Land Dispossession

行政摘要

由2009年迄今，石崗菜園村的抗爭運動給香港社會留下深刻印象。但一直較少人提及農戶在收地過程時面對的相關政策配套。政府經常提及向受收地影響的農戶發放「特惠金」/「特惠津貼」，補償其損失，但「特惠金」/「特惠津貼」其實是一種「恩恤」救助(ex-gratia)，即一種沒有義務的協助 (settlement without obligation)，而非按農戶的實際損失發放的正規賠償。

每當這種恩恤賠償方式一出，便隨即惹來公眾對農業補償之誤解︰公眾以其「特惠」之名，便認為政府以「特殊」的賠償方式「優惠」了農戶，事實上政府只是按既定程序和計算方法進行恩恤。

事件主要問題

一‧補償機制與實際的農業生產和銷售完全脫軌

A) 狸貓換太子－以批發價代替零售價的「農作物真正市值」

政府強調「按農作物的真正市值」釐訂補償，但「真正市值」卻是指蔬菜統營處的農作物批發價，而非市場的零售價。雖然青苗賠償會被視為政府大量購入(bulk purchase)農產品，故訂價較零售價低。但青苗補償是政府因強制徵用農田而補償農戶的農作物損失，農戶根本不能拒絕，只能被迫放棄他們的農作物，不屬市場行為。其次，整個過程並無消費者，故以經濟學邊際效益概念為基礎的批發價值不應被應用於青苗補償機制之中，所謂「真正市值」其實無法反映農作物的真正價值。

B) 「青苗生果金」違反私有產權精神；「補償損失」混淆公眾視聽

政府在釐訂青苗補償時，只以田產重量決定賠償的高低︰田產重量/產值越高的農地，其土地價值會越高，而不會考慮農產品質素。事實上，作為一種「恩恤」機制，政府只求「多快好省」︰粗略以「重量」為彌償的準則，草草利用最快捷的方法和最少量的賠償額，盡快敷衍打發農戶搬遷離開，以小恩小惠(favour)的恩恤津貼安撫失去生計和家園的農戶。

由於強制徵地與私人產權精神相違背，故政府希望以「青苗生果金」混淆視聽，避免受公眾和輿論指責。但農作物屬農戶的私有財產，受到《基本法》的保障，應獲得相等於農作物實際損失的補償，政府卻利用低於市值的青苗「特惠津貼」，強令農戶放棄他們的農作物。這不單無助政府脫離「違背私有產權精神」的泥沼，反而更有力和尖銳地指出農作物補償機制嚴重違反私有產權精神。

C) 「青苗生果金」50年不變，全賴強行收地作後盾

政府官員聲稱政策早在60年代便已制訂，一直沿用至今接近50年，政府認為「政策向來行之有效，無需修改」，拒絕進行任何檢討或諮詢。「政策行之有效」是因為政府在決定特惠津貼金額後，不會因受影響人士對特惠津貼的機制和執行過程有不滿或懷疑，而暫緩其清拆和收地進度，反而用盡各種方法，務求在限期前成功收地，受影響人士接受特惠津貼機制與否對政府的收地進度絲毫沒有影響。有「強制收地」為後盾，青苗補償政策當然是「行之有效」。

D) 疑似罰則，青苗生果金隨時折上折

青苗補償政策當中還有一些疑似罰則的措施。果樹類別的農作物一旦被打上一至三星( * / ** / *** )，註明這些項目為培苗 (nursery stock)，該棵果樹的價值便會被打折。既然青苗補償政策只是一種沒有義務的協助(Settlement without obligation)，其計算方式本身已不為公眾知悉，政府還安排了暗黑罰則，所謂刻意培苗亦只有「官字兩個口」，一旦有官員點算時有遺漏或有任何誤會，農民基本上沒有任何澄清及辯解的機會。

二‧收地補償程序混亂，猶如土豪惡霸

青苗補償過程也有不少予人感到程序不公的情況，包括：1) 漁護署職員在點算農作物時並不專業︰點算時曾將價值較高的朴樹估作「雜樹」；量度果樹時，職員也曾用肉眼低估樹木高度；2) 離實質徵地階段只餘一個月之際，政府仍不願將農作物補償清單發給農戶；3) 政府「打死狗講價」，主張先拆毀建構物後再談補償，令農戶喪失任何議價及重新估算的機會。農民失去生計後才獲得補償，令農戶上訴及重置的機會更形渺茫。

