Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation

Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism

Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

The contributions to this collection use the tools of agrarian political economy to explore the rapid growth and complex dynamics of large-scale land deals in recent years, with a special focus on the implications of big land deals for property and labour regimes, labour processes and structures of accumulation. The first part of this introductory essay examines the implications of this agrarian political economy perspective. First we explore the continuities and contrasts between historical and contemporary land grabs, before examining the core underlying debate around large- versus small-scale farming futures. Next, we unpack the diverse contexts and causes of land grabbing today, highlighting six overlapping mechanisms. The following section turns to assessing the crisis narratives that frame the justifications for land deals, and the flaws in the argument around there being excess, empty or idle land available. Next the paper turns to an examination of the impacts of land deals, and the processes of inclusion and exclusion at play, before looking at patterns of resistance and constructions of alternatives. The final section introduces the papers in the collection.

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The new enclosures: critical perspectives on corporate land deals

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 ground-breaking 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.

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Resistance, acquiescence or incorporation? An introduction to land grabbing and political reactions ‘from below’

This article examines some contemporary policy discourses on land tenure reform in sub–Saharan Africa and their implications for women's interests in land. It demonstrates an emerging consensus among a range of influential policy institutions, lawyers and academics about the potential of so–called customary systems of land tenure to meet the needs of all land users and claimants. This consensus, which has arisen out of critiques of past attempts at land titling and registration, particularly in Kenya, is rooted in modernizing discourses and/or evolutionary theories of land tenure and embraces particular and contested understandings of customary law and legal pluralism. It has also fed into a wide–ranging critique of the failures of the post–colonial state in Africa, which has been important in the current retreat of the state under structural adjustment programmes. African women lawyers, a minority dissenting voice, are much more equivocal about trusting the customary, preferring instead to look to the State for laws to protect women's interests. We agree that there are considerable problems with so–called customary systems of land tenure and administration for achieving gender justice with respect to women's land claims. Insufficient attention is being paid to power relations in the countryside and their implications for social groups, such as women, who are not well positioned and represented in local level power structures. But considerable changes to political and legal practices and cultures will be needed before African states can begin to deliver gender justice with respect to land.

Policy discourses on women's land rights in sub-Saharan Africa: the implications of the re-turn to the customary.

Whether or not investments in African agriculture can generate quality employment at scale, avoid dispossessing local people of their land, promote diversified and sustainable livelihoods, and catalyse more vibrant local economies depends on what farming model is pursued. In this Forum, we build on recent scholarship by discussing the key findings of our recent studies in Ghana, Kenya and Zambia. We examined cases of three models of agricultural commercialisation, characterised by different sets of institutional arrangements that link land, labour and capital. The three models are: plantations or estates with on-farm processing; contract farming and outgrower schemes; and medium-scale commercial farming areas. Building on core debates in the critical agrarian studies literature, we identify commercial farming areas and contract farming as producing the most local economic linkages, and plantations/estates as producing more jobs, although these are of low quality and mostly casual. We point to the gender a...

https://tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03066150.2016.1263187

Plantations, outgrowers and commercial farming in Africa: agricultural commercialisation and implications for agrarian change

Recent large-scale commercial agriculture projects in developing countries have raised concerns about the effects on natural resource-based livelihood activities of local people. A significant weakness in the emerging literature is the lack of a gender perspective on implications for agrarian livelihoods. This article explores the gendered aspects of land transactions on livelihood prospects in the Northern Region of Ghana. Drawing on qualitative research from two commercial agriculture projects, the article examines how pre-existing gender inequalities in agrarian production systems, as well as gender biases in project design, are implicated in post-project livelihood activities. The article concludes that a good business model of a land deal, even one that includes local communities in production and profit sharing, is not sufficient to protect women's livelihood prospects if projects ignore pre-existing gender inequalities and biases, which limit access to opportunities.

When a Good Business Model is Not Enough: Land Transactions and Gendered Livelihood Prospects in Rural Ghana

This article is an account of the debates around the recent land tenure reforms in Tanzania. It focuses on the discourses of Government officials, academic researchers and NGO activists on the implications of the reforms for women's interests in land and the most fruitful approaches to the issues of discriminatory customary law rules and male–dominated land management and adjudication institutions at national and village levels. The article argues that from being marginal to the debates, women's interests became one of the most contentious issues, showing up divisions within NGO ranks and generating accusations of State co–optation and class bias. It illustrates the implications of the recent positive reappraisal of African customary laws and local–level land management institutions for a specific national context, that of Tanzania.

Securing Women's Interests Within Land Tenure Reforms: Recent Debates in Tanzania

Since 2008, a surge in large-scale land acquisitions, or land grabs, has been taking place in low- and middle-income countries around the globe. This contribution examines the gendered effects of and responses to these deals, drawing on nine studies, which include conceptual framing essays that bring in debates about human rights, studies that draw on previous waves of land acquisitions globally, and case studies that examine the gendered dimensions of land dispossession and loss of common property. Three key insights emerge: the evolving gender and land tenure literature provides valuable information for understanding the likely effects of land deals; some of the land deal issues transcend gender-equity concerns and relate to broader problems of dispossession and loss of livelihoods; and huge gaps remain in our knowledge of gender and land rights that require urgent attention and systematic integration of gender analysis into mainstream research.

Dzodzi Tsikata

Papers

Policy discourses on women's land rights in sub-Saharan Africa: the implications of the re-turn to the customary.

Plantations, outgrowers and commercial farming in Africa: agricultural commercialisation and implications for agrarian change

When a Good Business Model is Not Enough: Land Transactions and Gendered Livelihood Prospects in Rural Ghana

Securing Women's Interests Within Land Tenure Reforms: Recent Debates in Tanzania

Land, Gender, and Food Security