Explore the vast range of titles available.

Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century illuminates the transnational agrarian movements that are remaking rural society and the world's food and agriculture systems. Marc Edelman explains how peasant movements are staking their claims from farmers' fields to massive protests around the world, shaping heated debates over peasants' rights and the very category of \"peasant\" within the agrarian organizations and in the United Nations. Edelman chronicles the rise of these movements, their objectives, and their alliances with environmental, human rights, women's, and food justice groups. The book scrutinizes high-profile activists and the forgotten genealogies and policy implications of foundational analytical frameworks like \"moral economy,\" and concepts, such as \"food sovereignty\" and \"civil society.\" Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century charts the struggle of agrarian movements in the face of land grabbing, counter agrarian reform, and a looming climate catastrophe, and celebrates engaged research from Central America to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

In many (although not all) international human rights instruments, Article 1 is used to define rights holders. Normative clarifications of this kind can be controversial. The question of how to define peasant and peasantry has a long, complicated, and controversial history. Definitions of human groups arise or are created for different purposes, including social control, legal protection, social analysis, collective action, and colloquial description. These boundaries may or may not overlap and coincide. Sometimes groups targeted for discrimination appropriate, invest in, and celebrate previously pejorative labels. Furthermore, related terms in different languages are not always fully equivalent. Although normative definitions seem to fix an object in a timeless manner, in practice they always change over time and tend to have different degrees of strictness and laxity.

James Scott's \"The Moral Economy of the Peasant\" (1976) appeared at a time when \"peasant studies\" had begun to occupy an important place in the social sciences. The book's focus on Vietnam, as well as its novel argument about the causes of rural rebellion, attracted widespread attention and unleashed acerbic debates about peasants' \"rationality\" and the applicability of concepts from neoclassical economics to smallholding agriculturalists. In this article, I analyze E. P. Thompson's notion of \"moral economy\" and Scott's use of it to develop an experiential theory of exploitation. I then discuss other influences on Scott, including Karl Polanyi, A. V. Chayanov, and the Annales historians. \"Moral economy\" and \"subsistence crisis\" are concepts that Scott elaborated mainly in relation to village or national politics. In the final section of the article, I outline changes affecting peasantries in the globalization era and the continuing relevance of moral economic discourses in agriculturalists' transnational campaigns against the WTO.

Scholars, practitioners and activists generally agree that investor interest in land has climbed sharply, although they differ about what to call this phenomenon and how to analyse it. This introduction discusses several contested definitional, conceptual, methodological and political issues in the land grab debate. The initial 'making sense' period drew sweeping conclusions from large databases, rapid-appraisal fieldwork and local case studies. Today research examines financialisation of land, 'water grabbing', 'green grabbing' and grabbing for industrial and urbanisation projects, and a substantial literature challenges key assumptions of the early discussion (the emphasis on foreign actors in Africa and on food and biofuels production, the claim that local populations are inevitably displaced or negatively affected). The authors in this collection, representing a diversity of approaches and backgrounds, argue the need to move beyond the basic questions of the 'making sense' period of the debate and share a common commitment to connecting analyses of contemporary land grabbing to its historical antecedents and legal contexts and to longstanding agrarian political economy questions concerning forms of dispossession and accumulation, the role of labour and the impediments to the development of capitalism in agriculture. They call for more rigorous grounding of claims about impacts, for scrutiny of failed projects and for (re)examination of the longue durée, social differentiation, the agency of contending social classes and forms of grassroots resistance as key elements shaping agrarian outcomes.

The lack of historical perspective in many studies of land grabbing leads researchers to ignore or underestimate the extent to which pre-existing social relations shape rural spaces in which contemporary land deals occur. Bringing history back in to land grabbing research is essential for understanding antecedents, establishing baselines to measure impacts and restoring the agency of contending agrarian social classes. In Central America each of several cycles of land grabbing-liberal reforms, banana concessions and agrarian counter-reform-has profoundly shaped the period that succeeded it. In the Bajo Aguán region of Honduras-a centre of agrarian reform and then counter-reform-violent conflicts over land have been materially shaped by both peasant, landowner and state repertoires of contention and repression, as well as by peasants' memories of dispossession.

For more than one hundred years, professional baseball has enjoyed a form of exemption from federal antitrust laws. Arising from a statement made by the game's first commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis that organized baseball is a national institution and not labor-and later enshrined into common law by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's adoption of a now-outdated definition of interstate commerce-baseball's antitrust exemption endures as \"an exception, an anomaly and an aberration.\" Relying on an exemption from antitrust law, owners of Major League Baseball have become exceedingly wealthy based on their carte blanche freedom to act in their collective best interests-sometimes to the detriment of players, rival sports leagues, and fans. Even though the original basis for baseball's antitrust exemption has long since faded, courts and Congress, fearing political backlash or perhaps enjoying the perks of aggressive lobbyists seeking to curry favor, have been loath to lift the exemption. This Article calls for reform to the treatment of professional baseball under federal antitrust laws and suggests that baseball, like all other organized sports, be held subject to competitive scrutiny. Drawing on a careful study of baseball history, legal precedent, and public policy, the Article concludes that even if organized baseball is a national institution, much like its historic use of amateur players, unbalanced schedules, and segregated leagues, the time has come to put baseball's historic antitrust exemption behind us.

I wrote this chapter at the invitation of the Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights as a contribution to the negotiations in the first session in 2013 of the Intergovernmental Working Group on a United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP). As I indicate in chapter 8, drafting this text for an audience of diplomats involved a delicate analytical and political balancing act. In the UNDROP negotiations, the very idea of “peasant” evoked skepticism and frontal attacks. This chapter was an effort to have an elite audience normalize a category

The chapter outlines the process that led to the adoption in December 2018 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP). It describes my involvement in the negotiations and drafting of this new international instrument. Most anthropological research on global governance has a strong institutionalist and legalistic orientation. This chapter, in contrast, emphasizes the ethnographic encounter. It proposes a new way of thinking about the origin of international norms and an alternative to the “vernacularization” approach dominant in anthropological studies of law. UNDROP is a case of vernacularization-in-reverse, in which the

This chapter was first written for a 2006 conference on Land, Poverty, Social Justice, and Development: Social Movements’ Perspectives at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. The event was striking for its heated debates in several languages, something perhaps not surprising since it included progressive aca­demics, World Bank representatives, and activists from human rights organizations in Europe and agrarian movements in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. My essay was a provocation not only to positivist-minded social scientists but also to those who view themselves as militant allies and sometimes become uncritical cheerleaders for the movements they study. As

Scholars of collective action rarely examine why many, if not most, social movements fail. This chapter analyzes the roots of competing conservative and progressive visions of “civil society,” discusses the inadequacy of Gramsci’s concept of “organic intellectuals” for the study of agrarian movements, and examines the demise and subsequent reemergence of transnational peasant organization networks in Central America. The chapter notes the problems of “fictitious,” “shell,” or “paper organizations” and gatekeeper groups that vet movements seeking to affiliate with transnational networks, as well as the occasionally problematical representation claims of the peasant organizations. It constitutes an experiment in self-criticism and