forms of extra-economic oppression and consequent hegemonic accumulation by the Indian administration. More recently, the global carbon trading platforms encouraged the Chamling regime (1994-2018) to spearhead land accumulation in developable land-scarce Sikkim using permutations and combinations of extra-economic oppression. Although forest ban for biodiversity conservation, 100% organic farming policy, and cash crop promotion aggravated agrarian-food crises, there is general acceptance for these ‘green’ projects. Contrarily, infrastructure development such as the hydroelectricity projects met with more than two-decade-long community dissent. This varying response can be explained through hegemony – if there is alignment in the hegemonic accumulation interests of the global-national-local forces, then changes in access to land face the least resistance. However, if there is a misalignment, especially if the negotiations between the state and local deputies or organic intellectuals fail, the latter may mobilise a counter-hegemonic movement potent enough to challenge the continuity of the ruling government.

Η παρούσα διπλωματική εργασία εξετάζει και αναλύει τη διαδικασία παραγωγής του κεφαλαίου, όπως αποτυπώνεται σε συνθήκες απαλλοτριωτικής συσσώρευσης με επίκεντρο την κρίση του καπιταλισμού στον 21o αιώνα. Έχοντας ως εφαλτήριο τη θεωρία του Μαρξ για την πρωταρχική συσσώρευση και το καπιταλιστικό κέρδος, προσεγγίζονται σύγχρονες θεωρήσεις πάνω στην ανάπτυξη και την εσωτερική λογική του κεφαλαίου στην εποχή του νεοφιλελευθερισμού. Ακολουθώντας την ανάλυση του David Harvey πάνω στην άνιση γεωγραφική ανάπτυξη και την παραγωγή του χώρου καθώς και τη θεωρία του Thomas Piketty για τη δομή των ανισοτήτων εισοδήματος και πλούτου, προκύπτουν ερευνητικά ερωτήματα γύρω από τη φύση της καπιταλιστικής κρίσης, την όξυνση των αντιθέσεων και την ένταση της εκμετάλλευσης στις σύγχρονες δυτικές καπιταλιστικές κοινωνίες. Υπό αυτό το πρίσμα η διπλωματική θα επιχειρήσει να αναδείξει τις κύριες πλευρές γύρω από την προβληματική της ατέρμονης συσσώρευσης, της ανάπτυξης του κεφαλαίου και των δομικών του αντιφάσεων.

The graphic convergence of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous violence in the name of self-defense emerges with unmistakable clarity in the recent the “stand your ground” meme featuring sixteen year-old Nick Sandmann wearing his “Make America Great Again” baseball hat. The red, white, and blue meme appeared on white nationalist and rightwing social media in the wake of the viral online video of the mostly white Covington Catholic High School students from Kentucky wearing MAGA hats and taunting Nathan Phillips, an elder of the Omaha Tribe, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC on January 18, 2019. The premise “land gets stolen” and the Sandmann “stand your ground” meme together starkly convey the relentless onslaught of racialized colonization, the fantasy of the perpetrators as the real victims, and the obstinate disavowal of the colonial present’s unpaid debts. Here the debt for what has been extracted through processes of colonization and ongoing economies of dispossession shows the inadequacy of current methods of accounting, compensation, and repayment. At the same time, to acknowledge that such debt is unpayable is not to forgo demands for restitution and economic redress. These are unpaid debts in the sense that they are an obligation to take responsibility for complicity in what has been done and to contribute to dismantling colonial and racialized relations of violence and possession. This article is part of a series of texts published on Public Seminar in the lead-up to the Digital/Debt/Empire symposium in Vancouver in late April 2019, convened by Benjamin Anderson, Enda Brophy and Max Haiven.

Since the 1980s all Ghanaian governments have promoted large-scale mining by transnational mining companies (TNMCs) as a fundamental development strategy. This is consistent with the euphoria in the
international development community about the development potential of extractive industries. Paradoxically, this ‘new extractivism’ has spawned horrific injustices against peasants and artisanal and
small-scale miners, a segment of the citizenry whose wellbeing development is supposed to promote. These injustices, particularly land-dispossessions, are similar to the violence of primitive accumulation that created the agrarian transformations in some core Western countries, leading to capitalism and capitalist development. This paper critically examines the capitalist development potential of mining-extractivism in Ghana. Based on the theory of ‘uneven and combined development’, the specificity of foreign capital accumulation in Africa within a globalised capitalist economy, and the way in which these have shaped the integration of African economies into the global economy, the paper concludes that the prospects for capitalist development in Ghana from extractivism agrarian change are dismal.

