Search our website
Support us

Jun Borras Associate

Our people — Associate

Jun Borras is Professor of Agrarian Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University in Rotterdam where he earned his Phd in 2004. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the College of Humanities and Development Studies at China Agricultural University, Beijing, and a Fellow of Food First in California. Jun also serves on the board of the Philippine NGO RIGHTS. 

Sue Cowell

Saturnino 'Jun" Borras cv (Docx, 148.5 KB)

Saturnino 'Jun' M Borras Jr. ranks among the top 1% of the world’s most cited researchers in his field, and is a recipient of a European Research Council Advanced Grant (2019-2024) for his research on land politics and five spheres of global social life (food, climate change, labour/migration, citizenship, and geopolitics). Jun has been deeply involved in rural social movements since the early 1980s in the Philippines. He was a founding member of the international small farmers’ movement La Via Campesina (LVC), serving on its International Coordinating Committee (ICC) in 1993-1996. On moving into academia, Jun has stayed true to the activist-scholarship tradition. He has been a TNI Fellow since 2008. 

Jun is Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS), which has been ranked first for the past years in the fields of Development Studies as well as in Anthropology. Jun also serves on the editorial advisory boards of the Journal of Agrarian Change, Canadian Journal of Development Studies, Alternatives Sud, Third World Quarterly, Russian Journal of Peasant Studies, Public Policy: Interdisciplinary Development Perspectives, and Land. In collaboration with PLAAS, Young African Researchers in Agriculture Network and the Future Agricultures Consortium, Jun organises the annual JPS Writeshops intended for young researchers from the Global South. 2019 Writeshop participants have organized themselves (and future writeshop participants) into a global network, namely, Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Activists in the South (CASAS) -- https://casasouth.org.

Jun co-anchors a number of international networks through Initiatives in Critical Agrarian Studies. Currently, these initiatives concern, respectively, land grabbing, agrarian politics of BRICS countries, authoritarianism in rural contexts, and migrant farm workers in China and Southeast Asia. TNI is associated with three. He also serves on the advisory boards of: LANDac, the Netherlands Land Academy at Utrecht University; DEMETER, a project of the Geneva Graduate Institute; and GLOCON, Global Change-Local Conflicts Research Group at Free University of Berlin. He collaborates with Paul Nicholson (one of the founding leaders of La Via Campesina) and community activists on an on-going action research on the political economy of the increasing popularity of the Camino de Santiago and its implications for the local communities across the pilgrimage trail.

Areas of expertise:

Land/resource/climate change/food politics; (trans)national agrarian movements; migrant farm workers especially in China, Myanmar and Vietnam;  geopolitics, BRICS/MICs and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and global agrarian transformations; state/citizenship, rightwing populism and the rural world; and global governance institutions. Southeast Asia, China, Africa, and South America.

Honours/Awards:

2020 Ester Boserup Prize for research on development.
2019 Ranked as in top 1% most cited researchers in his field
2018 Ranked as in top 1% most cited researchers in his field
2009 National Book Award (Social Sciences) in Philippines

 

Publications

Jun’s publications can be found here.

 

Latest work

  • Scholar-Activism and Land Struggles

    • Land Sovereignty
    • Land and Water Grabbing
    • Climate Crisis
    Cover image

    This book is about scholar-activism and political struggles for land. Scholar-activism is a way of working that tries to change society by combining the best features of radical academic and political activist traditions, despite the many contradictions and challenges that this entails. The role played by scholar-activists in land struggles is important, but is not straightforward. This book unapologetically celebrates the contributions of scholar-activism in land struggles and scholarship, but more than this, it is about exploring the contradictions and challenges facing scholar-activism. It is neither a glorification of the achievements of scholar-activism, nor a set of prescriptive propositions on how to ‘do’ scholar-activism. Rather, it addresses contentious issues in scholar-activism, many of which are rarely discussed, or are discussed only gingerly and awkwardly when they cannot be avoided. It is a book written by two scholar-activists who have focused their individual and collaborative research and activist works on the politics of land and the role played by radical agrarian movements. Insights in this book are drawn on the experiences of the authors working in the three main sites of global knowledge circuits: academic institutions, independent research institutions oriented to practical politics, and left-wing agrarian movements. Order Print Copy

    Book by
    • Jun Borras
    • Jennifer Franco

  • La Via Campesina –transforming agrarian and knowledge politics, and co-constructing a field A laudatio

    Food Sovereignty

    La Via Campesina(LVC) has revalorized agrarian politics, transformed knowledge politics, and co-constructed the field of Critical Agrarian Studies. It has shown the important role of agrarian movements in anti-capitalist struggles and the radical reimagination and construction of a positive future. The significance of LVC is found not in the shrinking numerical size of farming populations or in agriculture’s dwindling macroeconomic contributions to national economies, in relative terms, but in the political heft of what it represents in terms of an alternative future that is so different from the current agrarian world.

    Article by
    Jun Borras

  • Susan George and contemporary anticapitalist struggles within and against the global food system

    Food Sovereignty

    This year, 2021, the global community of food sovereignty activists is celebrating what is deemed as the 25th year anniversary of food sovereignty – as it protests against a corporate-captured UN Food System Summit (UNFSS) this September 2021. The global food system remains front and center in international political debates, as working people struggle to survive during this ongoing pandemic while a few corporate food giants continue to make huge profits. The struggle to dismantle the unjust, unsustainable industrial food system while constructing alternatives around food sovereignty is at the core of contemporary anti-capitalist struggles.

    Article by
    Jun Borras
See all work by Jun Borras

Key documents

Ideas into movement

Boost TNI's work

50 years. Hundreds of social struggles. Countless ideas turned into movement. 

Support us as we celebrate our 50th anniversary in 2024.

Make a donation