CASAS is a politically engaged, solidarity-based network of scholar-activists from the Global South working in agrarian studies. Guided by a commitment to social, agrarian, environmental, gender, racial, and climate justice, we stand for the complete abolition of all forms of privilege rooted in the exploitation of labour, land, income, and social reproduction. We embrace plural and revolutionary forms of anti-capitalism, recognising that systemic inequalities—whether ethnic, racial, caste-based, or gendered—are mechanisms that sustain imperialism and oppression. United by solidarity and mutual care, our network fosters collaborative spaces that centre the struggles and knowledge of those on the margins, while collectively building transformative alternatives for agrarian and environmental justice.

CASAS is guided by a commitment to rigorous academic work that engages in dialogue and collaboration with social movements aligned with our values, supporting their struggles for radical transformation and the development of alternative approaches to social and ecological reproduction—including agroecology, social and solidarity economies, territorial self-governance, commoning, and buen vivir. As a network, we foster diversity and solidarity among Global South scholars, promote collaborative knowledge co-production through co-authorship and reviewing, expand the dissemination of our work in international academic spaces, and maintain a non-sectarian, reflexive, and caring approach to cross-border collaboration. We support scholar-activists working in conflict and settler colonial contexts, uphold democratic governance through our General Assembly and Reference Group, operate under a strict anti-sexual harassment and non-discrimination policy, and oppose classism, racism, casteism, regionalism, sexism, and all other forms of discrimination.

As a collective, we uphold social justice in academic spaces by challenging all forms of discrimination—racial, gender, caste, and others—and by confronting financial inequalities, exploitative publishing practices, structural barriers to recognition, precarious working conditions for junior scholars, and constraints on academic freedom. Second, we practice anti-colonial knowledge production by democratising access to knowledge, co-creating it collectively and reflexively in dialogue with agrarian struggles, and centring the perspectives of marginalised groups—including peasants, Indigenous Peoples, migrants, women, and workers—across Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and other colonised societies. We conceptualise the Global South as an insurgent political category rather than a fixed geography, critically reflect on our internal positionalities and power inequalities, reject the dominance of both Northern mainstream theories and Southern academic elites that reproduce colonial hierarchies, and remain open to scholars from the North who face systemic barriers. Third, we commit to language justice by recognising language as a tool of imperial domination, challenging the hegemony of English, promoting academic dissemination in diverse languages, and actively integrating Indigenous languages and knowledge systems into our spaces.

You can review our values and guiding principles in the document below: