Scholar-activism and land struggles, By Saturnino M. Borras, Jennifer C. Franco, Rugby: Practical Action Publishing. 2023. pp. 180. £49.94 (hbk)/£17.95 (pbk). ISBN: 978-1-78853-258-7, 978-1-78853-257-0.

Abstract

Renowned agrarian scholar-activists Saturnino M. Borras Jr. and Jennifer C. Franco wrote the book Scholar-Activism and Land Struggles to identify the ‘modest but significant’ (p. 12) role of agrarian scholar-activists in struggles for agrarian justice. While the authors do not provide a bullet-point action plan on what to do, and rightfully so, they aim to provoke the thoughts and actions of agrarian scholar-activists by directing them towards the contradictions, tensions and challenges that arise during the practice of scholar-activism amidst the neoliberal policy architecture that dictates today's politics of agriculture, research and education. The book is divided into four chapters, which provide the reader with an understanding of competing views on agrarian politics in general and land politics in particular. It mainly discusses how ‘scholar-activism is a way of working that tries to change society by combining the best features of radical academic and political activist traditions, despite the many contradictions and challenges that this entails’ (p. 1). It engages with the potential role of scholar-activists in shaping future political and research agendas to attain agrarian and social justice.

The struggle for access to land is at the heart of struggles for agrarian justice and, by extension, social justice. Therefore, the book locates land struggles within the broader narrative of rural agrarian transformations, which hold the key to understanding how power structures form and change over time, shaping historical and social relations around land. It discusses how the contemporary global land rush is accelerating the pace of land grabbing in diverse forms. It includes attacks not only on agricultural lands but also on indigenous community lands and rural non-agricultural spaces, urban agriculture and urban non-agriculture lands required for economic production and social reproduction in the north and south, which are not commonly discussed in agrarian politics. In most cases, the state acts as a broker and exerts extra-economic coercion to facilitate capital accumulation processes in the name of development. Land grabbing is also legitimized through the purchase and sale of land through markets under the pretexts of productivity and economic efficiency. Given the diverse mechanisms of land grabbing, the face and form of the land grabbers or the key reactionary classes also extend beyond the landlords or agribusiness plantation owners to individual land buyers, land mafias and domestic and transnational corporate land grabbers. Borras and Franco emphasize that there is an urgent need to interpret the changing social dynamics with existing and new analytical tools and change the course of these dynamics to create a ‘more just, fairer, and kinder world’ (p. 1). This requires agrarian scholar-activists to take an unapologetic and explicit bias towards the oppressed classes and social groups ‘embedded in class and co-constitutive relations of race, ethnicity, gender, caste, generation, religion, and nationality’ (p. 10) who face unfair treatment and social exclusion in the ongoing accumulation processes.

Scholar-activism is not a homogenous category, and it comprises a broad spectrum of radical thinkers to political activists who do activist work or are connected to political projects. Broadly based on their institutions, the book identifies three types of scholar-activists principally based in (a) academic institutions, (b) non-academic independent research institutions, and (c) social movements or political projects. Often, these categories overlap, and boundaries are blurred. The interplay between these actors is crucial to knowledge generation and political action, but it is not well-researched. The book presents different perspectives from the existing literature on what constitutes scholar-activism and who is a scholar-activist. It is a dynamic and fluid concept defined as relational, historical and cultural, that is, the idea of a scholar-activist cannot be rigidly defined in an ideal type of institution or time or political culture. The book leaves the reader with no unique definition of a scholar-activist but presents an analytical framework to form an understanding specific to context and time and a broad set of characteristics such as aspiring to do politically relevant research, take up organizing challenges themselves, or immerse in political movements and conduct research from within. It positions scholar-activism as a subset of radical scholarship.

Specific to agrarian scholar-activism, the book highlights the theoretical and analytical continuum between the competing views of orthodox Marxist traditions of class purism and Chayanovian traditions of agrarian populism. The interaction among scholar-activists operating from different institutional locations and theoretical positions creates potential synergies and tensions that manifest into agrarian movements. The authors pitch for agrarian scholar-activists to find in each other political allies committed to the cause of agrarian justice and continue the struggles by taking inspiration from imperfect political formulations instead of backing away from the tensions and social movements.

A closer and continuous engagement between scholar-activists and agrarian movements is crucial to counter the hegemony of capitalist narratives and build anti-capitalist solidarity and alliances. The authors caution the reader that not all social movements are necessarily anti-capitalist, and there are variations even in articulating anti-capitalist struggles. Scholar-activists need to identify their ideological positions to forge necessary political alliances. Further, it is essential to locate hierarchies and differentiation within the agrarian movements (such as elite, cadres, militants, mass and base) to locate the ‘origin and representation of ideas emanating from a movement or sections of a movement’ (p. 7). One of the key takeaways for scholar-activists from the book is that while they look for ways to engage with established or organized movements, it is equally or more important to identify places where scholar activism is necessary but existing organizations are weak or nonexistent. Scholar-activist collectives can play a vital role in identifying these gaps in the organization of agrarian politics.