Dans cette recherche, nous avons tenté de dévoiler le lien entre les politiques de la turquification et de l'accumulation primitive des musulmans-turcs par
dépossession des minorités non musulmanes en focalisant sur le local d'Edirne à partir du début du XXè siècle aux années 1970 à Edirne. Ces processus qui se sont déroulés à Edirne au cours des soixante années étaient un petit exemple spécifique des politiques de l'identité et l'économie à l'échelle nationale et qu'il peut suivre ce processus sur la base d'exemple d2Edirne.
Le paradigme nationaliste et l'identité nationale turque qui ont commencé à se cristalliser à la suite des guerres balkaniques ont conduit à appliquer des politiques
anti-minoritaires. Notre étude souligne la continuité des politiques économiques, sociales et identitaires dans la transition de l'Empire ottoman à la République de
Turquie. Alors, les politiques de l'Etat turc sont fondés sur deux piliers au sujet de la création de l'État-nation capitaliste: L'un des piliers était de nettoyer les minoritaires non-musulmanes considérées comme des éléments « étrangers de l'intérieur » et « dangereux » du pays, en un mot, de la liquidation. L'autre pilier était de former une classe sur laquelle l'État turc pourrait compter, au besoin, et qui pourrait s'appuyer dans le domaine économique. Toutefois, puisqu'il n'y avait pas assez du capital afin de créer une classe de la bourgeoisie composant des musulmans-turcs, le trio local « bureaucratie-peuple-notable » musulman-turc ont tenté d'obtenir leur accumulation primitive par dépossession des minoritaires non-musulmanes tels que les Arméniens et les Rums et les Juifs. D'abord, « la déportation des Arméniens » et l'expulsion et la migration forcée des Rums ont eu lieu. Puis, l'Expulsion des Juifs de Thrace s'est déroulée. Ensuite, le processus de l‟accumulation primitive à nouveau des musulmans-turcs par dépossession des non musulmans et la turquification du capital ont été réalisé par l'application de l'Impôt sur la Fortune. Enfin, les activités de la branche d'Edirne de l'Association pour la Lutte contre le Sionisme de Turquie ont forcé les Juifs restants de quitter Edirne.

In 2014, approximately 100,000 lots lie ‘‘vacant’’ in Detroit after decades of industrial decline, white flight, and poverty. Planners and government officials have proposed to repurpose Detroit’s highest vacancy neighborhoods, deemed to have ‘‘no market value,’’ as blue and green infrastructure (retention ponds, carbon forests, urban farms, greenways). According to the Detroit Future City plan, traditional public services (water, street lights, transportation, garbage pickup) and the ‘‘grey infrastructures’’ that deliver them will be reduced and eventually withdrawn from these zones. While Detroit is widely touted for its potential as a model green city, the costs and benefits of green redevelopment are distributed unevenly within the context of gentrification and bankruptcy. Through an analysis of media representations, a contentious citywide planning project, and the construction of a private urban forest, I demonstrate how settler colonial imaginaries and rationalities articulate with austerity measures to prepare a postindustrial urban frontier for resettlement and reinvestment. During the historical era of U.S. settler colonialism, economic development happened through westward expansion on a continental scale (and then imperial scale), but today, in the urban United States, it occurs through internal differentiation of previously developed spaces and is taking a new form. Where the rural settlers of the 19th century sought to conquer wilderness, ‘‘urban pioneers’’ in the 21st century deploy nature as a tool of economic development in a city with a shrinking population and a large spatial footprint. Yet accumulation by green dispossession still turns on some of the defining features of settler colonialism, e.g., private property as a civilizing mechanism on the frontier, the appropriation of collective land and resources, and the expendability of particular people and places. The production of this new urban frontier also depends, like any frontier, on erasure: the material and discursive work of presenting ‘‘empty’’ landscapes as in need of improvement by non-local actors. I argue that understanding the stakes of postindustrial urban development struggles requires attention to how concepts of (white) settler society – which have been absorbed into political and legal-juridical institutions, discourses, myths, symbols, and national metaphors – are used to claim ‘‘wild’’ and ‘‘empty’’ lands like those in Detroit.