三‧侮辱農民尊嚴的「恩恤」特惠津貼

政府強制收回土地，先無視受影響農戶意願，將收地扭曲為一買一賣的交易，將農耕生活換算為現金價值；甚至行利用青苗補償機制七除八扣，將賠償減至最低。農戶失去了農田、家園、生計和耕種生活，最後只換來侮辱其尊嚴、極為低廉的「恩恤」特惠津貼。
總結及建議﹕

各種矛盾都是源於青苗補償政策以「恩恤」為主要原則的行政措施所致。恩恤為一種殖民地時代的施捨，政府不單不承認其破壞市民日常生活的責任，甚至要求農民們為青苗的恩恤而「感恩」，這樣與殖民地政府看待市民的態度無異。

近年社會漸漸了解及珍惜本地農業，政府必須正視農作物賠償，並將之納入正規政策。政策理念必須由「以小恩小惠驅逐農戶」糾正為「以延續其農耕生活」，照顧受影響農戶的生計問題，包括向受影響農戶解釋青苗計算方法、主動提供資訊，安排復耕協助重新建立耕作生活。

目前青苗補償的計算方法，主要不斷將農作物的批發價「打折」，做法不合時宜，更損害農民尊嚴。政府必須根據廿一世紀的實際環境，重新釐訂賠償準則及計算方法，令賠償能真正照顧受影響農民。若政府繼續以現行政策發展新界農地，未來勢必引起更加重大的紛爭，故政府及民間都必須尋求政策上的突破，令農民獲得更公平、公開的對待。

This thesis seeks to connect the Honduran state’s need for capital accumulation, it’s almost myopic focus on agro-industrialization and dispossessing Garífuna from lands valued for African palm production, and finally how the Garífuna have been able to effectively resist the state’s attempts to take Garífuna lands by force. One company in particular, the Dinant Corporation, poses the greatest threat to Garífuna communities in the remote Honduran territories of Atlántida and Colón. Dinant Corporation, owned entirely by Miguel Facussé, is a large commercial producer and processor of African palm in Honduras. The company is the largest and fastest gorwing African palm producer in Honduras. In order to expand so quickly, Facussé expropriated thousands of hectares of Garífuna lands in the Garífuna territories in Atlántida and Colón. The state has supported Facusse by providing troops, financing Facusse's expansion, and dispossessing the Garífuna from their lands. However, some Garífuna have been effective in protesting land expropriation and have even successfully reclaimed lands that commercial African palm producers had taken from the Garífuna communities. This project provides a close examination of how the state and African palm producers have worked in violent ways to expand the African palm industry and how the Garífuna have resisted expropriation of their lands.

As the conflict over land assumes a central dynamic within the “growing Indian economy”, forcible acquisition, or the state’s power of eminent domain, is critical to various political and economic calculations. This paper discusses the doctrine of eminent domain in the context of dispossession and emergent land and resource conflicts in India. The origin of the doctrine in pre-constitutional colonial law, the legal mechanisms of land reform and acquisition laws through which it finds expression, and the recently proposed mechanisms for acquisition that expand its power and conflate public purpose with private capitalist interests are discussed. The paper examines the doctrine's dual nature that lends itself to redistributive justice and the dispossession of already marginalised citizenry. It then examines the vexatious concept of sovereignty animating the doctrine, discusses existing substantive limits to its power that need to be given primacy and the uneven jurisprudence around the doctrine. It argues for contextualised rights to land- and resource-use regimes, concluding with observations on the implications of the doctrine’s continuing and expanded scope.

