Presentation short abstract

This study analyzes how Kenya's devolution reconfigured rural governance into new regimes of dispossession. By weaponizing ethnicity and eroding pastoral moral economies, administrative boundaries now drive calculated terror, displacement, and violent land enclosure.

Presentation long abstract

The 2010 Constitution of Kenya introduced devolution to redress historical marginalization, yet in the northern frontiers, this political restructuring has unintentionally assembled new regimes of dispossession. Responding to the panel’s call to ground conflict analysis in political ecology, this study challenges simplistic narratives that attribute violence in Northern Kenya to mere ethnic hatred or climatic scarcity. Instead, I argue that ethnicity is being weaponized to achieve dispossession, transforming administrative boundaries into instruments of land enclosure and accumulation. Drawing on qualitative research (2022–2024) in the contested borderlands of Baringo, Turkana, Samburu and West Pokot Counties, the paper uses assemblage theory to examine how new state policies, territorial narratives, and local actors converge to reconfigure rural governance. The paper analyzes the erosion of the pastoral moral economy, showing how practices once rooted in redistributive survival, such as cattle raiding, have mutated into calculated campaigns of terror aimed at displacement. In this fenced future, devolution has not brought equity but has reassembled the landscape into a theatre of violent resource competition. The findings illustrate how the territorialization of ethnicity perpetuates cycles of forced migration and insecurity, offering a grounded political ecology of how state-building processes drive dispossession in non-Western contexts.

Presentation short abstract

Drawing on work in Argentina, we unpack the process of smallholder displacement due to the expansion of commodity agriculture. Our analysis invites reflection on the temporality of rural displacement and on the ‘forced' versus ‘voluntary’ nature of families’ relocation towards urbanizing centers.

Presentation long abstract

Today, about half of the planet's habitable area has been converted to crop- and pastureland. As this agricultural footprint continues to grow, understanding how the presence of people gives way to that of crops is urgent. In this paper, we unpack the process of smallholder displacement due to the expansion of commodity agriculture. Our analysis draws on qualitative fieldwork in the Argentine Chaco, where large-scale soy and cattle operations are advancing over forest. We find that the enclosure of resources by agribusiness is often brought to term when communities experience a shock—such as a legal defeat or the death of an elderly leader—that leads to an internal race to sell land. This feedback cycle, triggered by a single event but enabled by the build-up of constraints over time, leads to a relatively sudden dissolution of rural communities. What this case draws attention to, then, is the pacing of displacement: how it is slow until sometimes it is not. It is in these final, accelerated moments of community dissolution that land is made available for commodity production, underscoring the importance of examining how people hold on to land and what finally causes them to let it go.

By taking as point of departure the agency of rural families and by examining the dynamics happening both at sites of departure and of arrival, our analysis provokes reflection on the temporality of displacement as well as on the ‘forced' versus ‘voluntary’ nature of rural smallholders’ relocation towards urbanizing centers due to land grabbing.

Presentation short abstract

Using critical agrarian studies and intersectional political ecology, this presentation examines land conflicts and rural migration in Nicaragua’s Bosawas Reserve, critiquing “interethnic” framings and showing how extractivist dispossession and classed racial-spatial hierarchies shape violence.

Presentation long abstract

I draw from critical agrarian studies and intersectional political ecology to criticize narratives that frame conflicts in indigenous territories as “interethnic.” Focusing on the colonization of indigenous territories in the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast, and drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I examine how territorial disputes are reduced to clashes between “culturally incompatible” indigenous communities and “non-indigenous” mestizo migrants. I argue that this framing obscures how indigenous territorial insecurity is rooted in the nexus of extractivist accumulation by dispossession, rural migration, and territorial violence, enabled by state policies that prioritize extractivism and large-scale agriculture, marginalizing and uprooting both “indigenous” and “non-indigenous” rural lives. Moreover, it invisibilizes how intersecting axes of class, race, and space shape the lived realities and subjectivities of mestizo campesinos, often left essentialized in agrarian studies literature.

In state imaginaries, the Caribbean Coast and its indigenous territories—racialized as an indigenous space—are conceptualized simultaneously as a resource bank and as a spatial fix for campesinos dispossessed by extractivism on the Pacific Coast. Although migrants hold racial privilege over indigenous communities, their class-based marginalization results in precarity. Moreover, the Caribbean Coast’s spatial–racial framing renders mestizos as migrants and “settler-colonos,” even when they are Caribbean Coast–born. This status facilitates their exclusion, while the broader structural privilege of mestizo elites—the true agents of large-scale extractivist land accumulation—remains unchallenged. By unsettling the notion of a homogeneous “mestizo” identity, I demonstrate that violence and migration are inextricably linked to intersectional racial–class-spatial hierarchies and extractivist regimes of dispossession.

