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The term agro-extractivism has become synonymous with large-scale, corporate-controlled, monoculture plantation agriculture. The aim of this concept note is to clarify the extractivist dynamics in the current context of the capitalist development process. The paper surveys the development of agro-extractivism as a conceptual framework and as a feature of the contemporary political economy of agrarian change in Latin America. It briefly reflects on the potential contributions of land-based struggles to post-extractivist alternatives based on food sovereignty politics. The paper concludes by assessing the broader implications of agro-extractivism for our understanding of the agrarian question in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the deleterious effects of petroleum extractive activities in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, with a special focus on HIV infection. It argues against the hegemonizing claims of the "resource curse" thesis and deploys the framework of "accumulation by dispossession" to explain the crisis of development associated with the country's petroleum economy. The paper couches the challenges of economic survival in the petroleum resource-rich region on a predatory alliance between the extractive transnational corporations (TNCs) and the domestic compradors. It highlights the implications of extractive activities in the region for HIV infection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an analysis of the financialisation of the British welfare state. In a continuation of neo-liberal privatisation and labour market activation, the financialised welfare state pursues a policy of welfare retrenchment, while engaging in forms of social engineering aimed at producing self-responsibilised individuals and communities who are financially literate, ‘investment-ready’ and economically productive. New financial instruments such as social impact bonds are deployed to these ends, both to ‘solve social problems’ and enable cost saving. Through the use of such financial instruments, the implementation of regulatory infrastructures and tax incentives, the financialised welfare state becomes a vehicle for the transfer of wealth from the public to private investors, while subjecting the domain of social policy to the vicissitudes of global financial markets. This paper offers a critique of these developments, situating the case of Britain within the broader global context and with regard to the implications for understanding the current political economy of the welfare state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questioning the prevailing discourse of multiple benefits surrounding tourism development, this paper examines the Itanos Gaia investment on Cavo Sidero peninsula, north-eastern Crete as a hegemonic project of dispossession. Drawing on David Harvey's theorisation of accumulation by dispossession and Gramsci's original work on hegemony, we describe and analyse the specificities and antinomies of the Itanos Gaia project, first to chart the modalities of dispossession in four interrelated strands operative in this case: nature, land, financial speculation and the institutionalisation of dispossession, and second, to analyse the interplay between hegemony and the imposition of dispossession, including its internalisation in the realm of (local) civil society as 'common sense', underpinned by the local and broader dynamics of a particular power bloc. Empirically, this inquiry is informed by a survey conducted among local residents to identify local perceptions/views about the investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a critical assessment of how tourism development in the municipality of Los Cabos, Baja California Sur affects land and water use. Los Cabos is a seaside tourism Mecca located at the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula, in Mexico's northwest. There, subsidised profits and a process of dispossession in the tourism sector have to do mainly with land and water appropriation in the form of restrictions to beach access by the local population, urban segregation and, in an arid region, privileging water provision for the tourism industry over the needs of the population. In order to sustain these claims, we map water and land use for tourism in Cabo San Lucas. We also analyse the expansion of the Los Cabos type of tourism to the small town of La Ribera, in the East Cape-Cabo Pulmo area, where marinas and high scale housing for residential tourism sprout along the coast. We argue that the seemingly ever-growing presence of tourism in the region carries with it an urgent call for the reappraisal of current approaches to land and water use, if local resources are to deliver quality of life for the population, and not only economic profitability for (mostly) foreign capital. Analytically, we address these issues by unpacking David Harvey's concept of accumulation by dispossession, which – we argue – is for our purposes a broader tent than the (mostly Latin American) theorisations on extractivism, as we explain later in the relevant section