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Rural social movements have in recent years adopted agroecology and diversified farming systems as part of their discourse and practice. Here, we situate this phenomenon in the evolving context of rural spaces that are increasingly disputed between agribusiness, together with other corporate land-grabbers, and peasants and their organizations and movements. We use the theoretical frameworks of disputed material and immaterial territories and of re-peasantization to explain the increased emphasis on agroecology by movements in this context. We provide examples from the farmer-to-farmer movement to show the advantages that social movements bring to the table in taking agroecology to scale and discuss the growing agroecology networking process in the transnational peasant and family farmer movementLa Vía Campesina.

This article examines the rationale behind municipal and local governments' pursuance of urbanization, and the political and socio-economic implications of the policy to move villagers from their farmland into apartment blocks in high-density resettlement areas, or “concentrated villages.” It provides evidence of an increasing reliance by municipal and local governments on land revenues and the financing of urban infrastructure by the governments' land-leasing income. Following their relocation to apartment blocks, villagers complain that their incomes fall but their expenditures rise. Moreover, although they cede rights to the use of their farmland to the government, they are not given access to the state-provided social welfare to which urban residents are entitled. The paltry compensation which they receive for their land is insufficient to sustain them. Displaced or landless peasants are emerging as a distinctly disadvantaged societal group, deprived of the long-term security of either farmland or social welfare. The question of whether or not rural land rights should be freely traded is not as crucial to the future livelihoods of landless peasants as allowing them access to the full range of social welfare afforded to urban residents.

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.

I use data covering 267 prefectures over four centuries to investigate two questions about historical China. To what extent did weather shocks cause civil conflict? And to what extent did the historical introduction of (drought resistant) sweet potatoes mitigate these effects? I find that before the introduction of sweet potatoes, exceptional droughts increased the probability of peasant revolts by around 0.7 percentage points, which translates into a revolt probability in drought years that is more than twice the average revolt probability. After the introduction of sweet potatoes, exceptional droughts only increased the probability of peasant revolts by around 0.2 percentage points.

As a result of its open-door policies and 30 years of reform, China has become the \"world's factory\" and given rise to a new working class of rural migrant workers. This process has underlain a path of (semi-)proletarianization of Chinese peasant-workers: now the second generation is experiencing dagong, working for a boss, in industrialized towns and cities. What is the process of proletarianization of peasant-workers in China today? In what way does the path of proletarianization shape the new Chinese working class? Drawing on workers' narratives and our ethnographic studies in Shenzhen and Dongguan between 2005 and 2008, this study focuses on the subjective experiences of the second generation of dagongmei/zai, female migrant workers/male migrant workers, who have developed new forms of power and resistance unknown to the previous generation of workers. Did the pain and trauma experienced by the first generation of dagong subjects gradually evolve into the anger and resentment that has conditioned the labor strikes and class actions of the second generation? In short, what continuity and change can we observe in the life struggles of this new working class? Is the second generation of dagong subjects compelled to take action as a result of long-endured pain and anger? Self, anger, and collective action among the new working class propel the narrative described in this article.

We analyze the emergence of the first socioeconomic institution in history limiting fertility: west of a line from St. Petersburg to Trieste, the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) reduced childbirths by approximately one-third between the fourteenth and eighteenth century. To explain the rise of EMP we build a two-sector model of agricultural production—grain and livestock. Women have a comparative advantage in animal husbandry. After the Black Death in 1348-1350, land abundance triggered a shift toward the pastoral sector. This improved female employment prospects, leading to later marriages. Using detailed data from England, we provide strong evidence for our mechanism.

In recent years, China has instituted a variety of reforms to its hukou system, an institution with the power to restrict population mobility and access to state-sponsored benefits for the majority of China's rural population. A wave of newspaper stories published in late 2005 understood the latest round of reform initiatives to suggest that the hukou is set to be abolished, and that rural residents will soon be “granted urban rights.” This article clarifies the basic operations of the hukou system in light of recent reforms to examine the validity of these claims. We point out that confusion over the functional operations of the hukou system and the nuances of the hukou lexicon have contributed to the overstated interpretation of the initiative. The cumulative effect of these reforms is not abolition of the hukou, but devolution of responsibility for hukou policies to local governments, which in many cases actually makes permanent migration of peasants to cities harder than before. At the broader level, the hukou system, as a major divide between the rural and urban population, remains potent and intact.

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.

We analyze the colonial land revenue institutions set up by the British in India, and show that differences in historical property rights institutions lead to sustained differences in economic outcomes. Areas in which proprietary rights in land were historically given to landlords have significantly lower agricultural investments and productivity in the post-independence period than areas in which these rights were given to the cultivators. These areas also have significantly lower investments in health and education. These differences are not driven by omitted variables or endogeneity problems; they probably arise because differences in historical institutions lead to very different policy choices.

Despite the fact that urban hukou is understood to be far superior to rural hukou and that rural migrants have strong intention to stay in cities for many years, responses to hukou reforms that increase opportunities to obtain urban hukou have been less than enthusiastic. This article addresses this puzzle by showing how the respective values of rural hukou and urban hukou have changed in recent decades. The access and benefits that are tied to rural hukou-including farming and housing land, compensation for land requisition, and more relaxed birth control-are considered increasingly valuable. Thus, many migrants are opting to straddle and circulate between the city and countryside rather than giving up their rural hukou. Meanwhile, the competitive advantage of urban hukou has declined as China seeks to expand basic public services to all and as the market's role in distri-buting food, housing, and other needs increases. The mismatch between rural migrants' preference for large cities and hukou reforms' focus on medium-sized and small cities and towns also undermines the reforms' effectiveness. From a policy point of view, this article's findings suggest that China's urbanization strategy should take multilocality seriously and should focus on rural migrants' livelihood and well-being in cities, rather than on hukou conversion alone.