In Dispossession without Development, Michael Levien seeks to uncover the structural underpinnings of India's so-called "land wars." He examines how land dispossession changed with India's shift from state-led development to neoliberalism and the consequences of these changes for dispossessed farmers in contemporary India.
Since the mid-2000s, India has been beset by widespread farmer protests against land dispossession. Dispossession Without Development demonstrates that beneath these conflicts lay a profound shift in regimes of dispossession. While the postcolonial Indian state dispossessed land mostly for public-sector industry and infrastructure, since the 1990s state governments have become land brokers for private real estate capital. Using the case of a village in Rajasthan that was dispossessed for a private Special Economic Zone, the book ethnographically illustrates the exclusionary trajectory of capitalism driving dispossession in contemporary India. Taking us into the lives of diverse villagers in "Rajpura," the book meticulously documents the destruction of agricultural livelihoods, the marginalization of rural labor, the spatial uneveness of infrastructure provision, and the dramatic consequences of real estate speculation for social inequality and village politics. Illuminating the structural underpinnings of land struggles in contemporary India, this book will resonate in any place where "land grabs" have fueled conflict in recent years.
The aim of the present work is to advance a theoretical framework for the comparative study of dispossession by explaining how the political economy of land dispossession has transformed from state-led developmentalism to neoliberalism in India. The dissertation compares the archetypical forms of dispossession in each period and argues that they constitute different regimes of dispossession. A regime of dispossession is an institutionalized way of expropriating landed assets from their current owners or users. Each regime of dispossession is distinguished by: 1) a set of purposes for which a state is willing to dispossess land and 2) a way of producing compliance to that dispossession. Under different regimes, dispossession facilitates different kinds of accumulation with variable developmental consequences. These consequences crucially effect the long-term political stability of a regime of dispossession. Between independence in 1947 and economic liberalization in the early 1990s, India operated under a developmentalist regime of dispossession. Under this regime, the Indian state dispossessed land for state-led industrial and infrastructural projects, ensuring compliance through coercion and powerful ideological appeals to national development. This dispossession facilitated productive agrarian and industrial accumulation that disproportionately benefited the industrial bourgeoisie, big farmers, and the public sector elite, but also delivered some benefits to other classes. This development was, however, based on the impoverishment of tens of millions of people that it dispossessed. For many decades, this regime was able to convince a wide public that such dispossession constituted a necessary sacrifice for "the nation." Social movements in the 1970s and 1980s challenged this view, but they could not substantially impede dispossession before the developmentalist regime gave way to economic liberalization. Economic liberalization in the early 1990s generated a transition to a new neoliberal regime of dispossession in which state governments restructured themselves as land brokers for private capital. No longer just dispossessing land for state-led industrial and infrastructural projects, states turned to dispossessing peasants for private real estate. Special Economic Zones (SEZs) are the archetype of this regime. Based on 19 months of ethnographic research on one of the first large SEZs in North India, this dissertation illustrates the character and consequences of this neoliberal regime of dispossession. First, it argues that dispossessing land for SEZs lacks legitimacy, fuelling "land wars"; however, states may be able to generate material compliance among some farmers by absorbing them into real estate markets. Second, it argues that dispossessing land for SEZs facilitates real estate and knowledge-intensive accumulation that benefits a narrow set of class interests, while disaccumulating agrarian assets and marginalizing rural labor. Third, it argues that the major economic effect of this accumulation is real estate speculation, which generates unequal and involutionary agrarian change that leaves the majority of the dispossessed impoverished. The result is "dispossession without development." The dissertation concludes that India's neoliberal regime of dispossession will remain politically tenuous. It ends by outlining a comparative research program on the sociology of dispossession. By integrating land dispossession into theories of capitalist development, the theory of regimes of dispossession fills an absence in development sociology and reconstructs Marxist theories of "primitive accumulation," enhancing our understanding of states, economic development, agrarian change, and rural politics.
This volume takes a fresh look at the land question in India. Instead of re-engaging in the rich transition debate in which the transformation of agriculture is seen as a necessary historical step to usher in dynamic capitalist (or socialist) development, this collection critically examines the centrality of land in contemporary development discourse in India. Consequently, the focus is on the role of the state in pushing a process of dispossession of peasants through direct expropriation for developmental purposes such as acquisition of land by (local) states for infrastructure development and to support accumulation strategies of private business through industrialization. Land in India is sought for non-agricultural purposes such as purchasing land to reduce risk and real estate development. Land is also central to tribal communities (adivasis), whose livelihoods depend on it and on a moral economy that is independent of any price-driven markets. Adivasis tend to hold on to such property, not as individual owners for profit, but for collective security and to protect a way of life. Thus land, notwithstanding its role in the accumulation process, has been, and continues to be, a turbulent arena in which classes, castes, and communities are in conflict with each other, with the state, and with capital, jockeying to determine the terms and conditions of land transactions or their prevention, through both market and non-market mechanisms. The volume goes beyond the traditional political economy of the agrarian transition question, and deals with, inter alia, distributional conflicts arising from acquisition of land by the state for capital accumulation on the one hand and its commodification on the other. It provides new analytical insights into the land acquisition processes, their legal-institutional and ethical implications, and the multifaceted regional diversity of acquisition experiences in India.