Presentation short abstract

The talk proposes the term commons grabbing as a wider concept than just land grabbing. It explains how and why people are migrating and exposed to climate change. Ethnographic data from research in Zambia and Senegal shows that debates on migration and climate change hide this process.

Presentation long abstract

The talk will highlight how the notion of 'commons grabbing', which is also relevant to peasant studies, could help us to understand the root causes of grounded political ecology. Long-term ethnographic research in Zambia and Senegal over the last 10 to 20 years illustrates how such processes are often overlooked when discussing land grabbing and local migration, and how they relate to structural violence concerning food security, conservation, and climate change adaptation. The selected research areas are previously resource-rich areas that were managed by common property institutions of peasants, as well as nomadic and hunter-gatherer groups, such as the Senegal River (Senegal) and the Kafue Flats Floodplain (Zambia). These areas were once managed by local common property institutions (rules and regulations), which created cultural landscape ecosystems. However, the analysis of these systems must go beyond the often apolitical debate on the commons (see the work of Ostrom omitting power reflections) and be analysed using theoretical approaches combining institutional theory and political ecology concerning structural (capital), discursive (development) and ontological (naturalist) power. This will help us to understand the root causes of institutional change from common to state and private property. The talk will argue that this is the basis for pushing people out of their areas, undermining their relationship with their cultural landscapes and their local climate change resilience. Migration is then one of the few ways in which peasants can diversify their strategies, as remittances from migrants also help to secure the commons and remain connected.

Presentation short abstract

In Western Ethiopia, longitudinal fieldwork on six investor farms reveals state support for selected investors amid armed insurgency. Peasants and pastoralists continuously negotiate access to land and jobs. We interpret this as regimes of dispossession linking state accumulation to rural conflict.

Presentation long abstract

Despite repeated shortcomings in meeting their stated promises and mixed evidence regarding their socio-economic impacts, governments worldwide continue to prioritise large-scale agricultural land investments as central to development agendas. Ethiopia is a prime example of this, using both foreign and domestic capital to achieve economic growth, job creation, food security and increased state control over rural areas. The majority of these medium- and large-scale farms focus on producing commodities and seeds primarily for the domestic market and are lagging behind in their objectives. To analyse the political economy behind these investments, we conducted fieldwork in 2016 on six farms in western Ethiopia — three managed by Indian investors and three by Ethiopian investors. Through interviews with company managers, workers, local communities, and governmental and non-governmental representatives, we explored investment processes, state interactions, community outcomes, and labour dynamics. Nine years later, we revisited the same sites and individuals to assess longitudinal changes. Our findings reveal the active promotion and selective support of particular investors by both the national and regional governments amid an ongoing armed insurgency and contests over authority and resource allocation. Socially differentiated peasants and pastoralists have continously been negotiating their access to land and employment opportunities. We interpret these dynamics through Michael Levien’s concept of 'regimes of dispossession', linking state-backed accumulation processes to rural social struggles, and situate our findings within the literature that connects violent conflict and (historical) agrarian struggles over land and other resources.

Presentation short abstract

Mapuche communities in southern Argentina face renewed dispossession amid extractive pressures and a far-right turn driving administrative rollbacks. The paper analyses territorial claims and resistance through a grounded political ecology lens.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines contemporary processes of land dispossession affecting Mapuche communities in the southern Andes, focusing on intensifying disputes over territorial claims in the South of the Province of Mendoza, in Argentina. Building on grounded political ecology and classic peasant studies, the analysis situates these struggles within broader regimes of dispossession shaped by extractive expansion, land concentration by economic and political elites and shifting state agendas.

Since the 1990s, legal recognition frameworks (impulse by the ILO 169) enabled the formation and legal recognition of Mapuche communities with collective landholding structures, improving livelihoods and territorial security. These gains, however, have become increasingly fragile. Argentina’s recent far-right turn has triggered administrative rollbacks in the recognition of Mapuche communities, accompanied by public campaigns aimed at delegitimising their territorial claims and facilitating access to lands sought for mining, hydrocarbons, and tourism development.

Through ethnographic insights and discourse analysis, the presentation explores how administrative procedures themselves become instruments of dispossession, reshaping the political terrain in which territorial claims are negotiated. At the same time, Mapuche communities mobilise legal strategies, alliances, and everyday forms of resistance to defend ancestral territories and sustain rural livelihoods.

By foregrounding the interplay between land rights, extractive interests, and state power, this study challenges reductionist explanations of conflict and demonstrates how the Mapuche case illuminates the nexus between dispossession, agrarian political economy, and territorial struggle.

Presentation short abstract

This paper contests prevailing narratives that attribute conflict and migration in the Sahel primarily to ethnicity, climate change, or poverty. It identifies five distinct regimes of dispossession which exacerbate both migration and the growth of armed groups, as reactions to perceived injustices.

