Format/Structure

Panel

Long Abstract

Political ecology has since its inception in the 1980s developed in a diversity of directions. This panel draws on the roots of the field grounded in peasant studies (later developed into critical agrarian studies). The panel will in particular focus on concepts such as moral economy, accumulation by dispossession and regimes of dispossession as they shape rural migration and violence. It will challenge simplistic notions of ethnic conflict, climate change, demographic pressures and mere poverty that are often evoked to explain migration and violent conflict in non-Western contexts.

In contrast to the extensive literature on the links between land dispossession and peasant revolts in Latin America and Asia, contemporary research on armed conflict, and migration, in Africa has rarely engaged with the theoretical, conceptual, and interpretive insights from classic agrarian studies. The migration literature is also poorly informed by rural political economy or political ecology insights. Depending on the social, political and historical context, this nexus may take various forms, which we aim to explore in this panel. While the panel organizers have worked in Africa, we are open for presentations from a variety of geographical settings, which combine theoretical engagements with solid empirical evidence, drawing on the combination of political ecology and classic peasant studies.

This Panel has 6 pending paper proposals.
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