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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.

This essay reads “The Solemn Boy” as a revision of the biblical tale of Abraham and Sarah. In this revision, however, the aged couple is gifted a son for only one afternoon, after which he is taken away. Nevertheless, Tol and Miss Minnie do not become bitter. By graciously accepting their loss, the couple models the humility that is central to Berry’s thought and that comes, in his estimation, from working the soil. Tol and Miss Minnie are the salt of the earth, and they become such by tilling the earth. Their saintliness is an effect of their agrarianism.

This article introduces this special collection on food sovereignty. It frames the collection in relation to a broader political and intellectual initiative that aims to deepen academic discussions on food sovereignty. Building upon previous and parallel initiatives in 'engaged academic research' and following the tradition of 'critical dialogue' among activists and academics, we have identified four key themes - all focusing on the contradictions, dilemmas and challenges confronting future research - that we believe contribute to further advancing the conversation around food sovereignty: (1) dynamics within and between social groups in rural and urban, global North-South contexts; (2) flex crops and commodities, market insertion and long-distance trade; (3) territorial restructuring, land and food sovereignty; and (4) the localisation problematique. We conclude with a glance at the future research challenges at international, national and local scales, as well as at the links between them, while emphasising the continuing relevance of a critical dialogue between food sovereignty activists and engaged scholars.

In this article I present an untold story about the controversy over the ideal Jewish peasant in Palestine at the turn of the twentieth century. The controversy preceded the rise of the haluz (pioneer), a key component in Zionism's classic ethos. I discuss the two camps in this controversy and the socio-political views they represented. While one camp advocated for the simple-minded peasant, the other promoted the ideal of the proud bourgeois Jewish farmer. I examine the controversy's implications for the politics of class but also Jewish nationalism, and provide a new framework for understanding the Jewish national peasant's emergence as a central figure in Jewish nationalism.

This article analyses the creation of new human rights by a contemporary transnational agrarian movement, Via Campesina. It makes the case that the movement's assertion of new rights contributes to shaping a cosmopolitan, multicultural, and anti-hegemonic conception of human rights. It discusses the advantages and constraints of the human rights framework and analyses the creation of new rights by the movement as a way to overcome the limitations of the 'rights master frame'. It concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges involved in the institutionalization of new rights.

Dancing in time: Agrarian transformation and persistence of the peasantry in ArgentinaThe persistence of the peasantry continues to be one of the main theoretical concerns of the agrarian question in the twenty-first century. Contrary to those who predict its disappear-ance, Santiago del Estero, a peripheral province of Argentina, maintains an agrarian struc-ture with almost 68 percent of peasant farms. These figures are accentuated in some depart-ments such as Atamisqui and Figueroa, which generate various hypotheses about the pene-tration of capitalism in agriculture as well as about the sector’s ability to resist and remain. This article identifies old and renewed processes of resistance and recreation of the peasant-ry in the rural areas of Santiago, maintaining that the term peasant is not crystallized but dynamic. This requires a more diachronic methodology that allows to examine its trajectory, not only from the conjunctural strategies, but also from its evolution in time. ResumenLa persistencia del campesinado continúa siendo una de las principales preocupaciones teóricas de la cuestión agraria en pleno siglo XXI. Pese a quienes pronostican su desaparición, Santiago del Estero, una provincia periférica de la Argentina, mantiene una estructura agraria con casi un 68 por ciento de explotaciones campesinas. Dichas cifras se acentúan en algunos departamentos como Atamisqui y Figueroa, lo que genera diversas hipótesis, tanto sobre la penetración del capitalismo en el agro, como también sobre la capacidad que tuvo el sector para resistir y permanecer. Este artículo identifica antiguos y renovados procesos de resistencia y recreación del campesinado en la ruralidad santiagueña, sosteniendo que el término campesino no está cristalizado, sino que es dinámico. Esto requiere una metodología más diacrónica que permita examinar su trayectoria, no solo a partir de las estrategias coyunturales, sino también a partir de su devenir en el tiempo.

Brazil has presided over the most comprehensive agrarian reform frontier colonization program on Earth, in which ~1.2 million settlers have been translocated by successive governments since the 1970's, mostly into forested hinterlands of Brazilian Amazonia. These settlements encompass 5.3% of this ~5 million km2 region, but have contributed with 13.5% of all land conversion into agropastoral land uses. The Brazilian Federal Agrarian Agency (INCRA) has repeatedly claimed that deforestation in these areas largely predates the sanctioned arrival of new settlers. Here, we quantify rates of natural vegetation conversion across 1911 agrarian settlements allocated to 568 Amazonian counties and compare fire incidence and deforestation rates before and after the official occupation of settlements by migrant farmers. The timing and spatial distribution of deforestation and fires in our analysis provides irrefutable chronological and spatially explicit evidence of agropastoral conversion both inside and immediately outside agrarian settlements over the last decade. Deforestation rates are strongly related to local human population density and road access to regional markets. Agrarian settlements consistently accelerated rates of deforestation and fires, compared to neighboring areas outside settlements, but within the same counties. Relocated smallholders allocated to forest areas undoubtedly operate as pivotal agents of deforestation, and most of the forest clearance occurs in the aftermath of government-induced migration.

Analysis of a natural fertility agrarian society with a multi-variate model of population ecology isolates three distinct phases of population growth following settlement of a new habitat: (1) a sometimes lengthy copial phase of surplus food production and constant vital rates; (2) a brief transition phase in which food shortages rapidly cause increased mortality and lessened fertility; and (3) a Malthusian phase of indefinite length in which vital rates and quality of life are depressed, sometimes strikingly so. Copial phase duration declines with increases in the size of the founding group, maximum life expectancy and fertility; it increases with habitat area and yield per hectare; and, it is unaffected by the sensitivity of vital rates to hunger. Transition phase duration is unaffected by size of founding population and area of settlement; it declines with yield, life expectancy, fertility and the sensitivity of vital rates to hunger. We characterize the transition phase as the Malthusian transition interval (MTI), in order to highlight how little time populations generally have to adjust. Under food-limited density dependence, the copial phase passes quickly to an equilibrium of grim Malthusian constraints, in the manner of a runner dashing over an invisible cliff. The three-phase pattern diverges from widely held intuitions based on standard Lotka-Verhulst approaches to population regulation, with implications for the analysis of socio-cultural evolution, agricultural intensification, bioarchaeological interpretation of food stress in prehistoric societies, and state-level collapse.

Using evidence from four ethnographically rich case studies of people who conduct shifting agriculture and swidden cultivation in the borderlands of South, East, and Southeast Asia, this introduction to the Special Forum argues that state territorialization of peripheral societies in Asia produces similar effects in spite of varying political, national, economic, and geographical contexts. In addition, in contrast to the large body of literature on agrarian change, which focuses on economic, political, and ecological changes in agricultural societies, this forum is particularly—but not singularly—devoted to understanding social, religious, and cosmological change. The four case studies demonstrate how the latter are intertwined with the more infrastructural dimensions as a total “way of life.” As part of the state territorialization of peripheral areas, in all four cases this “way of life” gets partially replaced, and changes become embedded in moral discourses of “modernity,” “civilization,” and “development,” which also involve multiple economic, political, social, cosmological, and religious dimensions. In spite of these powerful new hegemonic discourses, as the case studies demonstrate, contradictions and unexpected consequences frequently arise, showing that state control is never fully realized, and that social processes are always complex and in flux.