What is LDPI?
More than a decade ago, the Land Deals Politics Initiative (LDPI) was launched as a loose network of scholars and activists concerned about the rise of land, water and green grabs across the world and the consequences for rural livelihoods and agrarian relations. A massive wave of investment in land, resulting in expropriation and displacement had emerged following the financial, food and energy crises of 2008-09. We wanted to understand what was going on and how best to respond. Between 2009–2019, LDPI organised a series of events to analyse the social, economic, political and environmental dynamics of large-scale land deals and their implications for policy and social movements. LDPI funded significant research and contributed to a considerable body of published scholarly research on land deals, all of which shaped policy discussions and informed numerous initiatives such as the FAO’s Tenure Guidelines.
The current LDPI agenda
The global debate around land deals has diminished in the last several years, but important research and political questions remain. What happened to the thousands of land grabs documented by researchers, non-governmental organisations, activist groups, news media, and aid agencies? What new configurations of land, labour and capital have emerged since? How has the rise of authoritarian, state-led populism and politics re-shaped the tensions between ‘foreignisation’ and extraction? We made a Call for Applications for Small Grants ($3,000 each), and we received close to 700 applications! We have been able to fund 27 recipients.
This LDPI conference
Meanwhile, the organisers of the LDPI are collaborating with several leading research hubs in organizing an International Conference on Global Land Grabbing on 19-21 March 2024 in Bogota, Colombia which will include academic researchers, activists and policymakers from across the world
Funding
The very limited funds we have will be allocated to some basic conference expenses (free lunches for conference participants), simultaneous English/Spanish translation, travel/accommodation subsidy to a handful invited speakers (especially those from the Global South and social movements). If you are keen on participating, at least you still have several months to look for your own funding. We will later provide a list of low-priced hostel/hotel accommodation in Bogota, plus possibilities for ‘solidarity accommodation’. But there will be no conference fee.
Call for Papers
We are inviting academic researchers, policy experts, activists in the Global North and South to submit abstracts for the conference. The proposed themes include:
· What happened to failed large-scale land grabs?
· Multiple, invisible domestic land grabs
· The implications for labour
· The role of science
· Processes of financialisation
· Green energy and climate change
· Green grabbing, neoliberal conservation and market-based instruments
· Growth as extra-territorial development
· Land grabs and environmental change
· The national political context of land grabbing
· Violence, from the everyday to the spectacular
· Resistance and mobilisation
· Policy and political change
· Methodology
· Towards theorisation
· Global South and Global North
Conference outputs
The aim is to publish the papers online beginning mid-February 2024 in the LDPI Working Paper series as a way to share them widely in the build-up to and during the March 2024 international conference in Bogota. Having widely circulating papers will facilitate vibrant, open conversations. Five leading journals are co-organizing the initiative: Journal of Peasant Studies, World Development, Antipode, Globalizations, and Análisis Político. Some special issues or special forums in these journals may be organized for selected appropriate papers from this initiative.
Online submission
Submit an online application here https://forms.gle/HapahGfuFKde23C27
Your application should include an abstract of 350 words, with author’s bio of 100 words, plus title, keywords and authors’ institutional affiliation.
Deadline for applications: 31 October 2023
For selected abstracts, deadline for full conference papers: 15 February 2024.
International Organizing Team
Andrea Sosa (CONICET, Argentina), Rama Dieng (U of Edinburgh), Arnim Scheidel (UAB-ICTA Barcelona), Jacobo Grajales (Pantheon-Sorbonne University, Paris), Tor Benjaminsen (Norwegian University of Life Sciences; Political Ecology Forum), Jampel Dell’Angelo (VU, Amsterdam; NEWAVE), COHD/China Agricultural University (Ye Jingzhong, Wang Chunyu and Liu Juan), Diana Ojeda (Indiana University), Barry Gills (U of Helsinki; EXALT), Transnational Institute or TNI (Katie Sandwell, Sylvia Kay and Jennifer Franco), Dzifa Torvikey (ISSER, U of Ghana), Lorenzo Cotula (IIED), Diana Aguiar (Federal University of Bahia, Brazil), Sergio Sauer (U of Brasilia), Murat Arsel (Erasmus University Rotterdam/ISS, The Hague), Marc Edelman (CUNY), Ruth Hall (PLAAS, Cape Town; SARChI), Ben White (Erasmus University Rotterdam/ISS, The Hague), Wendy Wolford (Cornell U), Ian Scoones (IDS Sussex; PASTRES) and Jun Borras (Erasmus University Rotterdam ISS, The Hague; RRUSHES-5).
Colombia Organizing Team
U. Nacional (Francisco Gutierrez Sanín), U. Rosario (Rocío del Pilar Peña Huertas), U. los Andes (Angela Serrano), U. Javeriana (Julio Arias), U. Externado (Flavio Bladimir Rodríguez Muñoz and Dario Fajardo), CINEP (Sergio Coronado) and the Colombian team of RRUSHES-5 project (Itayosara Rojas and Lorenza Arango, ISS PhD researchers).
See conference updates on:
www.iss.nl/en/research/research-networks/land-deal-politics-initiative
For queries, please send email to: landdealpoliticsinitiative@gmail.com
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CASAS
The Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Activists from the Global South (CASAS) is a community of Scholar-Activists working in critical agrarian studies.