This study examines the ongoing creation of the Dholera Special Investment Region along the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor in Gujarat. It analyses the agrarian political economy of the region in relation to the anticipated rentier gains from the conversion of land from agriculture to a “smart city.” Given the low level of interest by real estate developers in the project so far, the stagnant manufacturing investments in the country, and the continuing resistance by local residents, the study argues that the anticipated futures that moor the Dholera smart city are tenuous and rife with conditions of resistance and overthrow. It argues that the ‘rentier economy’ driving the project may not meet the development needs of a majority of local residents, dispossessing a large majority of peasants for whom the agrarian economy offers a choice of critical livelihood strategies. The ‘land pooling’ mechanism is ill equipped to deal with issues emerging from dissent. In contrast to official articulation of industrial infrastructure development, local opinion emphasises agrarian infrastructure, specifically the overdue Narmada canal irrigation system. This contest over what is deemed necessary infrastructure for economic growth, and who will benefit from such infrastructure, points to the necessity for policies oriented towards ‘development from below.’

La thèse proposée est que le pouvoir de nos jours n’est plus théologico-politique, mais scientifico-politique, une preuve historique de sa mise en place infléchit l'ordre de causation entre le capitalisme et le pouvoir scientifico-politique: ce n'est pas le capitalisme qui génère un monde technologique dont il faudrait réaliser la critique, c'est le pouvoir-savoir scientifico-politique qui génère une production dont le capitalisme est un mode articulé aux autres dont celui de la forme-Etat. Une preuve historique est proposée dans la thèse. Si nous avons vu juste, c'est donc la normalisation scientificisée qui discrimine les tenants du pouvoir-savoir contemporain du reste de la population: tout a du se scientificiser pour survivre, tout a du être ou se diviser, être normalisé. Le risque dénoncé est une hégémonie de l'autorité de ce pouvoir scientifico-politique parmi d'autres. Le moyen de le contrer n'est pas d'accepter les inégalités et les considérer comme justes comme pour Hayek, Nozick ou Rawls: le moyen de contrer tout pouvoir est d'en réaliser la critique, accompagnant les actions des groupes politiques minoritaires et de formuler des propositions et mesures concrètes et des diagnostics critiques transcatégoriels.

Héritière de la tradition critique française, soucieuse d'une lecture rigoureuse de Hobbes, la production s'est voulue proposer un effort de pensée politique totalisant mais pour déployer un geste philosophique de philosophie politique : le geste auto-critique. Certains points sont développés avec une importance capitale, la relecture de l'accumulation primitive l'errance migratoire comme anomalie face au droit, la question des relations internationales contemporaines et les stratégies politiques possiblement mises en œuvre.

La thèse soutenue propose donc en résumé une méthode d’identification du pouvoir central contemporain et une vérification de la validité de cette identification, une création d’outils conceptuels pour analyser les effets de ce pouvoir central contemporain, ainsi qu’une proposition de mesures concrètes pour en réduire les effets mutilants dans le cadre d’une philosophie politique matérialiste d’inspiration deleuzo-guattarienne. Cette production philosophique propose une réponse aux sommes existantes contemporaines notamment les oeuvres de Hayek, de Nozick et de Rawls.  Il s'agit d'une réponse d'une philosophie continentale française politique à ces théorisations américaines.

Este libro trata de la barriga y sus nostalgias. En él se cuentan historias sobre la añoranza de sabores que ya no son o que pronto dejarán de ser. ¿Qué pasa con los lenguajes maternos de la comida cuando la guerra, el extractivismo y el despojo los arrancan de la boca?

* For a revised and expanded version of this paper, see "'In the Constant Flux of Its Incessant Renewal': The Social Reproduction of Racial Capitalism and Settler Colonial Entitlement" [Uncorrected Proofs]: https://www.academia.edu/75944463/_In_the_Constant_Flux_of_Its_Incessant_Renewal_The_Social_Reproduction_of_Racial_Capitalism_and_Settler_Colonial_Entitlement_Uncorrected_Proofs_

This paper focuses on the ways in which property relations and prevailing conceptions of ownership are key sites for the social reproduction of race, capitalism, and the particularities of U.S. settler colonialism. I begin with a consideration of racial capitalism in relation to reproduction. I then discuss how “so-called primitive accumulation” continues to serve as an important referent in debates on the relationship between colonialism and capitalism. In conclusion, I briefly consider the ongoing fractionation of Native American land in the wake of the 1887 allotment act and the attrition of African American land ownership through the partition of tenancy-in-common of heirs’ property. I use these examples to show how the racial, colonial, gendered, and generational making of property and the capacity for possession are both a consequence of particular historical conditions of dispossession and continue to be reproduced in new ways in the present. Inheritance in this sense is quite literally a matter of social reproduction and a site of struggle over power and history in the context of the current moment.

