Paper short abstract:

We wish to share the latest information and often ignored story of Zimbabwe's land reform

Paper long abstract:

Dubbed the most redistributive land reform post-cold war, Zimbabwe's land reform is and has been under attack from neoliberal forces since day one. We trace, the reversal of this broad-based land reform from various fronts and the resultant outcomes in terms of the class configuration, accumulation trajectories, and politics ensuing. Evidence arising from multiple sites in the countryside reveals that neoliberal condescension at times at the behest of the state has reconfigured land ownership directly and directly through multiple maneuvers such as pseudo-win-win joint venture agreements; land leasing (virtual dispossession); outright (re) dispossession and new state-sanctioned land allocations. The most affected class is the poor peasants and a minority of large-scale land reform beneficiaries. The latter class is largely alienated from the land based on a rapidly shifting political terrain. The responses to these counter agrarian maneuvers spur a spectrum of successful resistance (pivot politics) and courtroom battles (legal fare). The implications of these findings reveal and point to the mysteriousness of capital and embeddedness and enduring nature of the struggle for survival at one pole and the Spatio-temporal fixedness of capital in a changing world and the enduring land question in a developing transitional state.

Keywords: Counter Agrarian Reform; land reform; neoliberalism; capitalism;