A B S T R A C T This article calls attention to the role of capital, large capital in particular, in recent reforms to China's system of household registration (hukou). It argues that a tripartite alliance between agrarian capital, urban capital, and local governments arose in the first decade of this century and has become a major force driving locally initiated hukou reforms. The main goal of reform has been to facilitate the transfer of land rights from rural residents so that rural land could be used to generate profits and government revenue. While rural residents are compensated for the loss of land rights, many face increasing insecurity in their livelihoods. The article is based on an extensive survey of local policy documents and a case study of Chengdu Municipality in Sichuan Province.
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/690622

South Africa is a work in progress, in which at every step the contradictions
between promises and expectations must be negotiated in a context of fractures and hierarchies inherited by the legacy of apartheid and influenced heavily by dominant international blueprints.
The essays proposed here succeed to make connections between scholarly research and political and social action, between theory and practice. To show how state decision-making is influenced, and in what measure determined, by the nature and internal social changes and by government staying in power in regional and international relations. Connections that raise further relevant questions to stimulate the critique of the democratic process and on how these relations of power may influence, stall or even drive back, the path of autonomous emancipation, as it was and is embedded in the history of suffering and sacrifice of the population.

ב-16 בספטמבר 2001 גורשו (שוב) תושבי הכפר סוסיא בדרום הר חברון בפעולה צבאית. הם גורשו צפונה, לעיירה יאטה. שבוע לאחר מכן שבו לכפרם בסיוע תנועת תעאיוש – שותפות ערבית-יהודית. מאות פעילות ופעילים באו למקום כדי לשמש חגורה אנושית לשיבת התושבים לכפרם. לאחר חזרת התושבים שגורשו למקומם, נשארה קבוצה קטנה של פעילות ופעילים ללון במקום כדי לסייע במניעת גירוש נוסף. למחרת באמת הגיע כוח צבאי קטן למקום כדי לגרש את התושבים, שוב. הנסיון נבלם והתושבים נשארו. נוכח הלחץ הציבורי הודיע אז הצבא ש"תיפתח חקירה" ביחס לגירוש שכן התבצע – ובה בעת הכחיש שבכלל נעשה נסיון לגרש את התושבים, שנבלם על ידי הפעילים.
שני קטעי עיתונות נוספו כדי להבהיר את מהלך הדברים.

Why is it that, at a time when countless state officials are apologizing for historic wrongs and insisting that Canada has entered a period of reconciliation, many settlers continue to act towards indigenous peoples with unabated aggression and resentment? This thesis attempts to explain the continual reproduction of settler colonialism through an investigation of the processes involved in the formation of settlers as political subjects. Developing a Butlerean account of the subject, the author suggests that settlers are produced through colonial regimes as political subjects with deep and often unacknowledged investments in the reproduction of systems of oppression that provide for their material and psychic position of privilege. While the instability inherent in such systems ultimately threatens settlers themselves – as seen in the collapsing North American middle class – the fragility and precarity experienced by settlers who are targeted by neoliberal reforms often leads them to reinvest in, and aggressively defend, those very systems of power as a matter of subjective continuity.
The author’s inquiry into these issues emerges from his own experience as a settler, and as an attempt to understand what motivates the aggression and resentment that many elements within his own community direct towards indigenous peoples. Because of these motivations, much of this thesis is grounded in discussions about the ways in which the author’s home community, in the southern Ontario riding of Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, is predicated in ongoing acts of colonization. From burial ground reclamations, to mob violence, to the problems inherent in combatting white supremacy without at once critiquing settler colonialism, each of the examples brought forward in this thesis attempts to analyze why this community of settlers seemingly throbs with a collective anger and indignation that is continually directed at the Saugeen Anishinaabek.

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.

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

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.

This papers seeks to advance our understanding of the gendered implications of land dispossession. It does so through a comparative analysis of five cases of rural land dispossession driven by different economic purposes in diverse agrarian contexts: the English enclosures, colonial and post-colonial rice irrigation projects in the Gambia; large dams in India; oil palm cultivation in Indonesia; and Special Economic Zones in India. The paper first identifies some of the very common gendered effects of dispossession. In each case, it shows that land dispossession reproduced women’s lack of independent land rights or reversed them where they existed; intensified household reproductive work; and occurred without meaningful consultation with—much less decision-making by—rural women. The paper secondly demonstrates ways in which the gendered consequences of land dispossession vary across forms of dispossession and agrarian milieu. The most important dimension of this variation is the effect of land loss on the gendered division of labor, which is often deleterious but varies qualitatively across the cases examined. The paper also illustrates important variation within dispossessed populations as gender intersects with class, caste, and other inequalities. The article concludes that land dispossession consistently contributes to gender inequality, albeit in social and historically specific ways. So while defensive struggles against land dispossession will not in themselves transform patriarchal social relations, they may be a pre-condition for more offensive struggles for gender equality.

