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In recent years a debate has emerged about the conditions under which justiciable legal frameworks facilitate the fulfilment of socioeconomic rights. This debate has pitted institutionalist perspectives that emphasise the progressive potential of democratisation against structuralist perspectives that emphasise the constraints imposed by relationships of power and interest. This paper considers the debate in light of Indonesia’s recent experience. It suggests that we need to examine how institutional and structural factors interac twithin particular contexts to shape socioeconomic rights fulfilment, not examine these factors in isolation. It also considers the strategic implications of this argument for rights proponents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Seven decades after its first publication, Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation remains one of the most insightful readings about the socioeconomic changes associated with the Industrial Revolution, and the ways in which law facilitated, or countered, moves towards the commodification of land at that time. As today’s global land rush brings competing land claims into contest, new transitions are occurring between more commodified and more ‘socially embedded’ conceptualisations of land. Using Polanyi’s framework, this article analyses the role of international law in these processes. International investment law construes land as a commercial asset, can facilitate access to land for foreign investors and imposes discipline on the exercise of regulatory powers in land matters. But shifts in the political economy that underpins international investment law and growing recourse to international human rights law are creating new opportunities for reflecting the non-commercial (cultural, social, political) relations within which land rights remain embedded in many societies. When contrasting conceptualisations of land collide, the relative strength of legal rights and enforcement mechanisms become particularly important. Ultimately, the legitimacy of international law to mediate between competing land claims will depend on the extent to which it can recognise the multiple values that society attaches to land. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper has two main objectives. First, to address the problematic of the socioeconomic impact of land deals in sub-Saharan Africa by looking at what we know from the available literature so far, namely what has been claimed and how much research has been done, as well as why we do not know very much despite the quantity of material published. This is done via a systematic scoping review, which aims to avoid some of the biases inherent in conventional literature reviews and to provide evidence for some basic features of the emerging research on land grabs in Africa, with specific reference to their contribution to the understanding of livelihood impacts. Second, the article links empirical questions about the impact and implications of land grabs with a discussion of alternative (neglected) research questions, notably the implications of the current land rush phenomenon for the classic agrarian questions of capital and labour, as understood in agrarian political economy. Thus the paper proposes a re-engagement with debates on the classic agrarian questions in a Marxist political economy tradition in order to move the land grab research agenda towards more conceptually and empirically challenging research questions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In The Real Wealth of Nations, Eisler proposes a holistic view of the economy, which would include the caring sectors—the household, unpaid community work and the environment—as an alternative to market-oriented economic models that have proven ineffective in dealing with the problems facing our local and global communities. Her inclusion of language change as part of a strategy for economic transformation implicitly recognises the socially constitutive function of discourse, a notion put forth by critical linguists. Based on these economic and linguistic perspectives, this article reports on a study that examined the social knowledge about poverty constructed through selected discourses to determine whether they communicate a narrow or holistic view of the economy. It proposes that economic planning for poverty reduction build upon the process of language change towards a caring economy as revealed by the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Asian economic crisis of 1997 highlighted the inherent instability of the new worldwide economic order being created by highly mobile capital, and also its destabilizing social and political effects, especially in the transitional societies which had proved so hospitable to the champions of globalization and to proffered capital inputs. Whether these societies are destined to be subsumed and captured by globalization processes, or whether they and their citizens have any possibility of capturing some genuine benefits from advancing globalization, may rest on whether these transitional states and societies can assert, or at least influence, the terms of their engagement with those processes. This will not be possible, however, if people, societies and states capitulate in advance to the forces and processes of globalization as irresistible. This issue is explored through the grounded investigation of four key questions: do globalization processes serve any ends beyond themselves? How might one grasp the best, and make the most, of globalization? Is the logic of the market immutable and inflexible transculturally, or is it amenable to varying forms of cultural inflection and political supervision? Can what globalization delivers be drawn upon selectively, or is it instead a 'package-deal'? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]