of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to redress the under-appreciated significance of rent for political ecological analysis. We introduce the notion ofvalue grabbing, defined as the appropriation of (surplus) value through rent. A concept that is analytically distinct from accumulation, rent is both a social relation and a distributional process that is increasingly central to the reproduction of contemporary capitalism. Emphasis is placed on the “grabbing” of value in order to shed light on the processes at work by which surplus value is distributed unevenly between different classes and fractions of classes. A focus on rent within political ecology, we argue, can help us distinguish between two organically related but analytically distinct “moments”: (a) the creation of property rights that establish rent relations and (b) the struggle over the appropriation and distribution of surplus value generated by the rent relation itself. We explore some of the implications of this perspective for understanding new forms of socio-ecological struggles and their varied relations to the state. We maintain that a value-grabbing perspective has far-reaching consequences for political ecology, as it provides a sharp conceptual tool for situating a wide range of socio-ecological conflicts and movements as class struggles over value appropriation and distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a review of recent writings in political ecology and agrarian studies, this paper appraises the potential for emerging forms of ‘green economy’ initiatives to catalyze new forms of internal displacement in West Africa, with specific emphasis on the postwar contexts of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Following the International Committee of the Red Cross’ Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, the primary drivers of forced migration are conventionally thought to include some combination of civil war, ostensibly ‘ethnic’ strife or cleansing, development-induced migration, or allegedly ‘natural’ disasters. However, land acquisitions for both conservation and commercial agriculture seem poised to constitute an important additional driver of internal displacement, threatening to map onto the unresolved legacies of these previous instances of forced migration in both Liberia and Sierra Leone. Drawing lessons from the role of agrarian grievances in each country’s history of civil conflict, in particular, I explore the ways in which such forms of displacement may pose clear and present dangers to the very peacebuilding efforts that proponents of a green economy transition in the Mano River region claim to support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agroecology is in fashion, and now constitutes a territory in dispute between social movements and institutionality. This new conjuncture offers a constellation of opportunities that social movements can avail themselves of to promote changes in the food system. Yet there is an enormous risk that agroecology will be co-opted, institutionalized, colonized and stripped of its political content. In this paper, we analyze this quandary in terms of political ecology: will agroecology end up as merely offering a few more tools for the toolbox of industrial agriculture, to fine tune an agribusiness system that is being restructured in the midst of a civilizational crisis or, alternatively, will it be strengthened as a politically mobilizing option for building alternatives to development? We interpret the contemporary dispute over agroecology through the lenses of contested material and immaterial territories, political ecology, and the first and second contradictions of capital. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Neoliberalism is theorized by Marxist polymath David Harvey as a set of political economic practices—predicated upon the teological restoration of economic elite class power through policies of financial deregulation, capital liberalization, and privatization—entailing the intellectual de-legitimization of Keynesian economics, the axiomatization of neoclassical ontological and epistemological precepts regarding the primacy of the self-regulating market, and the retrenchment of the embedded welfare state. Neoliberalism has failed dramatically in its purported goal of reviving global capital accumulation since its inception in the late 20th century. Rather, its main substantive economic achievement has been to redistribute, rather than to generate, wealth and income. Furthermore, within academia, the neoliberal political-economic meta-structure is considered to have eroded the Western socio-cultural ethos writ large, thus irrevocably producing a combustible political environment in which an emergent proto-fascist insurgency—reified currently throughout the contemporary Western polity by the likes of Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen—may unfold. These conditions were effectuated by myriad mechanisms, however, most prominently by those which fall under the prescript of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. This pertains to the continuation and proliferation of capital accumulation practices which