However, conducting scholar-activist research and organizing scholar-activist collectives require voluntary and additional efforts from scholar-activists beyond the existing research demands of their institutions. They are torn between the pressures of generating academically rigorous output dictated by the norms of their respective disciplines and politically rigorous research demanded by the political movements they are committed to. Often, the academically accepted research methods may not be adequate or appropriate to address issues raised by political movements and vice versa. Striking this balance and navigating scholar-activist research in neoliberal institutions can prove difficult and create workplace tensions. Scholar-activists usually find themselves at the margins of mainstream institutions. Further complicating individual research efforts, most research grants for academics or independent researchers are increasingly dictated by a neoliberal research agenda that systematically discourages politically explicit research that addresses agrarian and land politics questions. The twin processes of dwindling resources for public institutions, on the one hand, and the growing dominance of private universities and research think tanks that receive substantial amounts of research funding from large corporations or capitalist organizations, on the other hand, pose a unique challenge to conducting scholar-activist research within these very institutions that are party to various forms of agrarian and social injustice. The book highlights that the formation and successful operation of scholar-activist collectives outside neoliberal institutional spaces also face the challenges of funding and maintaining autonomy. However, it reminds the scholar-activists engaged in neoliberal institutions that they are entitled to a space in the academy which is both ‘a place of safety and a place of struggle’ (p. 117). Therefore, it may be difficult to pursue their research objectives given the constraints but it is not impossible due to the job security and access to the academy's resources which scholar activists outside such institutions lack. There is still a certain degree of tolerance and regard for scholar-activists within mainstream institutions as long as they can publish in peer-acknowledged and reputed journals. Often, these journals are highly ranked along a list of indicators with research objectives set up to further the neoliberal research agenda in the global north and give primacy to adopting rigorous research methods. Therefore, the onus of gaining acceptance of mainstream scholars and retaining their position within the mainstream institutions lies with scholar-activists through publishing their research in such journals. In order to publish their research in mainstream journals or other journals that are more accepting of radical scholarship and scholar-activist work as long as it is socially relevant and academically rigorous, scholar-activists need access to a wide range of resources. There exists a systemic inequality in access to ‘transformative knowledge generation, attribution, and use’ (p. 108) between the scholars from the global north and the global south and between the privileged and underprivileged scholars within these regions. In a way, the existing knowledge structures are also built to reproduce the global architecture of exploitation.

The authors also mention a word of caution to the scholar-activists who are pushed into the neoliberal race of publish or perish to be mindful of the tensions that arise from patenting or passing down the ideas emerging from the agrarian movements that are unpublished as their intellectual private property without giving the required due credit. This chapter is the strongest in the book that carefully articulates the complexity and the necessity of scholar-activism in the contemporary world.

In the final chapter, ‘What is to be done’, the book points out that scholar-activist organizations can play a critical role in bridging the existing knowledge gap and mutually empowering each other. Their aims should be clearly defined and incorporate the elements of access, equity and autonomy. The access to knowledge includes but is not limited to subscriptions to libraries, journals, books and other materials; research funds; access to English language editing and translation services for scholars whose primary language is not English; and all other services that are key to empowering researchers from the global south and those farther from the centers of knowledge in the global south. The scholar-activist organizations can provide a platform to collectively demand their rights to resources and ensure equitable distribution of benefits from technology and research networks. However, the scholar-activist organization must be more than a research network. It should be a ‘hub of intellectual-political imagination and creativity in an operationally polycentric manner’ (p. 102). It should aim to attain a critical mass of like-minded scholars equipped with the necessary skills and resources to do what they want—in other words, build a ‘high degree of autonomy and capacity’ (p. 107). Affirmative action and community building within and across the neoliberal institutional spaces should provide the basis for recruiting its members along the co-constitute axes of social differences. Further, another critical task of a scholar-activist organization is to insert itself into the web of power and not accept the exclusion from global knowledge networks by forging alliances of international solidarity despite all odds and costs.

The following statement from the book should be quoted here: ‘The traditionally marginalized and resource-poor social groups in academic and scholar-activist research work are not completely powerless and resourceless. They have each other, and when they come together, they can generate a global resource pool’ (p. 118).

This book is a reminder that land struggles should form a core of broader and systematic anti-capitalist struggles linking various class and sectoral struggles. It requires a combined effort from scholar-activists and political activists to generate transformative knowledge that can inform research agendas and political struggles to change the world, attain social justice and eradicate inequality. The authors should be commended for illustrating the inevitable challenges and tensions in building scholar-activist collectives and inspiring the upcoming generation of aspiring agrarian scholar-activists to find their path to struggle. It would have been more helpful to the reader if they had allotted another chapter/s in compiling case studies of agrarian scholar-activist collectives to highlight the diversity of context-specific challenges. Nonetheless, this book is a timely guide to agrarian scholar-activists and collectives.