A First Foray into (World-)Ecological Economics, "translating" salient issues of world-ecology into the conceptual paradigm of Mainstream Economics. This involves the emergence and long-run evolution of capital and capitalist accumulation, pari passu with economic growth: Ever-changing/evolving technical- and organic compositions of capital (accumulation & business cycles) transform the dynamics of both industries and the economy at large, entailing "developmental crises" (Jason Moore!). Over time (1000-1913>2021), and with increasing stocks of capital, rising complexity (path dependencies & feedback), these developmental crises are now fusing into an "epochal crisis" of capitalism. The discussion involves "transdisciplinary trespassing" across several fields and is based on empirics plus references & LINKS!

THIS paper seeks to understand the dynamics of exclusion and conflict among India’s Ādivāsīs or Scheduled Tribes (STs). At 8.4% of the population, STs are India’s most marginalised socio-economic group (Das 2011; Rath 2006). As double-digit economic growth sweeps India, Ādivāsīs have been largely left behind. Compounding socio-economic marginalisation, STs confront displacement and the undermining of distinctive cultures, identities and ancient livelihood patterns.

As 160 of India’s 604 districts fall prey to a vi
cious conflict, this paper argues that it is not just deprivation or displacement precipitating violence. Recourse to violence is instead prompted by both privation and the manner in which it is perpetuated: through the denial of citizen voice. To make this case, three hypotheses will be tested:

1. Development and rehabilitation policies fail because they do not respond to the felt-needs of tribal communities.
2. These shortcomings reflect the absence of tribal voices in the policy process.
3. Processes of primitive accumulation additionally involve the wilful denial of rights, emasculating tribals both economically and politically.

It is thus posited, a fortiori, that the armed campaign is a tragic response to a more insidious form of violence: a political-economic system in which the costs of rapid industrialisation are borne by marginal groups, who are in turn denied the benefits of this ‘development’ and the means to counter these privations through non-violent forms of resistance.
 

Abstract
This thesis contributes to our understanding of social metabolism in general, and waste in social metabolism in particular. First, I examine the relationship between social metabolism and conflict, looking from a situated political ecology perspective, at how differences in the structure and nature of particular social metabolisms create different conflict dynamics. Second, I shed light at an often forgotten but very important part of social metabolism which is the informal recycling of waste. I
evaluate the contribution of informal recycling, and I investigate how power influences the social relations of production (or recycling), and how these shift costs to informal recyclers. Then, I make a case for the recognition of the important contribution of informal recyclers in making social metabolism more circular, and I call for due compensation of the services they provide, instead of a dispossession from their means of production, and a shifting of social costs of enterprises and consumers to them. My case studies present a range of experiences, mostly in India, to inform theory on how environments are shaped, politicized and contested.

Resumen
La presente tesis contribuye a la comprensión del metabolismo social. Específicamente, analiza el rol de los residuos en el metabolismo. Primero, reflexiona sobre la relación existente entre el metabolismo social y los conflictos ambientales, examinando cómo diferentes estructuras metabólicas condicionan las dinámicas del conflicto; todo ello desde la perspectiva de la ecología política situada en el espacio y el tiempo. En segundo lugar, se investiga una parte olvidada, pero
muy importante del metabolismo social que es el reciclaje informal de residuos. Para ello, se evalúa la contribución del reciclaje informal e investigo cómo el poder influye en las relaciones de la producción (o reciclado) de residuos, y cómo éstas desplazan los costos de la producción a los recicladores informales. Por último, se reconoce la importancia de los recicladores informales al contribuir en hacer más circular el metabolismo social; por lo que se propone que se indemnicen
debidamente los servicios que prestan los recicladores a la sociedad, en lugar de que se les desposea de sus medios de producción, y se les traspasen los costos sociales de las empresas y los consumidores. Mis casos de estudio presentan una serie de experiencias empíricas, en la India especialmente, que ilustran cómo el medio ambiente se moldea, politiza y disputa.