This article examines the trajectory of struggles over land and resources in Dawei, a town in southern Myanmar. The site of a major special economic zone project, Dawei has seen sustained mobilisation around displacement, dispossession and environmental degradation, against the backdrop of national political and economic reforms. Recently, scholars have argued that earlier visions of postcolonial transition have lost their empirical and political purchase, as farmers dispossessed of land increasingly become excluded from formal capitalist production. What happens to politics and political form if dynamics of exclusion, rather than transition, organise political activity under today's conditions of accumulation? Repurposing Kalyan Sanyal's concept of postcolonial capitalism, this article describes and theorises the politics of disposses-sion in Dawei. Tracing the political activities of activist groups and villagers, it argues that two contrasting political trajectories—one secular–egalitarian, one situational– differential—constitute a heterogeneous political field, reflecting the complexity of postcolonial capitalism itself.

El presente trabajo desarrolla una investigación sobre las inversiones en el sector de la palma de aceite realizadas por la empresa italiana Poligrow en Mapiripán (Meta). Desde el punto de vista teórico, el análisis introduce el giro eco-territorial de América Latina en la última década (a partir de las reflexiones de los geógrafos latinoamericanos), y en particular, las resistencias eco territoriales en América Latina en el estudio de los conflictos sociales. En el caso de Colombia, dichos conflictos se presentan de forma particularmente violenta, agudizados por la persistencia de un conflicto armado interno y el fortalecimiento de los grupos contra-insurgentes. Al mismo tiempo, las comunidades indígenas y campesinas han sido afectadas por el deterioro de sus territorios. En efecto, muchos grupos paramilitares, cuya acción y presencia transcienden la lógica de autodefensa, persiguen el acaparamiento de tierras en particular a través de la acumulación por desposesión, atraídos por la oportunidad de nuevos negocios en relación a la retórica del Capitalismo Verde. A la expropiación sigue una estrategia legal para “legalizar” el despojo.

The Canadian government broadly depicts the policy of Comprehensive Land Claims (CLC) as a form of ‘recognition’ of Aboriginal peoples. In this view, recognition is achieved by assuring ‘certainty’ over indigenous rights and lands within a liberal democratic framework. Against this, I argue that recognition and certainty are not benign, but operate in the service of a state strategy of dispossession. Using the ongoing Innu Nation Tshash Petapen (or ‘New Dawn’) agreement as a case example, I attempt to show that the organizational requirements of CLC, the various extinguishment or certainty provisions in it, and the arrangements for both wealth creation and debt entrench irreversible cessions of land and rights. Evidence concerning the social and political contexts in which agreement is elicited, the provisions in the text of the agreement for absolute forfeiture of Aboriginal lands and rights, and the agreement’s financial and commercial arrangements will be presented in support of this interpretation. Finally, I will suggest that it is helpful to extricate CLC from its more parochial context to show its similarities with other processes by which indigenous and other peoples have been (and continue to be) divested of their land and rights.

This essay focuses on the intimate logics, affective possessions, and genealogies of domestication that underwrite and further contemporary formations of settler colonialism in the United States.  The 2013 United States Supreme Court decision on Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl (the “Baby Veronica” case) circumvented the Indian Child Welfare Act and granted custody of a young girl of Cherokee descent to adoptive white parents despite opposition by her birth father and the Cherokee Nation, and the legal battles that have proceeded in the wake of this ruling, serve as its principal lens of analysis.  The case and public debate are analyzed as an ostensibly post-racial and postcolonial response to injury and racial innocence that discursively inverts the dynamics of dispossession by alleging an apparently ubiquitous threat of theft and loss of the tacit entitlements and inherent self-possession afforded by its disavowed political, economic, and racialized privilege.

