Essential Concepts of Land Politics: An A-Z Guide

This book compiles, discusses, and explains the key concepts in land politics in an easy-to-navigate A-Z format.

This book takes a broad view on land, across the rural and urban corridor, and advocates for a holistic view of the politics of land, as an aggregation of land and global social life, that is, the politics of food, climate, labour, citizenship, and geopolitics. The authors have curated a wide-ranging list of 67 key terms most commonly used in the field, with each entry mapping out an important concept or idea and illustrating how it relates more broadly across this growing discipline. Across the entries, the book showcases that land has been and remains central to productive and social reproductive activities of humanity for the incessant renewal of life and society. A key assumption in this book is that the politics of land is made up of building blocks in the form of key concepts. These key concepts evolve, both in the sense that they are politically contested and in the changing broader context within which they are embedded. The key concepts in this book are therefore not discussed in a random way but rather framed from Critical Agrarian Studies perspectives and scholar-activist tradition, which means taking the side of the exploited and oppressed.

With further reading recommendations included alongside the entries, this innovative and accessible volume will be of great interest to students, scholars, policy practitioners, and political activists.

Saturnino M. Borras Jr. is Professor of agrarian studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, and is part of the Erasmus Chairs program of Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. He is also an associate at the Transnational Institute (TNI), and Distinguished Professor at China Agricultural University in Beijing. He was the Editor-In-Chief of Journal of Peasant Studies for 15 years, until 2023. He is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Land Politics (2023)

Jennifer C. Franco is a researcher at the Transnational Institute (TNI) Myanmar-In-Focus programme, the Netherlands. She is an Adjunct Professor at the China Agricultural University in Beijing. She is co-author Scholar-Activism and Land Struggles (2023) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Land Politics(2025)