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Growing numbers of people are displaced by war and violent conflict. In Ukraine, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Syria, and elsewhere violence pushes civilian populations from their homes and sometimes from their countries, making them refugees. In previous decades, millions of refugees and displaced people returned to their place of origin after conflict or were resettled in countries in the Global North. Now displacements last longer, the number of people returning home is lower, and opportunities for resettlement are shrinking. More and more people spend decades in refugee camps or displaced within their own countries, raising their children away from their home communities and cultures. In this context, international policies encourage return to place of origin.

Using case studies and first-person accounts from interviews and fieldwork in post-conflict settings such as Uganda, Liberia, and Kosovo, Sandra F. Joireman highlights the divergence between these policies and the preferences of conflict-displaced people. Rather than looking from the top down, at the rights that people have in international and domestic law, the perspective of this text is from the ground up—examining individual and household choices after conflict. Some refugees want to go home, some do not want to return, some want to return to their countries of origin but live in a different place, and others are repatriated against their will when they have no other options. Peace, Preference, and Property suggests alternative policies that would provide greater choice for displaced people in terms of property restitution and solutions to displacement.

The global economic crisis has exposed the limits of neoliberalism and dramatically deepened social polarization. Yet, despite increasing social resistance and opposition, neoliberalism prevails globally.

Radical alternatives, moreover, are only rarely debated. And if they are, such alternatives are reduced to new Keynesian and new developmental agendas, which fail to address existing class divisions and imperialist relations of domination.

This collection of essays polarizes the debate between radical and reformist alternatives by exploring head-on the antagonistic structure of capitalist development. The contributors ground their proposals in an international, non-Eurocentric and Marxian inspired analysis of capitalism and its crises. From Latin America to Asia, Africa to the Middle East and Europe to the US, social and labour movements have emerged as the protagonists behind creating alternatives.

This book’s new generation of scholars has written accessible yet theoretically informed and empirically rich chapters elaborating radical worldwide strategies for moving beyond neoliberalism, and beyond capitalism. The intent is to provoke critical reflection and positive action towards substantive change.

The 2008 outcry over the “global land grab” made headlines around the world, leading to a sustained interest in the dynamics and fate of customary land among both academics and development practitioners. In Power/Knowledge/Land, author Laura German profiles the consolidation of a global knowledge regime surrounding land and its governance within international development circles in the decade following this outcry, and the growing enrollment of previously antagonistic actors within it. Drawing theoretical insights on the inseparability of power and knowledge, German reveals the dynamics of knowledge practices that have enabled the longstanding project of commodifying customary land – and the more contemporary interests in acquiring and financializing it – to be advanced and legitimated by capturing the energies of socially progressive forces. By bringing theories of change from the emergent land governance orthodoxy into dialogue with the ethnographic evidence from across the African continent and beyond, concepts masquerading as universal and self-evident truths are provincialized, and their role in commodifying customary land and entrenching colonial futurities put on display. In doing so, the volume brings wider academic debates surrounding productive forms of power into the heart of the land grab debate, while enhancing their accessibility to a wider audience.

Power/Knowledge/Land takes current scholarly debates surrounding land grabs beyond their theoretical moorings in critical agrarian studies, political economy and globalization into contemporary debates surrounding the politics of knowledge—from theories of coloniality to ontological anthropology, thereby enabling new dynamics of the phenomenon to be revealed. The book deploys a pioneering epistemology integrating deconstructionist approaches (to reveal the tactics, truth claims and ontological assumptions of global knowledge brokers), with systematic qualitative reviews and comparative study (to contrast these dominant constructs with the evidence and reveal alternative ways of knowing “land” and practicing “security” from the ethnographic literature). This helps to reveal the Western and modernist biases in the narratives that have been advanced about women, custom, and security, revealing how the coloniality of knowledge works to grease the wheels of land takings by advancing highly provincialized constructs aligned with western interests as universal truths.

The role of food and hunger in contemporary South African and Indian environmental writing
 

From GMOs to vegetarianism and veganism, questions of what we should (and shouldn’t) eat can be frequent sources of debate and disagreement. In Precarious Eating, Ben Jamieson Stanley asks how recentering global South representations of food might shift understandings of environmental precarity.

Precarious Eating follows the lead of writers and thinkers in South Africa and India who are tracing the production and consumption of food, exploring ways to reconnect our narratives about climate change, global capitalism, and social justice. Taking up a diverse range of novels, films, scholar/activist writings, intellectual histories, and cookbooks, Stanley connects the ethics of eating to histories of empire and apartheid, uneven globalization, gender and sexuality, and global South experiences of climate change. They shift the lens of environmental humanities from climate-focused paradigms developed in the global North to food-focused environmental culture and activism in the South, addressing topics that range from foraging and farmer suicides to disordered eating and queer intimacy. 

By highlighting authors, activists, and environments of the global South, Precarious Eating joins with scholarship from postcolonial, decolonial, Indigenous, and Black studies to underscore how capitalism and empire shape our planetary environmental crisis.

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