Keywords: social metabolism, cost-shifting, conflicts, recycling, recyclers, waste, accumulation by dispossession, accumulation by contamination, commodity frontiers

This article extends critical trends of citizenship studies and the theory of accumulation by dispossession to articulate how settler colonial citizenship is instantiated through the active accrual of land and resources and how the emerging settler colonial citizenship entrenches both structural subjugation and resistance. The article then examines the reformation of the boundaries of citizenship through indigenous agency. I do so through examining the Palestinian citizens in Israel, specifically centering the Internally Displaced Persons-Palestinians who received Israeli citizenship even as they were displaced from their places of origin. I conclude by asserting citizenship's double paradox in settler colonial contexts: It regulates certain rights and mobilities but simultaneously entraps the indigenous in a structure in which recursive accumulation is constitutive, thus entrenching dispossession and the further loss of collective rights and other claims.


تستعرض هذه المقالة التوجهات النقدية لدراسات المواطنة، ونظرية التراكم عن طريق سلب الملكية
(accumulation by dispossession)،
لتبيّن كيفية تجسيد المواطنة الكولونيالية الاستيطانية من خلال التراكم عبر انتزاع الأراضي والموارد بالقوة والعنف. وتناقش المقالة كيف أنّ المواطنة الكولونيالية الاستيطانية ترسّخ القهر البنيوي، ولكنها أيضا كانت، وما زالت، أداة يستعملها السكان الأصليون للنضال، ولتحدي بنية الدولة الاستعمارية. وعليه، تبحث المقالة في إعادة صياغة حدود المواطنة من خلال وكالة السكان الأصليين وفعاليتهم وصمودهم. وتعمل المقالة على ذلك من خلال التركيز على حالة المواطنين الفلسطينيين في إسرائيل، مشددة على حالة مهجري الداخل – الفلسطينيين، الذين حصلوا على الجنسية الإسرائيلية بعد تهجيرهم من قراهم ومدنهم الأصلية، ومنعهم من العودة إليها. أختتم المقالة بتأكيد التناقض البنيوي للمواطنة في السياقات الكولونيالية الاستيطانية: فمن ناحية، فإنّها تنظم بعض الحقوق وتضمنها، ولكنها في الوقت ذاته، توقع السكان الأصليين في شرك بنيوي تكون فيه مراكمة المواطنين الكولونيالين الاستيطانيين- الإسرائيليين اليهود في الحالة الفلسطينية- للأملاك والسيادة مراكمة انتزاعية على حساب السكان الفلسطينيين الأصلانيين، وفقدانهم لحقوقهم المادية، كما وتؤسس لنزع المزيد من الحقوق الجماعية وحقوق أخرى.

It is extremely dangerous to resist extractive megaprojects in Latin America. The intensive accumulation of natural resources for export on global markets has long characterized Latin America, but the boom in exports of raw commodities since 2000 has accentuated a violent history of dispossession. As of 2020, Latin America represents 60% of nature defenders killed in the world. Governments license natural resources at unprecedented rates, pushing land- and water-grabbing to new levels. Resistance against mining, oil, hydroelectric, and agribusiness projects is framed as antidevelopment and repressed with brutal violence. Governments are expanding the extractive frontier fast, promoting megaprojects in the name of national development or to fund social policies, a so-called redistributive neo-extractivism. This extractive consensus has increased social conflict across the region; but it has also inspired new forms of resistance. Resistance, which is mostly Indigenous and largely female, is a political struggle against extractive industries that represent ongoing forms of colonial dispossession. Resistance against extractivism focuses on the defense of nature as much as on rights to self-determination, a central element to shape a postextractive world. Ecuador is a case in point. The country recognizes international rights to prior consultation and established the first rights of nature framework in the world, yet it criminalizes nature defenders as it continues to expand the extractive frontier. The emerging rights of nature framework, like mining bans, are alternatives to extractivism that offer insights into experiences of resistance in the highlands of Ecuador. The Rio Blanco mine, an iconic megaproject financed by China, was suspended in 2018 thanks to a solid network of resistance that secured a broad mobilization of rural communities and urban youth, lawyers and academics, blending street protest with legal action. The Rio Blanco case shows the complementarity of various strategies, the potential of courts as allies, and the powerful coordination between social movements and government to contest structural dispossession.

