Short Abstract

Investments in land and agriculture are contested sites where wealth and accumulation converge with morality and belonging. This panel inquires into the premises, imaginaries and contradictions of ‘moral investments’ and their effects on agrarian futures.

Long Abstract

Across Africa, emerging farmers as well as civil servants, entrepreneurs, or pensioners, and other members of an expanding middle to upper strata increasingly invest in the acquisition and expansion of land and agriculture. These investments may be motivated not only be profit but also by aspirations to autonomy, masculinity, status, belonging, or responsibility for family, community, or nation. They can thus be forms of self-fashioning embedded in imaginaries about what wealth should do, whom it should benefit, and how a successful life ought to be lived.

At the same time, such ‘moral investments’ are not to separate from processes of accumulation and agrarian change. They might stimulate employment, services or markets. Or they might intensify dispossession, inequality, or dependency. Consequently, the moral claims attached to investment may predicate practices of redistribution, care or inclusive development, but also legitimize profit, patronage or unequal resource access.

We invite contributions that critically assess the premises, imaginaries and contradictions of ‘moral investments’ into land and agriculture and their effects on agrarian futures. Questions can include how and in reference to what, e.g. the ethics of Ubuntu or globalized models of ‘community based development’, moral claims are formulated and enacted, how ‘moral investments’ reshape kinship, gender, generation and class and the respective imaginaries and norms, or how wealth itself transforms through such investments, e.g. in respect to obligation or care. We particularly welcome contributions that attend to various perspectives and positionalities and the situated and often contested construction of legitimacy, power and knowledge.

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