Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

This article explores the specific features of collectivization in socialist Yugoslavia, focusing on Slovenia as one of its constituent republics. Through a bottom-up approach, it examines selected cases from the countryside surrounding the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana, between 1949 and 1953. Unlike the Soviet and broader Eastern European cases, the Slovene/Yugoslav regime stemmed from both a socialist revolution and the National Liberation War. Alongside coercion, it used pragmatic strategies to win over the peasantry—allowing wealthier peasants to join labour cooperatives and promoting ‘entrepreneurship’, a value rooted in capitalism, as a socialist principle. While aiming to preserve the industriousness of petty commodity production, the authorities sought to achieve this within a new environment: no longer in private enterprises, but in state or collective (cooperative) ones, protected from the destructive consequences of capitalism. Drawing on case studies, the article demonstrates that collectivization failed: Support from revolutionary activists proved insufficient, peasants rejected the proposed entrepreneurial model, and they continued to pursue individualistic family farming. It explains the persistence of traditional agriculture through the concept of the integrated peasant economy, in dialogue with theories of pluriactivity and petty commodity production.

This study investigates how agricultural producers are incorporated into commodity circuits under contemporary capitalism, in the context of growing pressures from emerging infectious diseases. Focusing on poultry production systems in Denmark and Norway currently under threat from highly pathogenic avian influenza, we argue that understanding these dynamics requires an expanded conception of agriculture that accounts for the contractual arrangements binding poultry growers to both upstream and downstream actors in a supply chain defined by spatially dispersed operations with growers positioned midstream. Specifically, we explore how risk diffuses along supply chains, how forms of knowledge and resources originating upstream and downstream of the farm-level organise production processes, and the managerial efforts aimed at reconciling contradictory interests. We contend that these dynamics have significant implications for how outbreaks of infectious diseases ramify across variously situated actors in natural resource industries under contemporary capitalism.

The growing literature on women's land rights in the1990s triggered international development policy support for land titling with the aim of strengthening women's land rights. However, land titling is unlikely to close the gender gap in land ownership if the main mode of acquiring land, inheritance, is not equally available to women and men. The paper draws upon two surveys on gendered access to land ownership to examine how Ghana's customary and formal inheritance institutions affect women's and men's land ownership. The paper shows that men are still overwhelmingly the beneficiaries of inherited land and that, without policies to address this, titling programmes will only perpetuate the gender gap in land ownership that is biased against women. The paper recommends a three-pronged approach that prioritises public education on the benefits of women's land ownership, reform of inheritance laws to promote gender equality and effective enforcement of these laws.

Colonial Punjab, the erstwhile province that included the present-day Indian and Pakistani subnational states of Punjab and the Indian state of Haryana, occupies a pivotal place in the history and politics of South Asia. It has also been a distinguished site for the study of colonialism, especially the phase of British rule inaugurated by the transfer of authority from the East India Company to the Crown in 1858.

If the dominant colonial perception rendered Punjab an exemplary province, ‘one of the most stable, loyal, and economically prosperous provinces in all of British India’ (Condos 2017, 9), postcolonial scholars have had to contend with its deeply contradictory place in the conjoined careers of colonialism and capitalism in South Asia—as a relatively late addition to Britain's territorial empire that became the proving ground for a new type of colonial governance (‘The Punjab School’), as a recipient of colonial state investment in irrigation and transportation infrastructures that transformed it into a major export region, as a quiescent province that supplied vast numbers of men to the imperial army, and as a prosperous agricultural region whose peasantry nevertheless became disposed to chronic indebtedness. In the post-Independence period, Punjab became the epicentre of the Green Revolution, cementing its place as India's ‘breadbasket’. These qualities have contributed to Punjab's enduring importance in debates on capitalist transition, economic development and agrarian political economy in colonial and postcolonial India.¹

Navyug Gill confronts many of these contradictions in Labors of Division, his densely woven ‘history of the division of labor’ in colonial Punjab.² He examines the novel form of social hierarchy brought into existence by the colonial reconfiguration of ascriptive and religious difference in Punjabi society. The book is organized into five chapters with an introduction and a brief conclusion. The first four chapters explore the colonial mediation of labour, caste hierarchy and religious identity in Punjab. The last chapter develops a postcolonial critique of ‘the peasant’ as a category in political economic thought. Gill's emphasis on colonial difference-making as a constitutive dimension of capitalist development locates his study within a loosely bound stream of postcolonial scholarship that attends to the frictions, concordances and trajectories generated by capital's encounters with—and metabolizations of—cultural heterogeneity and native forms of social order (see for instance Gidwani 2008; Sartori 2014; Ali 2018; Khan 2021).

Labors of Division seeks to provide a concrete alternative to the dominant European ‘narrative of accumulation’ that has ‘stealthily generated a set of expectations for the histories of all other societies’ (Gill 2024, 58). In this regard, the rejection of what Harry Haro

This paper synthesizes and systematizes existing empirical knowledge on agrarian class relations in West Africa. It contributes to the debate on agrarian transitions, which largely neglects coexisting diverse forms of class relations in land, labour and capital markets, and how these are interrelated with different agricultural production processes. Based on a systematic review of 196 published articles, we developed a typology of class relations, which we then used to analyse linkages between forms of class relations and production processes in three agricultural activities, namely, arable crops, tree crops and (agro-)pastoral ruminant herds. The paper highlights the relevance of specific farming practices as well as herd and plot level analysis for agrarian political economy. Class relations and farming practices are intertwined and mutually dependent. We do not only identify class relations specific to certain agricultural activities, but we also outlined how farming systems and class relations coevolve over time.