Violent Neoliberalism explores the relationship between neoliberalism and violence through a critical poststructuralist perspective. Springer exposes the supposed humanitarianism of what has become the world's most dominant political economic model as a process of transformation that is shot through with a significant degree of cruelty. Employing a series of theoretical dialogues informed by the empirical experiences of development, discourse, and dispossession in contemporary Cambodia, Violent Neoliberalism engages as a diagnostic rupturing of commonsense to reveal the manifold ways in which ongoing patterns of neoliberalization have become engrossed with violence.

Drawing on Marx’s approach to original accumulation at the dawn of capitalism, I characterize the waves of parliamentary enclosures that unfolded in England between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries as an exercise of original or ex-novo extended urbanization—an initial stage in the subsumption of non-urban realms under specifically capitalist modes of uneven spatial development, involving new divisions of labor, distributional systems for raw materials and commodities, political and cultural formations and so forth. Along with the economic, technical and infrastructural changes in this period, these waves of enclosure provided an opportunity to rescale the social fabric of rural enclaves, restructuring the linkages between city and countryside along a range of different dimensions. Non-urban, non-capitalist territories were increasingly subordinated to the operational landscapes of national and international trade networks, which in turn expanded across the globe as new resources circulated through the system. Such transformations undermined the relative autonomy of preexisting, comparatively self-contained lifeworlds in the countryside. Previous rural social structures that combined use-value oriented everyday routines and a relatively bounded, discrete sphere of market-oriented practices were superseded by an intensifying, potentially totalizing form of capitalist territorial organization. This transformation was achieved through a profound, spatially-driven alteration of property relations, spatial divisions of labor and forms of social reproduction that in turn hinged upon the concerted, systematic intervention of the state. The process of original extended urbanization thus reveals the violent, yet legally mediated operations of dispossession that constitute the new urban territories of capitalism.

The bulk of this chapter is dedicated to the study of English parliamentary enclosure as a way to delve into broader questions regarding the nature and historical geographies of worldwide capitalist urbanization. Throughout this discussion, in investigating the extended landscapes of early capitalist urbanization, I also devote particular attention to the dialectic between original (ex-novo) and ongoing enclosure processes, which are conceived as two interdependent yet analytically specific moments linking past and present logics of spatial creative destruction, both within and outside of urban agglomerations. I argue that any investigation of the interplay between concentrated and extended urbanization also requires careful attention to both the ex-novo and ongoing dimensions of enclosure processes under capitalism.

Employing a poststructuralist-meets-anarchist stance that advances conceptual insight into the nature of sovereign power, this article examines the dialectics of capitalism/primitive accumulation, civilization/savagery, and law/violence, which are argued to exist in a mutually reinforcing 'trilateral of logics'. In deciphering this triadic system, this article offers a radical (re)appraisal of capitalism, its legal process, and its civilizing effects, which together serve to mask the originary and ongoing violences of primitive accumulation and the property system. Such obfuscation suggests that wherever the trilateral of logics is enacted, so too is the state of exception called into being, exposing us all as potential homo sacer (life that does not count). Proceeding as a diagnostic assessment of sovereign power, where although signposted by Cambodia's contemporary experiences of violent land conflict, this article is not intended as a fine-grained empirical analysis. Instead, it forwards a theoretical dialogue where Cambodia's neoliberalizing processes offer a window on how sovereign power configures itself around the three discursive-institutional constellations (i.e., capitalism, civilization, and law) that form the trilateral of logics. Rather than formulating prescriptive solutions, the intention here is critique, where in particular it is argued that the preoccupation with strengthening Cambodia's legal system should not be read as a panacea for contemporary social ills, but as an imposition that serves to legitimize the violences of property.

Agriculture as a relation to land based on domestication, possession, and commerce has long been a means and justification for colonization in what is now the United States. This is an agriculture in which the sociality of land is illegible and epistemologies of conquest appear to evacuate land of its unruly animacies. This essay focuses on class action lawsuits brought by African American and Native American farmers against the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) for discrimination in the administration of its farm loan programs. At stake is not only how forms of colonial governance, property, indebtedness, and jurisprudence continue to impinge upon and be contested or negotiated by Indigenous and Black peoples today but also how these shape political, economic, and social formations more broadly and variously manifest between past and present tense. It is precisely the coexistence and compatibility of necropolitical will and conciliatory inclusion that seem emblematic of the current conjuncture, where the sustained project of attrition, devaluation, and disposability under way enacts dispossessive projects in the historical present.