While there is a growing literature on the phenomenon of land seizure by agribusiness and extractive industries, and their disastrous social and ecological effects around the world, there is often a shroud of vagueness and mystification about the concrete practices by which extractive companies come to gain access to the land itself. This is especially true since these companies increasingly veil their activities in plausible claims of “social responsibility.” This article documents the strategies by which foreign and especially Canadian capital has been grabbing and maintaining its control over land for mega-developments in Honduras, with an eye to the ways in which different tactics are adapted to each particular context in which they are applied. The purpose is to demonstrate the flexibility and complexity of these strategies and to lay the groundwork for future studies of these concrete practices in order to supplement the existing literature on land seizure.

Despite their theoretical and political potential, recent debates on enclosure usually lack an effective consideration of how space is mobilized in the process of dispossession. This article connects the analysis of enclosure’s general spatial rationality to a range of illustrations of its particular formations and procedures. Enclosure is understood as one of capitalism’s ‘universal territorial equivalents’, a polymorphous technique with variegated expressions in time but also with a consistent logic that uses the spatial erosion of the commons to subsume non-commodified, self-managed social spaces. In response to the ever-changing nature of commoning, successive regimes of enclosure reshape the morphologies of deprivation and their articulation to other state and market apparatuses in order to meet shifting strategies of capital accumulation and social reproduction. Through a spatially-nuanced account of these phenomena, I outline a tentative genealogy of enclosure formations that allows tracking diverse geographies of dispossession across different scales and regulatory contexts in various historical stages of capitalist development.
Keywords: enclosure, commons, dispossession, abstract space, territorial equivalent, autonomy

“Land” being an important factor, plays a crucial role in development, considered as one of the important aspects of “Urban Politics” and work as an instrument in structuring it. Land owners play a key holder as they can shape the growth and market economy of the cities.  When you analyze the land pattern, you will observe that the majority of the contemporary land in urban centers belongs to an elite group called “Urban elites” which once belonged to the farmers and small landholders and traceable chains could easily find the link to the “Political elites” in land grabbing. Land grabbing is a very popular phenomenon which uses the power of politics and acquires Public land without any regards to public interest. The “seizing of land”  and leasing it for the sake of one’s personal interest and involvement of political elites by virtue of having political power defined the phenomenon as “licensed exclusion” (Hall et al. 2011: 27) and this majorly affect the small farmers or landholders who existed at the periphery of the urban centers. This paper will study the question of land with the help of a very famous land scam of the Gurugram-Manesar Industrial Model Township. Indeed the case is still in the Supreme Court and investigation is under CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation), though we will try to analyze the situation from the lens of urban politics, and will try to understand the concept of space and the role of political elites in the creation of urban spaces.

Cet article interroge les dynamiques de pouvoir dans la région de la Haute- Guinée, en Guinée, à partir du recours de plus en plus fréquent à la justice nationale dans le cadre des conflits fonciers. Outre une forte intensification de l’exploitation minière aurifère industrielle et artisanale, cette région connaît également la multiplication de titres fonciers et miniers à l’origine d’une pression plus intense sur les terres et les habitants. Fondé sur un travail ethnographique de vingt mois, cet article partira d’un conflit interindividuel pour terminer par un cas de dépossession foncière emblématique dans la région, celui de la commune de Kintinian. L’objectif est d’opérer un jeu d’échelles afin d’interroger la notion de dépossession au regard de celle de propriété juridique dans les contextes d’accaparement foncier.

This paper explores the political churnings around an almost twenty year old process of land acquisition and development in Rajarhat, an erstwhile rural settlement in the Indian state of West Bengal. The narrative takes shape against the backdrop of a neo-liberal state in the global South acting as a corporate facilitator, the concomitant dispossession, and particularly the transformation of the villages and rural livelihoods. The paper tries to trace the nature of this transformation by mapping the socio-economic changes on the one hand, and the reinvention of traditional caste-based social hierarchies brought about by such changes on the other, and highlights the formation of ‘syndicates’ (low-level cartels) in the area as a unique manifestation of the latter. Such developments, the paper argues, symbolise a qualitative shift in rural social relations, brought about by rapid urbanisation in neoliberal India.

This article makes a contribution to the history and theory of international law by looking at instruments, institutions, and practices of the Spanish Conquest. Instead of analysing the canonical texts of the 'Spanish fathers' of the law of nations, as has been done several times in the literature, it focuses on the legal forms of territorial acquisition and analyses the performative character of the ceremonies of possession that served to legalise the Conquest in the early modern political and theological order of 16th century Europe.

