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The paper serves as an introduction to the RuJE special issue on the circulation of economic ideas between Russia and the West. This circulation is a contentious issue, especially among Russian economists. In this article a specific pattern of West–Russia–West transfer is investigated. The pattern suggests that experiencing strong influence from the West, leading Russian economists developed and modified Western economic theories, adapting them to specific Russian political, ideological and cultural circumstances. As a result, they exerted a certain influence over the next generations of Western economists. Among these circumstances the paper mentions moral and religious factors, the peasant question, the special influence of Marxism, the development of mathematics and statistics in Russia in the 1890s–1920s, and the unique experience of building a planned economy.

As we have seen in Chapter 3, the fallah question moved to the center of public discourse in the 1880s and 1890s, in the aftermath of the defeat of the ‘Urabists and the British occupation of Egypt. The peasant was now a moral subject as well as an object of reform, and a producing subject as well as an agricultural worker. The present chapter further elaborates the ways in which the moral and ideational analysis of the fallah as subject participated in the intense scrutiny given agricultural production at the end of the nineteenth century through an examination of agricultural

The twentieth century saw the emergence of the “peasant question” in Egypt as a discourse of social welfare and the reproduction of power relations. The reform of the Egyptian village and its inhabitants was a major concern within the discourse of social reform. Egyptian intellectuals often cited rural decay and criminality as reasons to institute reforms. A series of positivist interventions ensued to create a nahda rifiyya (rural renaissance) and to achieve new forms of social and spatial organization aimed at guiding the peasantry to “reformed” norms of behavior, modes of life, and social and cultural practices. The rural reconstruction work that was undertaken in the 1930s and 1940s was largely an attempt to have greater control over the laboring agricultural population. This chapter examines rural reconstruction in twentieth-century Egypt, focusing on the “peasant question” and the “problem of population.” It also discusses rural poverty and anomie by looking at discourses of positivist criminology, social welfare and hygiene, architectural modernism, and neo-Malthusianism.

This paper traces the evolution of land tenure changes in contemporary China since 1949. The transfer of land from peasant households to family farms and commercial sized units is on a vast scale and forms one of the greatest land reforms we have ever seen. The agrarian question forms both the policy and academic context in which this legislative account of land transfer is assessed and raises the question of whether land assembly in China resembles previous agricultural transformation policy and processes in industrialized countries or to what extent it has special characteristics of its own. The security of land holding in rural China, established with the household responsibility system, is seen to mature slowly over three to four periods of adjustment, always protecting the rights of peasants while improving conditions for increasing land productivity, resulting in an extension of the two rights of peasant holdings to three rights in the new millennium. The introduction of a third right, a land management right which is transferable from peasants to outsiders, has enabled a huge land assembly movement affecting millions of small holdings. This process of land tenure restructuring raises such questions as the consequences of the capitalization of agriculture, peasant land dispossession, proletarianization, and the prospect of a future land market in rural China, all topics for further research.

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 this article, I propose five ways to move beyond the analytical scheme of James Scott's \"Seeing Like a State\" (1998). I question the spatial optic that posits an \"up there,\" all-seeing state operating as a preformed repository of power, spread progressively outward to \"nonstate\" spaces beyond its reach. I highlight the role of parties beyond \"the state\" that attempt to govern--social reformers, scientists, and the so-called nongovernmental agencies, among others. I look beyond authoritarian high modernism to the more general problematic of \"improvement\" emerging from a governmental rationality focused on the welfare of populations. I explore the recourse to mētis (contextualized, local knowledge and practice) situated beyond the purview of planning. Finally, I reframe the question posed by Scott--why have certain schemes designed to improve the human condition failed?--to examine the question posed so provocatively by James Ferguson: What do these schemes do? What are their messy, contradictory, conjunctural effects?

Maize is a major staple produced by most peasant farmers in Ghana, amidst climate variabilities that potentially thwart the attainment of global sustainable development goals (SDGs), specifically SDG −2 of zero hunger. Ordinarily, one expects the extant literature to be replete on a nexus between climate variability adaptation strategies and maize yields. Ironically, there appears to be scant information on the expected nexus in Ghana's coastal areas. The dual questions about what adaptation strategies significantly affect maize yield, and the extent (magnitude) to which climate variability strategies affect maize yield beg answering. Inspired by these research questions, the objective of this article is to examine the effect of climate variability adaptation strategies on maize yield. This study relies on a cross-sectional data covering 197 smallholder maize farmers in the Cape Coast Metropolitan Assembly of Ghana's Central Region. The study is deeply rooted in a quantitative approach employing multiple linear regression and a treatment effect model (inverse probability weighted regression adjustment-IPWRA). Our findings reveal that adaptation strategies correlate with maize yields. Specifically, estimates from the IPWRA show that irrigation and changes in planting dates positively correlate with maize yields. The implication is that these adaptation strategies improve maize yields. Smallholder farmers are encouraged to adopt effective climate variability adaptation strategies to minimize the adverse risks associated with climate variability. The government of Ghana's initiative for arid regions, dubbed as the \"one village one dam\" initiative can be upscaled to southern Ghana to ensure sustainable agricultural development.

This article investigates Rwanda's agricultural policies and institutions as a historically contextualised response to exceptionally adverse developmental circumstances. Using the agrarian question as an analytical point of reference, the article argues that it is extremely difficult to identify how increases in productivity and income in smallholder agriculture can be achieved without forceful state action and a sustained injection of resources. In light of this, entirely right-congruent governance is caught in a dilemma about the extent to which the government overrides peasants' own agency and the extent to which the agrarian strategy produces a sustained and stable transformation in agriculture. Rather than making a defence or condemnation of the government's strategy, the article argues against pre-emptive judgements of an agrarian strategy that can only discernibly attain success over a long period. What the article does do is insist that there is development potential in the current strategy, not simply a disaster in the making.

2023 Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize, New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS) A study of the intersection of rural populations, state formation, and the origins of political conflict in Peru. On the eve of the twentieth century, Peru seemed like a profitable and yet fairly unexploited country. Both foreign capitalists and local state makers envisioned how remote highland areas were essential to a sustainable national economy. Mobilizing Andean populations lay at the core of this endeavor. In his groundbreaking book, The Rural State, Javier Puente uncovers the surprising and overlooked ways that Peru's rural communities formed the political nation-state that still exists today. Puente documents how people living in the Peruvian central sierra in the twentieth century confronted emerging and consolidating powers of state and capital and engaged in an ongoing struggle over increasingly elusive subsistence and autonomies. Over the years, policy, politics, and social turmoil shaped the rural, mountainous regions of Peru until violent unrest, perpetrated by the Shining Path and other revolutionary groups, unveiled the extent, limits, and fractures of a century-long process of rural state formation. Examining the conflicts between one rural community and the many iterations of statehood in the central sierra of Peru, The Rural State offers a fresh perspective on how the Andes became la sierra, how pueblos became comunidades, and how indígenas became campesinos.