Transnational Agrarian Movements Confronting Globalization

Readers of this book will encounter peasants and farmers who struggle at home and traverse national borders to challenge the World Trade Organization and other powerful global institutions.

• Studies the activists in Brazil who uproot plots of genetically modified soybeans, forest dwellers in Indonesia who chop down rubber plantations to cultivate rice to feed their families, 'runaway villages' in China that take up arms to resist corrupt officials, and Mexican migrants who, having exited in desperation, return from abroad to transform their communities
• Little-known transnational agrarian movements of the early twentieth century share the stage with more recent, high-profile global alliances, such as V a Campesina
• Celebrates a dynamic sector of international civil society, and tackles the thorny questions of successes and failures, ethical and political dilemmas, troubled alliances with NGOs, protest repertoires, and representation claims
• Analyzes contemporary collective action in all its complexity, acknowledging ambiguities and contradictions, posing challenging questions, and providing concrete strategies for scholars and activists

Saturnino M. Borras Jr is Canada Research Chair in International Development Studies at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. He has been deeply involved in (trans)national agrarian movements since the early 1980s as a political activist. His books include Pro-Poor Land Reform: A Critique (2007), Competing Views and Strategies on Agrarian Reform - Vol 1, International Perspective, and Vol 2, Philippine Perspective (2008); On Just Grounds: Struggling for Agrarian Justice and Citizenship Rights in the Rural Philippines (2005, co-edited with J Franco), Land, Livelihoods and Development in an Era of Globalization (2007, co-edited with H Akram Lodhi and C Kay), Market-Led Agrarian Reform (2008, co-edited with C Kay and E Lahiff).

Marc Edelman is Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has also taught or been a visiting researcher at Yale, Fordham, Princeton, Columbia, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the universities of Illinois, Tashkent and Costa Rica. His research interests include Latin American agrarian history, rural development, and the politics of controlling markets, whether through welfare states, social movements, or global trade rules. His books include The Logic of the Latifundio (1992) and Peasants Against Globalization (1999), as well as a co-edited volume The Anthropology of Development and Globalization (Blackwell, 2005) and the co-authored Social Democracy in the Global Periphery (2007).

Cristóbal Kay is Professor of Development Studies and Rural Development at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. His previous appointments were at the University of Chile in Santiago, the Catholic University of Peru in Lima and the University of Glasgow. He has done research on agrarian and rural issues in several Latin American countries. Some of his co-edited books are Labour and Development in Rural Cuba (1988), Development and Social Change in the Chilean Countryside (1992), Disappearing Peasantries? Rural Labour in Africa, Asia and Latin America (2000) and Peasants and Globalization: Political Economy, Rural Transformation and the Agrarian Question (2008).