In this unfinished rough powerpoint for a series of lectures I explore why the United States is markedly different from other representative democracies and welfare states.  I trace the tradition of using a combination of bribery and corruption of the Congress and Judiciary, and violence and racist terror as a means of marginalizing organized labour and frustrating democratic control.  I explore how the contemporary crisis of social inequality, political corruption and racist authoritarian government long predates Trump, first emerging after Reconstruction in the Kleptocracy of the Gilded Age, receding somewhat under Roosevelt's leadership and with the Bretton Woods consensus, only to re-emerge with the Reagan revolution and the political triumph of the racist reaction to the Civil Rights and Feminist Movements, and the radicalism of the 1960s.  On the foreign policy side, the resurgent power of the oligarchy within the country and the brutal repression of the poor and marginalization of labour and the voices of the black radical tradition, symbolized by the ruins of Detroit and the South Bronx, would be matched by the consolidation of the policies of the so-called Washington Consensus.  This policy approach, enforced by the IMF, World Bank, and American military force and paramilitary violence, is often sold as Globalization, critiqued as Neo-liberalism, but might more accurately be described as a return to racist colonialism of the filibusters, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson.  The talk, which is intended to engage non-academic audiences and avoid jargon and theory, ought to be read in conjunction with Richard Iton's Solidarity Blues, and WIlkinson and Pickett's The Spirit Level.

Este artículo aborda el desplazamiento ontológico y normativo que ha ejercido históricamente el Estado sobre las poblaciones indígenas. Ello ha establecido modelos que, a la postre, han
estructurado condiciones que facilitan la posesión o propiedad, uso y usufructo de la naturaleza y los territorios para unos; mientras que la dificultan para otros. La imposición lógica y
regímenes de segmentación y propiedad de la tierra, acordes con las perspectivas, visiones e intereses del Estado han desempeñado, en retrospectiva, un papel fundamental en la desintegración de los territorios indígenas y la apropiación de sus recursos naturales por actores externos. El reconocimiento más amplio e incluyente de los derechos de los distintos sujetos
colectivos requiere de la comprensión de las propias dinámicas históricas de defensa y ejercicio del derecho al territorio de los pueblos y comunidades, como lo ejemplifica el caso de
Choréachi

This paper contributes to a growing scholarship examining the ways in which dispossession in neoliberal India is reinforcing and reconfiguring agrarian social hierarchies. Existing studies have focussed on the differential successes of villagers in Special Economic Zone (SEZ)‐generated real estate markets, incorporation of land losers into stratified labour markets and the caste‐based politics of dispossession. Few studies, however, have systematically explored the long‐term implications of state‐orchestrated dispossession on agrarian credit and debt relations. Based on long‐term fieldwork on a village partially expropriated for a SEZ in the South Indian state of Telangana, this study shows how dispossession has led to a sharp rise of over‐indebtedness within the land losing population. Dispossession deprived villagers of land and livestock; low compensation was inadequate to obtain replacement assets; and labour inside the SEZ was insufficient to ensure the reproduction of most households. The result was a cascading process of indebtedness for consumption smoothing that was generalized but the greatest among former untouchables (Scheduled Castes, SCs) and Lambadas (Scheduled Tribes, STs). Since dispossession precluded these historically marginalized groups from access to institutional credit, their reliance on largely upper caste moneylenders—whose land was spared expropriation—was deepened. Thus, I show how dispossession for neoliberal projects has reinforced this traditional caste‐based form of exploitation.

Dispossession need not be the product of malicious intentions or a deliberate programme of accumulation. As I argue in this article, it may paradoxically be the consequence of social spending, or what I call dispossession through delivery. Using as a case study the proliferation of temporary relocation areas (TRAs) in post-apartheid Cape Town, I show how what appears as adequate housing from the municipal government's perspective exacerbates social isolation, perpetuates squatting and aggravates unemployment, transport costs and interpersonal violence. I draw on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in TRAs and land occupations, NGO reports and interviews with housing officials to understand dispossession through delivery in these relocation sites. While TRAs began as emergency housing in cases of environmental catastrophes, they have become regularised as a form of state-provisioned housing even in non-emergency situations and, above all, in cases of land occupations. They are but one of a range of technologies of delivery that facilitate dispossession, and I conclude this article with a discussion of how formal housing distribution and informal settlement upgrading have similar effects. When these various technologies of delivery are understood as bound together in a single articulation, "dispossession through delivery" challenges the standard opposition between neoliberalism and social spending that characterises much of the literature and begins to map novel socio-spatial effects of one trajectory of urbanisation in a Southern city.

