New frontiers of land control: Introduction

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Land questions have invigorated agrarian studies and economic history, with particular emphases on its control, since Marx. Words such as 'exclusion', 'alienation', 'expropriation', 'dispossession', and 'violence' describe processes that animate land histories and those of resources, property rights, and territories created, extracted, produced, or protected on land. Primitive and ongoing forms of accumulation, frontiers, enclosures, territories, grabs, and racializations have all been associated with mechanisms for land control. Agrarian environments have been transformed by processes of de-agrarianization, protected area establishment, urbanization, migration, land reform, resettlement, and re-peasantization. Even the classic agrarian question of how agriculture is influenced by capitalism has been reformulated multiple times at transformative conjunc-tures in the historical trajectories of these processes, reviving and producing new debates around the importance of land control. The authors in this collection focus primarily on new frontiers of land control and their active creation. These frontiers are sites where authorities, sovereignties, rights, and hegemonies of the recent past have been challenged by new enclosures, property regimes, and territorializations, producing new 'urban-agrarian-natured' environments, comprised of new labor and production processes; new actors, subjects, and networks connecting them; and new legal and violent means of challenging previous land controls. Some cases augment analytic tools that had seemed to have timeless applicability with new frameworks, concepts, and theoretical tools. What difference does land control make? These contributions to the debates demonstrate that the answers have been shaped by conflicts, contexts, histories, and agency, as land has been struggled over for livelihoods, revenue production, and power. Introduction What difference does land control make?. .. to old and new agrarian questions, to growers and landlords, to land managers with various goals: extraction, production, accumulation, conservation, and governance? The 'land question' has invigorated agrarian studies and …