Bradley Wilson
| I received my Ph.D. in Geography from Rutgers University in January 2010 and currently hold a post as Assistant Professor of Geography at West Virginia University. My work focuses on consumer solidarity politics in the United States and peasant and rural worker politics in Nicaragua. My previous research has explored the moral and political economies of fair trade coffee labeling and cooperativism among agrarian reform beneficiaries in Nicaragua. Reclaiming the People’s Property represents the next stage of a comparative project on the social, spatial and political-economic trajectories of agrarian reform in Nicaragua. Email: Bradley.Wilson@mail.wvu.edu |
Research on Land-grabbing:
Reclaiming the People’s Property: Land Grabbing, Worker Resistance and the Las Tunas Movement in Nicaragua
My LDPI research project explores a land grabbing resistance movement composed of unemployed coffee workers in Central Nicaragua. Between 1996 and 2000 a private agro-export conglomerate appropriated 60 worker-owned coffee estates previously designated as the Area Propiedad del Pueblo (APP). Following mass protests between 2001 and 2006, worker representatives from the Asociación de Trabajadores del Campo (ATC) and government officials negotiated and signed the Acuerdos de Las Tunas which provided 6,000 temporary jobs and redistributed land from nineteen of those coffee estates to 2,500 families. My project reveals the contentious politics, possibilities and paradoxes of worker-led alternatives to land grabbing in the (post) socialist agrarian reform context of Nicaragua.
