Short description:

This book examines how states and corporations across the Global South acquire land, identifying distinct patterns of expropriation and resistance. It introduces a comparative framework to explain how legal mechanisms, coercion, and state–business alliances combine in different ways to shape land conflicts.

Long description:

This book examines how states and corporations across the Global South acquire land, identifying distinct patterns of expropriation and resistance. Across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, economic growth in sectors such as mining, agribusiness, energy, infrastructure, and real estate is driving far-reaching land-use change. Yet the processes of dispossession that underpin these transformations vary considerably. It introduces a comparative framework to explain how legal mechanisms, coercion, and state–business alliances combine in different ways to shape land conflicts.

Drawing on detailed case studies—including India's solar parks, Indonesia's palm oil plantations, Cambodia's real estate developments, East Timor's oil and gas projects, and Brazil's land mafias—the contributors highlight three distinct regimes of dispossession: state-led expropriation, curtailed land rights, and decentralised coercion. By comparing these patterns across contexts, the book deepens understanding of how dispossession is organised and resisted, while offering insight into the broader political economy of land-use change.

This book is essential reading for scholars, researchers, and students in development studies, political economy, agrarian studies, geography, and sociology. It will also appeal to policymakers, civil society organizations, and activists engaged with land rights, resource governance, and social justice issues in the Global South.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Globalizations.

Table of Contents:

1. States and corporate land acquisition: comparing regimes of dispossession across the global south 2. Coding regimes of possession. An essay on land, property, and law 3. The production of rightlessness: palm oil companies and land dispossession in Indonesia 4. Speculative land grabs and Chinese investment: Cambodia’s evolving regime of dispossession 5. Dispossession of the commons: the Chaiya community forest and the creation of special economic zones 6. Tracking the sun: exposing India’s solar dispossessions 7. Land-grabbing mafias and dispossession in the Brazilian Amazon: rural–urban land speculation and deforestation in the Santarém region 8. Reconstructing regimes of dispossession