Marx had deemed as ‘primitive’ or ‘primal’ during the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. Broadly, these entail the commodification and privatization of land; transmutation of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive property rights (and the subsequent extraction of rents in the case of patents and intellectual property rights); erasure of many common property rights (e.g. state pensions, paid vacations, and access to education and health care); commodification of labor power and suppression of indigenous forms of production and consumerism; imperial procedures of appropriation of assets; liquidation of exchange and taxation; and usury, the national debt and the use of the credit system as a means for accumulation by dispossession. The neoliberal state assumes the central role of both supporting and promulgating these practices, by way of its possessing a monopoly over violence and definitions of legality. The purpose of this paper lies in the task of further elucidating these mechanisms, within the context of the contemporary Western political crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have become the epicenters of ‘land wars’ across India, with farmers resisting the state's forcible transfer of their land to capitalists. Based on 18 months of research focused on an SEZ in Rajasthan, this paper illuminates the role of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (ABD) in Indian capitalism today and its consequences for rural India. It argues that the existing theories of land grabs do not adequately explain why dispossession becomes necessary to accumulation at particular times and places, and seeks to reconstruct Harvey's theory of ABD to adequately account for it. It then shows the specific kind of rentier- and IT-driven accumulation that dispossession is making possible in SEZs and the non–labor-absorbing, real-estate–driven agrarian transformation this generates in the surrounding countryside. Land speculation amplifies class and caste inequalities in novel ways, marginalizes women and creates an involutionary dynamic of agrarian change that is ultimately impoverishing for the rural poor. Given the minimal benefits for rural India in this model of development, farmer resistance to land dispossession is likely to continue and pose the most serious obstacle to capitalist growth in India. The agrarian questions of labor and capital are, consequently, now rejoined in ‘the land question.’ [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Public--private partnerships (P3s) with the for-profit private sector are increasingly used in Canada to deliver public infrastructure and support services within the health care sector (e.g., hospitals, clinics, community health centres). This paper examines the emergence and legacy of P3s in the Canadian health care sector, classifying them as a form of neoliberal accumulation by dispossession and discussing their inability to live up to proponents' promises. Economic and social costs are examined, and examples are drawn from operational P3 hospitals in Canada. The article also briefly examines how P3s have been affected by the recent global financial crisis, arguing that despite serious problems with the private finance component of these projects, ultimately the policy is poised to weather the storm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1980, seed business law (patent law vis-à-vis agrobiotechnology, PVP law and seed laws) has been mainstreamed in the global South. Observers maintain that seed business law can lead to dispossession of farmers. I analyse legislation, statistics and case studies (Senegal, Burkina Faso), and argue that in African LDCs, dispossession primarily takes place through capturing seed markets via institutions for direct control over seed distribution. Domestic elites and (global) seed businesses preferably control germplasm via marketing boards, seed subsidies and other former colonial rural institutions. Seed business law, therefore, remains largely disused. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guatemala's palm oil production has surged in line with the global demand for biodiesel and vegetable oil production. While corporate land grabs have been a popular concept in agrarian studies, we emphasize the integral roles of the state and racially-charged political power relations, enhanced by the neoliberal food regime. These power relations, with racism at their core, foster land control grabs occurring alongside the rise of the palm oil industry. Their effects extend beyond merely the dispossession of land. The oil palm expansion and related dispossessions mostly benefit the international markets and the wealthy ruling class comprised of creole descendants and affluent ladinos. The soaring industry has given rise to human rights violations and a lack of access to or control of various resources, such as food and water. Based on fieldwork, we show that dispossessed Guatemalans, especially the indigenous, experience rising poverty, domestic food shortages and an influx of foreign foodstuffs as the meagrely paid work in the oil palm sector is only available for the few. