Resistance, Acquiescence or Incorporation? An Introduction to Land Grabbing and Political Reactions â•ŸFrom Belowâ•Ž

Political reactions 'from below' to global land grabbing have been vastly more varied and complex than is usually assumed. This essay introduces a collection of groundbreaking studies that discuss responses that range from various types of organized and everyday resistance to demands for incorporation or for better terms of incorporation into land deals. Initiatives 'from below' in response to land deals have involved local and transnational alliances and the use of legal and extra-legal methods, and have brought victories and defeats. The relevance of political reactions to land grabbing is discussed in light of theories of social movements and critical agrarian studies. Future research on reactions 'from below' to land grabbing must include greater attention to gender and generational differences in both impacts and political agency. Introduction Critical scholarly analysis of processes of agrarian change has long emphasized peasant agency and aimed to uncover forms of resistance, even in the midst of dispossession, oppression and processes of social differentiation. This collection draws on the rich base of existing scholarship to ask: in the midst of the 'global land grab', what are the political reactions 'from below'? While some reactions from people directly affected may involve resistance, the essays in this collection suggest that understanding the diversity of reactions from below requires critical empirical investigations of responses in specific situations. We thus frame 'political reactions from below' in a wider way, to refer to responses that extend far beyond 'resistance' in its many manifestations, and range from mobilizations seeking to improve the compensation for people's expulsion from their land to demands to be inserted into land deals as workers or contract farmers to counter-mobilizations against land deal resisters. Beyond the local level, highly varied responses by societies and states at national levels and in international multilateral fora and transnational movements also call for more detailed and critical assessment by social scientists. In the midst of enclosures and commercialization of land and other natural resources across the global South, tensions and synergies mark political reactions 'from below' to global land grabbing. A fuller understanding of the politics from below around land grabs brings us to some classic concepts in critical agrarian studies, including the dual front of 'struggle against dispossession' and 'struggle against exploitation', as well as