The year 2025 marks volume 25 of the Journal of Agrarian Change, meaning that the journal has been advancing the field of agrarian political economy for a full quarter century. To pay testament to this heritage, the journal editors have created a series of forums that capture current thinking on a range of contemporary issues in our field. This introductory statement sets out the first three forums, on climate change, agroecology and value analysis, respectively. The forums present one of the many ways that the Journal of Agrarian Change will continue to advance agrarian political economy over the coming years.

A range of compelling recent literature highlights how climate change is rewriting the intertwined social and environmental processes that comprise agrarian landscapes. Mainstream reaction has been to double down on technical intensification strategies supplemented by a resolute faith in scientific advancement to reduce vulnerabilities. For critical agrarian studies, however, climate change raises new conceptual and methodological challenges. Has climate change reinforced or undermined existing concepts and frameworks that explain core dynamics of agrarian change? Does agrarian studies as a field of engaged research need to change alongside the climate? In this exchange our contributors consider how anthropocentric climate change requires the field to rethink core analytical categories within agrarian studies. Key questions that the forum addresses include: How does climate change validate and/or challenge the conceptual armoury and normative orientations inherited largely from Marxist-influenced political economy? What new concepts and theoretical influences will prove helpful in orientating agrarian studies within a changing climate? How do we synthesise these with existing frameworks and concerns? And how does this reformulation change our understanding of the forms and content of resistance within agrarian environments?

Within agrarian studies, promoting agroecology is widely held as a key objective to animate progressive change with social and environmental benefits across rural regions. Yet, in practice, many questions remain salient concerning the political economy and social dynamics of agroecological transitions. On the one hand, different visions of agroecology exist in terms of both agricultural practices and their surrounding social relations. While a plurality of visions within the field is often celebrated, this conceptual flexibility can make analysis of what works, why, where, and for whom more challenging. On the other hand, agroecological transitions often present daunting challenges for resource poor farmers: a time lag for agroecological methods to become effective; a switch of markets and associated relationships; and new demands for farm and labour management in conditions of uncertain knowledge and constrained resources. These questions push the field of agrarian studies to move beyond simplified normative presentations of agroecology and grapple with the messy political economy of transitions. What are the social, political, and technical preconditions of success? How do agroecological transitions play out in communities and regions that often have internal divisions and conflicting interests? What are the respective roles—if any—of the state, social movements, or non-governmental agencies in such processes? And, given the partial adoption of agroecology within various governmental realms, is there a risk of a bifurcation of agriculture wherein there is intensive industrial farming for an agrarian elite and agroecology prescribed for a neo-subsistence rural poor?

To address these themes, the Journal of Agrarian Change asked a series of authors to consider two interlinked questions. First, how does agrarian studies as a field of analysis challenge agroecology by contextualizing agroecological initiatives within the complex dynamics of agrarian change? Second, how do the normative goals and practical experiences of agroecology challenge agrarian studies to widen, adapt or reinvent its empirical foci and analytical tools?

Reflecting a longstanding intellectual heritage in Marxist political economy, contributions to agrarian studies have variously referred to the production, distribution and extraction of value. Despite this central role within the heritage of agrarian studies, the concept of value is often used inconsistently between authors and sometimes deployed without clear elucidation of the underlying theoretical tenets. As such, value often tends to be used more as a metaphor suggestive of conditions of exploitation rather than a detailed conceptual framework. In response, we must ask if there is still a robust case for value analysis forming a foundational pillar of agrarian studies? To address this challenging question, we invited three authors to give their perspective on the value of value for agrarian studies. First and foremost, we asked them to consider what value analysis does that is otherwise missed in critical agrarian studies and how we can mobilise its potential to sharpen analyses. Two further pivotal questions arise, spurred on by recent trends in the literature. First, to what extent do the categories of value enrich or hinder our evolving understanding of the dynamics of social reproduction within agrarian households and communities, including the gendered relations through which agriculture and livelihoods are performed? Similarly, are the largely anthropogenic concepts of value fit for the purpose of explaining environmental change and the more-than-human dynamics through which agricultural landscapes are produced and change over time?

Rural Odisha, located along the eastern coast of India, has experienced slow economic growth over the past decade. This article employs a perspective rooted in the political economy of rural livelihoods to explore how and why this stagnation manifests among farmers. The case study focuses on farming households in a socioecologically homogeneous area with an upgraded irrigation scheme in an interior area in the northeastern side of the state. It uses longitudinal data from structured interviews in 2010/11 and 2022/23 with the same 175 households, supplemented by 64 semistructured interviews with local actors including farmers, local functionaries, government officers, and private actors. Our framework analyses the interplay of livelihood dynamics, aspiration formation, political economic drivers, ecological contexts and local innovation systems. The findings reveal a trajectory of structural change with limited livelihood dynamism, particularly in agriculture and crop diversification, though more changes were observed in nonfarm livelihoods. Limited agricultural dynamism was driven by modest aspirations and reinforced by paternalistic governance that undermines farmer agency. The study enhances our longitudinal understanding of agrarian change and livelihood dynamics with intergenerational differences.