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article analyses Macau's casinos as an example for accumulation by dispossession, in which they serve to transfer wealth from Mainland China to Macau and the casinos' foreign investors. They also represent a model for economic development and this model has migrated to Singapore, where it also operates as a form of accumulation by dispossession. By requiring citizens to pay an entrance fee, Singapore's casinos explicitly appropriate other people's money. The efficacy for the use of casinos as economic development is interrogated here because Macau's casino experience has emerged as a model for economic development in Asia beyond simply Singapore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural land dispossession has become a dominant mechanism of capital accumulation in the Chinese economy. However, the Chinese economy continues to rely on a migrant labor system that enables enterprises to accumulate capital precisely bynotdispossessing laborers, but instead enlisting rural communities in absorbing costs of workforce maintenance. These dual and contradictory mechanisms are particularly visible in China's urban construction sector, where enterprises require both low-cost labor and low-cost land for profitability. This contribution draws on long-term ethnographic research in Lan-ding Village, a labor-sending community undergoing land expropriations in Sichuan Province, to document a new system of class stratification resulting from these dual accumulation mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What happens when the Right to the City is understood as the right to reoccupy the inner city by middle-class suburbanites? In the self-styled Maboneng Precinct in Johannesburg, the writing is on the wall, literally. Graffiti reading, ‘We won't move’ on the roof of Revolution House begins to tell the story of hipster-styled urban gentrification in the city. These processes force a radical reinvention of the meaning of the right to the city, of centrality and of accumulation by dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay provides theoretical and empirical analysis of the interrelationships between land grabs, primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession (ABD) in the context of capitalist development. Evidence from a multi-class peasant formation in deltaic Bangladesh indicates that land grabs have been propelled by interactions between neoliberal globalization, state interventions, power relations and peasant resistance. Key roles have been played by illegal violence and de-linking of poor peasants from production organization and clientelist relations providing access to land. Establishment of a shrimp zone for export production has led to systematic eviction of the poor, backed by state power. Poor peasant resistance has shifted towards overt forms involving coalition-building and collective action. It is argued that the concept of primitive accumulation can subsume both market and non-market mechanisms as well as voluntary and involuntary transactions involving different degrees of intentionality, inclusive of deliberate dispossession, unintended consequences and negative externalities. Primitive accumulation and ABD correspond to distinct historical phases of capitalism and are subsumable under agenericconcept of ongoingcapitalism-facilitating accumulation. The dynamics of ‘actually existing capitalism’ display atwo-wayandrecursivecausal relationship in which continuing primitive accumulation is as much aconsequenceof expanding capitalist production as itsprecondition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the context of the 2008 financial crisis and how it has impacted on countries across the globe, it is striking how few scholars have critically analysed why and how past crises have created opportunities for states and capitalists to exploit the so-called ‘bottom of the pyramid consumers’ in the developing world. By situating the analysis within the wider neoliberalization processes, this article seeks to denaturalize the extension of consumer credit to the growing number of informal sector workers who comprise the relative surplus population in Mexico. Drawing on an historical materialist frame, I outline a key feature of the neoliberal Mexican state—what I refer to as the debtfare state—that has served to facilitate accumulation by dispossession strategies. These neoliberal strategies serve to expose and integrate spaces of informality into different facets of the capitalist market, i.e. the credit system, without including them ‘inside’ the capital relation–reproducing spaces of marginality and insecurity. En el contexto de la crisis financiera de 2008 y la forma como ha impactado a los países de todo el mundo, es impresionante cómo pocos académicos han analizado críticamente, porqué y cómo las crisis pasadas han creado oportunidades para estados y capitalistas para explotar a lo que se ha llamado ‘base de la pirámide de consumidores’ en el mundo en desarrollo. Este artículo busca desnaturalizar la extensión del crédito del consumidor al creciente número del sector de trabajadores que comprende el excedente relativo de población en México, situando el análisis dentro de los procesos de neoliberalización más amplios. A partir de un marco materialista histórico, describo una característica clave del estado mexicano neoliberal—a lo que me refiero como estado debtfare—que se ha servido para facilitar la acumulación por medio de estrategias de expropiación. Estas estrategias neoliberales sirven para exponer e integrar espacios de informalidad dentro de diferentes facetas del mercado capitalista, es decir el sistema de crédito, sin incluirlos ‘dentro’ de la relación del capital—reproduciendo espacios de marginalidad e inseguridad. 