This article explores the role of media-led dissent in Vietnam's contemporary land struggles. The analysis focuses on Vietnamese-language material published online by domestic and foreign media about the so-called Văn Giang incident – a high-profile land dispute that shook the country between 2009 and 2012. Looking at how the media treated this incident broadens studies of land struggles in Vietnam, which up till now have focused on peasants’ resistance strategies. This case not only shows that media practitioners engage in dissent with regard to land politics, but also that they engage in more straightforward criticism of the state and its corporate redevelopment partners than what most analyses of rural land struggles in Vietnam, centered on the micro-level and on “lawful” (O'Brien) forms of resistance, would lead one to believe. Illustrating this point, the author shows that media dissent throughout the Văn Giang land dispute openly challenged the government's justificatory discourse about “displacement for development” as well as the mismanagement of land resources on which political and economic elites rely to dispossess peasants from peri-urban lands. If it has not yet provoked major institutional changes, the media's contribution to land struggles has nevertheless succeeded in creating a genuine, national public debate on land politics in rapidly urbanizing Vietnam.

Contemporary Continental Philosophers frequently take the Holocaust as a point of departure. While their concern to investigate the conceptual operations underwriting the attempted annihilation of Europe’s internal Others is undeniably important, it is troubling how far less attention has been given to the colonial violence waged upon Europe’s external Others, and to the role played by philosophy in its justification and process. This general neglect on the part of Continental Philosophy to address reflexively its own past uses and imperial inclinations is all the more troubling because European colonization has a continuing legacy. Australia, for example, comprises an imposed settler society that remains unreconciled with the Indigenous peoples it displaced. Is this problematic colonial history of European thought redeemable, and if so, then what might constitute a postcolonial redemption of Continental Philosophy? Giorgio Agamben is one Continental thinker who has devoted significant attention to a notion of “redemption,” which is realized in an ethos of practice that he theorizes in terms of Pauline chrēsis, or “transformative use.” However, the relevance of Agamben’s concepts in non-Western situations is unclear, since he insists that his most influential paradigms apply only to Western political contexts and to the internal operation of European forms of political exception. I engage with the apparent insularity of Agamben’s Eurocentric Philosophy by testing whether his concepts and paradigms are “useful” for thinking about postcolonial justice in Australia.

This essay engages with the commodification of land in an urban periphery of India. It argues against the tendency to reduce commodification of land to “primitive accumulation” or “accumulation by dispossession.” It presents an ethnography of the process of the commodification of land under speculative conditions. The growing demand for land for urbanization and industrialization, along with the availability of speculative finance capital in the real estate market, has made land a scarce commodity. In this land market, local capitals piggyback on finance capital and bid up the prices exponentially in the micromarkets. Speculation makes it impossible for the state to match the market price, and its compensation for the land losers is always quite low, which the latter refuse to accept. The landowning farmers, on the other hand, have developed a capacity to adjust to the speculative conditions and to control the supply of land in the market. Even though they can receive a very good price for their land, they show no urgency to sell it. As a consequence, the state’s plan to urbanize a given area, to create a stable arrangement of clear property titles, and to control land prices become uncertain.

This article examines the political narrative around a two-decade old process of land acquisition and development in the ‘global city’ Rajarhat, a former rural settlement in the Indian state of West Bengal. The narrative – exploring the development politics in Rajarhat - is built against the backdrop of a neo-liberal state in the global South acting as a corporate facilitator, particularly in matters of land, and the concomitant dispossession. The multifaceted politics of Rajarhat takes shape in contrast to the erstwhile communist regime in West Bengal, the dichotomy of a Left state engaged in forceful and violent land acquisition thus forming an interesting paradox. The paper also presents evidence against the long held political myth of caste-relations being irrelevant in Bengali politics, by examining the upper-caste dominated social relations in Rajarhat and the formation of low-level cartels or ‘syndicates’ in the area. In conclusion, the article points to the reinvention and redeployment of caste relations – even in increasingly urban spaces where ‘hierarchical’ caste practices are usually taken to be on the decline - rooted in the duality between land-struggles and development.

