The rural communities in the Västernorrland county of Northern Sweden are not used to being in the national spotlight, but in 2017 their struggle to stop cutbacks in maternity and emergency care made national news. What are the lessons for all those involved in building counter-power in rural areas of the Global North?
What drives the negotiations for an Indonesia-Europe Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) in relation to investment? What would be the merits of the alternative investment protection frameworks as proposed by Indonesia? Will it be more effective in promoting a more equitable and sustainable development?
Global pressure on land and natural resources is mounting, with mainstream narratives about climate change often intensifying pressure to replace so-called "inefficient" users of land, including small farmers and pastoralists with market-based dynamics and actors. This dynamic makes the pursuit of socially just land policy ever more important and urgent, while at the same time creating new challenges. The fundamental connections and tensions between agrarian and climate justice must be reckoned with, and movements on both sides must deepen their understanding.
This statement has been developed jointly by Indonesian and European civil society organisations, who believe that an EU-Indonesia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) must first of all be approached as a means to serve the public interest.
The incorporation of labour, environmental and sustainable development provisions in the EU’s free trade agreements (FTA) has been much debated. But are the overall objectives of these FTAs truly compatible with a meaningful approach to labour rights, environmental protection and sustainable development? If not, what are these provisions actually doing?
Jun Borras, Jennifer Franco, Clara Mi Young Park, Mads Barbesgaard, Yukari Sekine, Ye Lin Myint, Thant Zin
02 March 2018
Paper
Dominant approaches to climate change mitigation are putting new pressures on small farmers and village dwellers, justifying dispossession by powerful actors who cast villagers' traditional ways of life as ecologically destructive or economically inefficient. In order to address the twin challenges of agrarian justice and climate justice, it is critical to understand the way new conflicts and initiatives intersect with old conflicts and the way they are compounded by undemocratic settings, and inequality and division along fault-lines of gender, ethnicity, class, and generation.
The radical citizens' movement and party, Barcelona en Comú, has a goal of democratizing the relationship between civil society and city institutions by transforming the traditional structures of political parties and creating new formsof democratic political participation. Through the study of one of the city's many neighbourhood assemblies, Zelinka examines whether it is possible for a political organization to be movement and institution at the same time and what kind of challenges, conflicts and opportunities emerge through this undertaking.
Situating questions about neoliberalism, nationalism and populism in Sri Lanka helps to broaden understanding of historical and political developments. Do neoliberal policies emerge in the West and then spread to the Global South, or do neoliberal policies evolve in confrontations with nationalist, populist and other political projects and go through considerable innovation in the Global South?
In January - February 2016, 8,058 former members of the Fajar Nusantara Movement (Gafatar) were forcibly removed from several locations in Kalimantan, Indonesia where they had established egalitarian agrarian settler communities.
How is state-supported land grabbing since the early 2010s by Hungarian oligarchs enabling the maintenance of the authoritarian populist regime in Hungary?
The 2016 death of J. Jayalalithaa, chief minister of Tamil Nadu and head of the ruling party, destabilised a two-party dominated system of elections. How has this led to the political turmoil and new kind of populism that has arisen in the state since?
This paper explores if and how the dynamic of authoritarian populism relates to concrete spaces – as already produced through the process of accumulation – from the grounded vantage of Noida, a city adjacent to New Delhi.
While state-society relations in Turkey have historically been top-down and coups d’etat periodically interrupted the functioning of electoral politics, the recent authoritarian turn under President Erdogan is remarkable. This paper examines two especially salient political economic dynamics at play.
How does the rise of Islamic populism in Indonesia signal a return of fascist ideologies and practices that use nationalism and religion as political instruments to clear a new pathway for capital accumulation?
Maria Kastrinou, Salman Fakher Al-Deen, Steven B. Emery
15 March 2018
Paper
Could the struggle against Israeli occupation within this rural vantage on the Middle East offer new insights into the emancipatory potential of agrarian and land-based political movements?