Guolin Gu, CASAS’ member, has published an article in The Journal of Peasant Studies.
Abstract: Why do peasants refrain from resisting dispossession, even when faced with the loss of subsistence, minimal compensation, and limited state enforcement? This paper examines an ethnographic case of decade-long intra-village conflicts following partial land expropriation for railway construction in southwest China. It demonstrates how dispossessed villagers took advantage of ambiguous land rights and invoked moral claims to compete for inclusion into the very processes that marginalise them. As ‘fair compensation’ for expropriation, villagers aspired to become landlords and live off rental income but instead found themselves trapped in precarious work. I term such politics righteous complicity.
Read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2025.2476001
Follow us on our social media
CASAS
The Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Activists from the Global South (CASAS) is a community of Scholar-Activists working in critical agrarian studies.