In this article, four authors come together to reprise a menacing, mournful narrator—this time to theorize dispossession and how " her shape haunts the maps drawn by his hand, " (Paperson, 30). Wedged between Indigenous theorizations of settler colonialism, Black theorizations of antiblackness, and theorizations of visitation and fugitivity, this article achingly imagines the future without our loved ones, or even us. The question of haunting persists in this article as it interacts with recent works of art and fiction, and photographs of a new series of visitations by the Super Futures Haunt Qollective. › › Everything I love is an effect of an already given dispossession and of another dispossession to come. Everything I love survives dispossession, is therefore before dispossession. —Fred Moten, " The Subprime " Her shape haunts the maps drawn by his hand. She implies a different spatial and temporal geography of tunnels and time warps. She herself is not fully legible to colonialism's eye and cannot be defined by its sciences nor described through its grammar of power. —La Paperson, " The Postcolonial Ghetto " [Dionne Brand] reminds me that the earth is also skin and that a young girl can legitimately take possession of a street, or an entire city, albeit on different terms than we may be familiar with. —Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds

Land expropriation and peasant resistance in China have been widely noted, but the many cases in which peasants consent to give up land have drawn less attention. This paper conceptualizes and examines an alternative development practice: accumulation without dispossession (AWD), a concept first developed by Gillian Hart and Giovanni Arrighi. AWD may arise if accumulation takes place without (completely) depriving rural producers of the right to assets and benefits. The paper examines multiple forms of AWD and makes two main arguments. First, land expropriation does not necessarily lead to dispossession if peasants are compensated with valuable flats, commercial venues, and/or secure jobs. Due to its positive effects on social equality and livelihood security, AWD may offer an alternative vision in the era of neoliberal dispossession. Second, the outcome of land expropriation in China has varied substantially across space and time. In general, there has been a shift away from AWD in the 1980s following the neoliberal reform in the 1990s, but in the recent decade, there has been some movement back towards AWD due to peasant protests, though only to a limited degree. Nevertheless , the majority of peasants losing land have not received compensation sufficient to sustain a secure livelihood.

Globally, land has significant socioeconomic value since it is a major source of livelihood for people who use it for farming. Yet, mineral mining is reducing people's access to their land. This paper employs the global land grabbing literature to examine the political economy of land dispossession in Ghana's mining sector, with a focus on the activities of two multinational companies. The argument is that is that the dispossession that occurs due to the proliferation of mineral extraction undermines the potential contribution of mining to sustainable livelihood outcomes for people in host communities. To augment this argument, the paper draws upon primary data gathered using two methods namely, semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions in addition to a plethora of secondary sources, on the community perspectives on dispossession and marginalization relative to land and livelihoods in Ghana's mining sector. Drawing upon such data, the paper also underscores the intersections of place (global and local) and agency (domestic and foreign) with the overall objective of using the case of Ghana to underscore how land dispossession remains an important driver of social injustice, marginalization, and poor livelihoods in mining communities.

This article theorizes changing configurations of development governance emerging as states attempt to reconcile two contradictory pressures of global urbanization: dispossessing capitalist accumulation and demands for inclusive welfare. It introduces the 'redevelopmental state' as a dynamic spatio-political framework for understanding how hegemonic rule is tenuously forged amid potentially volatile urban land struggles. Whereas Northern urban redevelopment theories are less attentive to post-colonial urbanization processes and most developmental state scholarship has not fo-cused on cities, the redevelopmental state offers an alternative conceptualiza-tion. It centres on how emerging regimes of territorial rule, development and political participation contour access to land and social benefits in Southern cities. Forged at key conjunctures of social pressure, these redevelopmental state spaces work through and beyond formal policies and institutions, and articulate with nationalist cultural politics of belonging and aspiration that foster consent for redevelopment while also legitimating exclusions, violence and dispossession. A case study of Mumbai illustrates redevelopmental state spaces that suture ethno-religious nationalism, urbanized accumulation and populist welfare to unevenly distribute life capacities, garnering both cooperation and contestation. The article concludes by suggesting ways this spatially attuned framing can provide insights into the recent rise of ethno-nationalism and authoritarian populism around the world.