在2008年金融危机及它如何影响了世界各国的背景下，批判地分析过去的危机为何及如何为国家和资本家们创造了机会以剥削发展中世界所谓的“金字塔底层消费者”，这样的学者是如此之少。通过把分析置于更广泛的新自由化进程之内，本文寻求使消费者信贷扩展到人数不断增多的非正式部门工人这一现象非自然化，这些工人组成为墨西哥的相对剩余人口。利用一种历史唯物主义的架构，我勾画了新自由主义墨西哥国家（我称之为债务国家 ，它已服务于以剥夺战略促进积累）的一个关键特征。这些新自由主义战略服务于揭开各种非正式空间，将其整合进资本主义市场即信贷体系的不同方面，而不把它们纳入资本关系，对边缘和不安全空间进行再生产。 2008년 금융위기와 그것이 세계에 준 충격 맥락에서 놀랍게도 과거 위기가 국가와 자본가들에게 소위 개발 도상국에서 ‘피라밋 하단’으로 불리는 소비자들을 착취할 수 있는 기회를 만든 것을 비판적으로 분석하는 학자는 대단히 적다. 이 글은 신자유주의화 과정을 분석하여 멕시코에서 상대적인 잉여 인구를 구성하고 있는 비공식 부문 노동자들에게 소비자 크레딧을 확대하는 것을 탈자연주의화하고자 한다. 사적 유물론적 틀을 갖고 탈취 전략으로 축적을 촉진시키는데 기여한 - 부채국가(debtfare state)라고 부른 - 신자유주의 멕시코 국가의 핵심적인 내용을 다룬다. 이러한 신자유주의 전략들은 비공식성의 공간을 다양한 자본주의 시장 즉, 자본 관계 내부로 포함시키지 않고, 주변성과 불안의 공간을 재생산하는 크레딧 시스템에 노출시키고 또한 통합하는데 기여한다. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article shows how wildlife and marine conservation in Tanzania lead to forms of ‘green’ or ‘blue grabbing’. Dispossession of local people's land and resources has been gradual and piecemeal in some cases, while it involved violence in other cases. It does not primarily take the usual form of privatization of land. The spaces involved are still formally state or village land. It is rather the benefits from the land and natural resources that contribute to capital accumulation by more powerful actors (rent-seeking state officials, transnational conservation organizations, tourism companies, and the State Treasury). In both cases, restrictions on local resource use are justified by degradation narratives, while financial benefits from tourism are drained from local communities within a system lacking in transparent information sharing. Contrary to other forms of primitive accumulation, this dispossession is not primarily for wage labour or linked to creation of a labour reserve. It is the wide-open spaces without its users that are valued by conservation organizations and the tourism industry. The introduction of ‘community-based conservation’ worked as a key mechanism for accumulation by dispossession allowing conservation a foothold in village lands. This foothold produced the conditions under which subsequent dispossessions could take place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The increasing power of concentrated financial capital is accompanied by an extension of processes of commodification and procedures of dispossession similar to forms of original accumulation. This continuing and reinforced accumulation by dispossession in its different guises is capital's answer to the problem of over-accumulation. As a form of dispossessing accumulation, the implementation and extension of intellectual property monopolies is of particular importance. In the context of an increasing socialization of labor, in particular of innovative activities, the private appropriation of knowledge in the form of intellectual property monopolies and its commercial valorization has become a central characteristic of the current configuration of capitalism. Income based on such property titles has become an important form of the appropriation of resources in the finance-dominated accumulation regime. The article applies Marxian rent theory to intellectual property monopolies. Findings from the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries illustrate how, based on specific power relations, the owners of property titles can appropriate resources and values. Rent extraction processes take place on different scales, from the enforcement of property monopolies over gene sequences to the role of the USA as a rentier state on a global scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberalization has swept across the world like a vast tidal wave of institutional reform and discursive adjustment, entailing much destruction, not only of prior institutional frameworks and powers, but also of divisions of labor, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life, attachments to the land, habits of the heart, ways of thought, and the like. To turn the neoliberal rhetoric against itself, we may reasonably ask: in whose particular interests is it that the state take a neoliberal stance and in what ways have these particular interests used neoliberalism to benefit themselves rather than, as is claimed, everyone, everywhere? Neoliberalism has spawned a swath of oppositional movements. The more clearly oppositional movements recognize that their central objective must be to confront the class power that has been so effectively restored under neoliberalization, the more they will likely themselves cohere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]