• International Conference on Global Land Grabbing, 6-8 April 2011, IDS Sussex, UK, co-organized by ICAS together with Future Agricultures Consortium (FAC), PLAAS of the University of the Western Cape, Cornell University, and the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), The Hague.

The current condition and implications of the global land grab phenomenon will be discussed in depth at the conference. Bringing together 120 contributions from countries ranging from Ghana to Guatemala, and covering topics from plantation agriculture and mining to ‘green grabs’ and ‘water grabs’, will allow the first detailed assessment of what is happening where and with what consequences. Outputs of the conference, including video and audio interviews, presentations and papers will be available on the conference website www.future-agricultures.org/land-grab.hml.

• Colloquium: Agrarian transformation and surplus population in the Global South: revisiting agarrian questions of labour. ICAS-LDPI Colloquium,International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), the Hague on 3 May 2011, featuring leading scholars Tania Murray Li, Henry Bernstein, Teodor Shanin, Andries du Toit, Ben White, Farshad Araghi and Marc Wuyts.

The workshop complemented recent debates about the politics of land, from the perspective of the “agrarian question of labour”: the truncated transition that expels people from agriculture without absorbing their labour elsewhere in the economy, and linking this to recent work on the biopolitics of 'surplus populations' of the dispossessed.

Download the Colloquium programme. (pdf document)

In general, workshops and conferences will always try to bring together a good balance of academics, NGO professionals, social movement activists, and development practitioners from different parts of the world; or to organize such initiatives that complement other groups’ efforts on the same theme.

For example, with the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS), ICAS co-organized a global workshop on the politics of biofuels in October 2009 in Canada, which led to the publication of a special issue of JPS on ‘Biofuels, Land and Agrarian Change’ in October 2010.