Popular struggles in the global south suggest the need for the development of new and politically enabling categories of analysis, and new ways of understanding contemporary social movements. This book shows how social movements in Africa, South Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East politicize development in an age of neoliberal hegemony.
What happens when the market tries to help the poor? In many parts of the world today, neoliberal development programs are offering ordinary people the tools of free enterprise as the means to well-being and empowerment. Schemes to transform the poor into small-scale entrepreneurs promise them the benefits of the market and access to the rewards of globalization. Markets of Dispossession is a theoretically sophisticated and sobering account of the consequences of these initiatives. Julia Elyachar studied the efforts of bankers, social scientists, ngo members, development workers, and state officials to turn the craftsmen and unemployed youth of Cairo into the vanguard of a new market society based on microenterprise. She considers these efforts in relation to the alternative notions of economic success held by craftsmen in Cairo, in which short-term financial profit is not always highly valued. Through her careful ethnography of workshop life, Elyachar explains how the traditional market practices of craftsmen are among the most vibrant modes of market life in Egypt. Long condemned as backward, these existing market practices have been seized on by social scientists and development institutions as the raw materials for experiments in “free market” expansion. Elyachar argues that the new economic value accorded to the cultural resources and social networks of the poor has fueled a broader process leading to their economic, social, and cultural dispossession.
Rural areas and rural people have been centrally implicated in Southeast Asia's modernisation. Through the three entry points of smallholder persistence, upland dispossession, and landlessness, this Element offers an insight into the ways in which the countryside has been transformed over the past half century. Drawing on primary fieldwork undertaken in Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, and secondary studies from across the region, Rigg shows how the experience of Southeast Asia offers a counterpoint and a challenge to standard, historicist understandings of agrarian change and, more broadly, development. Taking a rural view allows an alternative lens for theorising and judging Southeast Asia's modernisation experience and narrative. The Element argues that if we are to capture the nature – and not just the direction and amount – of agrarian change in Southeast Asia, then we need to view the countryside as more than rural and greater than farming.
Violent Neoliberalism explores the complex unfolding relationship between neoliberalism and violence. Employing a series of theoretical dialogues on development, discourse and dispossession Cambodia, this study sheds significant empirical light on the vicious implications of free market ideology and practice.
"This book is an in-depth analysis of the educational development of tribals in India. Education as Development: Deprivation, Poverty, Dispossession is a significant new addition for understanding educational and economic setbacks experienced by the marginalized in India. The volume: Focuses on how the social, economic and education systems have evolved over time in India and identifies the scope of development in these areas; Provides a rational structure for readers to understand how the Adivasi in India can be made to fit in the modern designed education system; Highlights the problems of the marginalized - such as income inequality, education, health, housing, governance, civil society environment and infrastructure and others which hampers their overall growth. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers and policy makers in the fields of education, minority studies, indigenous studies, sociology of education, and South Asian studies"--
Agrarian transition, exploitative production relations, bondage in the agriculture and informal sectors, food insecurity, and poverty are among the central concerns that have marked the work of the eminent economist and author Utsa Patnaik. She has sought to seek and define alternative economic models that address these concerns and that are therefore emancipatory in nature. This festschrift attempts to engage with the theoretical frameworks, historical analyses, and developmental questions that her remarkable academic contributions have raised. The volume delves deep into issues such as the agrarian question in contemporary India, the issue of primitive accumulation, displacement and land rights, the crisis of employment generation and women's work under present economic regimes, the challenge of environmental sustainability, and environmental constraints to development, left politics, issues of secularism and the social challenges of communalism--all of which are contradictions faced in the development process today. The editors hope that the volume will be useful to all whose praxis and work are anchored on the motivation to build a better and just world.
The book discusses important developments emerging around the land questions in India in the context of India’s neoliberal economic development and its changing political economy. It covers many issues that have been impinging the political economy in land and livelihoods in India since the 1990s, examining the land question from diverse methodological standpoints. Most of the chapters rely on evidence generated through primary surveys in different parts of the country. The book, via its diversity of approaches and methodologies, brings out new and hitherto unexplored and/or less researched issues on the emerging land question in India. The range of issues addressed in the volume encompasses the contemporary developments in the political economy of land, land dispossession, SEZs, agrarian changes, urbanisation and the drive for the commodification of land across India. The authors also examine role of the state in promoting the capitalist transformation in India and continuities and changes emerging in the context of land liberalisation and market-friendly economic reforms.