Presentation long abstract

This paper contests prevailing narratives that attribute conflict and migration in the Sahel primarily to factors such as ethnicity, climate change, or poverty. Instead, we underscore land dispossession as a central, yet insufficiently examined, driver of both phenomena. Drawing on peasant studies and political ecology, and based on many empirical studies we identified five distinct, regimes of dispossession: peri-urban, large-scale agricultural, pastoral, community, and licensed dispossessions. These different regimes of dispossession may overlap and are not mutually exclusive. They are influenced by state policies, elite capture, social differentiation and global economic pressures, resulting in coercive land redistribution and the marginalisation of rural populations. We contend that dispossession exacerbates both migration and the growth of armed groups, including jihadist movements, as reactions to perceived injustices. By reevaluating concepts such as moral economy and primitive accumulation, the paper offers a new understanding of the crises in the Sahel, using land and migration as key points, to emphasize the need for historically and politically informed analyses rather than reductionist explanations.

Presentation short abstract

Contemporary land conflicts in northern Uganda are largely interpreted as a legacy of the Lord’s Resistance Army war. Here, I argue that they are rooted in colonial policies that, a century ago, used sleeping sickness control as a pretext to sever communities from the landscape that sustained them.

Presentation long abstract

In 2006, after two decades of war, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) withdrew from northern Uganda, allowing 1.1 million Acholis to begin recovering from years of forced displacement and internment. The ensuing resettlement process was marred by violent land conflicts – particularly in western Acholiland, where peasant communities continue to clash with powerful investors over land the Ugandan government characterizes as “idle” (Mabikke 2011).

Standard analyses claim these clashes arise from wartime displacement and demographic shifts colliding with circumstances of the global land grab to ignite competition over previously empty lands. Blinkered by a focus on the LRA war and its effects, such studies take the historic emptiness of western Acholiland for granted. Conversely, this paper adopts a longue durée lens within a political ecology framework to argue that this emptiness was “produced” (Edelman and León 2013).

In 1912, British administrators forcibly relocated the entire population of western Acholiland – ostensibly for sleeping-sickness control. Colonial correspondence indicates, however, that the disease posed little threat in Acholiland. Through ethnographic and archival evidence, I demonstrate that administrators in fact used sleeping-sickness measures to uproot Acholi communities, deliberately severing socio-ecological relationships to subdue a population officials feared would evade colonial economic and political control so long as it remained “assisted by hills.”

I close by examining how the stakes of contemporary land conflicts change when we acknowledge western Acholi peasants are not merely competing with investors for “empty” land, but rather struggling to reclaim land their ancestors lost through deeper histories of dispossession.

Presentation short abstract

This paper focuses on the relationship between the mining industry and small-scale local farmers in Moatize, Mozambique, demonstrating how farmers organize to confront a powerful state-backed mining company, which expropriated their livelihood means.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the relationship between the mining industry and small-scale local farmers in Moatize, Mozambique. It examines how farmers organise to oppose exploitation and reclaim expropriated land and resources following displacement and resettlement. It will analyse the various forms of mobilisation adopted by small farmers, including overt and covert actions which escalated into violence and were subsequently suppressed by the police, raising issues of human rights violations. It argues that the resistance to land expropriation in Moatize is a rejection of the mining exploitation model that is devastating the territory on which livelihoods and access to different medicines depend. Small farmers have struggled to safeguard their land rights, which are acquired through customary tenure and are threatened by coal extraction practices. Although seemingly weak in the face of a powerful mining industry backed by the state, the paper argues that small farmers mobilized and confronted this industry, demonstrating their agency and achieving some of their demands.

Keywords: Small farmers, land rights, mobilization, coal mining, resistance, displacement, resettlement and medicine.

Presentation short abstract

Land conversion in central Mali contributes to violence involving herders, as the expansion of agricultural land has led to conflicts. This work aims to explore the mechanisms behind this phenomenon.

Presentation long abstract

Land conflicts remain a significant source of violence in Mali, especially in the central Mopti region. Issues such as converting pasturelands to ricefields, blocking migration routes, and encroaching on Bourgou wetland dry-season pastures threaten pastoral livelihoods and heighten their socio-economic vulnerability. These problems have pushed herders to join jihadi groups for protection, security, and social influence.

This study investigates why pastoralists have joined the jihadist group Katiba Macina. It uses a biographical approach, collecting life stories from individuals associated with jihadist groups. A total of forty-seven semi-structured interviews were recorded and transcribed for analysis. The provisional findings highlight three primary motivations: loss of pasturelands, the need for self-defence, and a desire to control land use in the crucial Inland Niger Delta.