The conventional modernist approach to the history of industrialization in non-Western societies has largely assumed that this process did not begin until the twentieth century, through state-led projects. In the case of the Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey, as with many other " late comers " to industrialization, similar modernist assertions are also dominant in the literature. The etatist policies of the early Republican government are often justified by the alleged absence of industrial capital in the young Republic, along with the alleged lack of a late Ottoman bourgeoisie or working class. My research on social conflict in Ottoman Bursa from the 1840s through World War I challenges these assumptions and proposes to revise the prevailing Eurocentric narrative of the Industrial Revolution. Based on petitions and letters from industrial workers, court documents, and police interrogation reports, my paper presents evidence that many symptoms of industrial revolution, including the appropriation of public lands, natural and urban resources by industrialists, as well as environmental problems, unsafe working conditions, factory explosions, long working hours, and exploitation of child and female wage labor, were found in Bursa from the 1840s onward. Bursa's shift from the handicraft silk industry to industrial silk filature (yarn) production was not led by the state, but pioneered by the private sector. The economic transformation was swift and forceful, and when combined with the legal and centralizing administrative provincial reforms of the Tanzimat, it uprooted the existing socioeconomic and political structure at the provincial level. Ancient Ottoman institutions, such as artisan guilds, shar'ia courts and waqfs, which played a crucial role in the protection of the public good, balancing the arbitrary power of the state, conflict resolution and allocation of urban resources, were doomed to vanish due to these developments, while two new classes, i.e. the bourgeoisie and the working class, emerged in Bursa's new social fabric. The transformation was radical but not very peaceful. Class conflicts could easily develop into sectarian disputes in a multi-ethnic population like Bursa's, particularly when Tanzimat and post-Tanzimat governments failed to fill the vacuum of ancient Ottoman institutions and to enact new laws to protect the public good against the outcomes of unbridled capitalism.

This article examines the dynamics of judicialisation and dejudicialisation of subaltern resistance in the context of a prolonged anti-land acquisition struggle in Singur in the Indian state of West Bengal. Taking its point of departure in a detailed, chronological ethnographic account of the Singur movement and its shifting engagement with the language and institutions of law, the paper demonstrates how the local resistance to a land acquisition for the purpose of setting up a new automobile factory oscillated strategically back and forth between a multitude of sites of contestation. This strategic oscillation was, in turn, highly sensitive to the broader context in which the movement was carried out, and to the shifting terrain of the local and regional political landscape in particular. The attractiveness of invoking the language and institutions of law as part of their struggle therefore significantly depended on the attractiveness of other modalities of resistance at a given moment. In conclusion, the article uses the Singur case to critically interrogate and rethink the seminal work of Partha Chatterjee on political society and the politics of the governed in postcolonial India.

In February 2014, at the heart of an upscale neighborhood in Rabat, police forces forcefully destroyed the homes of Douar Ouled Dlim’s inhabitants – descendants of the Guich Oudaya tribe. Refusing to leave their land, the inhabitants have since continued to live in makeshift camps made of plastic tarp, protesting their dispossession. Ultimately, they all wonder ‘wach hna maghrba – are we still Moroccan citizens?’ The Guich lands, which have been relinquished at nominal prices to private developers linked to the ruling elite, have been used since the 1980s to extend the city of Rabat and, particularly, to erect one of its most exclusive neighborhoods, Hay Ryad. Despite the various struggles that shaped the resistance led by the Guich Oudaya tribe, today their lands have been consumed by concrete, erasing any trace of the existence of this peri-urban agricultural community. By analysing the mechanisms of dispossession put in place by the State, this paper seeks to show how the colonial logic – reconfigured through the discourse of modernity – has implemented a dichotomy between ‘progress’ and ‘nature’. Finally, the paper argues that this dichotomy continues to contribute to and legitimise the destruction of communal agricultural spaces and the consolidation of urban inequality in contemporary Morocco.