prof.dr. SM (Jun) Borras

Biography

Saturnino ('Jun') M. Borras Jr. is Professor of Agrarian Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, and was the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Peasant Studies for 15 years, until early 2023. He is part of the distinguished Erasmus Professor Program for Societal Impact, Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is a recipient of the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant for his ongoing research project, "Commodity & land rushes: reshaping five spheres of global social life - food, climate change politics, labour/migration, state/citizenship, and geopolitics" in Africa, Asia and Latin America. He is also a Distinguished Professor at China Agricultural University, Beijing, and an associate at the Netherlands-based Transnational Institute (TNI). He was Canada Research Chair (T2) in International Development Studies at Saint Mary's University in Canada in 2007-2010.

His publications include books, journal special issues, and articles. His Open Access books include Political Dynamics of Transnational Agrarian Movements (with M. Edelman), Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World (co-edited with I. Scoones et al.), Climate Change and Critical Agrarian Studies (co-edited with I. Scoones et al.). His monograph on scholar-activism (with J. C. Franco) is  Scholar-Activism and Land Struggles  has been published in 2023 (Spanish edition, 2024). He is co-editor (with J.C. Franco) of The Oxford Handbook of Land Politics (paperback for release in September 2025; with earlier online release). His monograph (with J.C. Franco) Essential Concepts of Land Politics (Routledge), paperback edition, is for release in May 2025. He is currently completing the manuscript of his monograph (with JC Franco),  Land rush and climate politics (Cambridge University Press). He is co-guest editor of the forthcoming Special Issues of Agriculture and Human Values: "Migrants, Farmers and Farmworkers: The politics of land and labour, production and social reproduction"; Globalizations journal: "The spectacular land rush and its consequences"; and Third World Quarterly journal: "Democratizing Knowledge Politics : Scholar-activism and agrarian and environmental justice politics." 

His research interests include: land politics/land rush, (trans)national agrarian movements (TAMs); migrant farmworkers, climate change politics; food politics/food sovereignty; BRICS and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and global agrarian transformations. His geographic areas of research interest are: Southeast Asia, China, Africa, and South America. He also studies international institutional 'spaces' of state- society interactions, including the role of global governance institutions.

He works within the tradition of, and at the same time studies and writes about, scholar-activism. This has been influenced by his background: He has been deeply involved in rural social movements since the early 1980s in the Philippines, and later, internationally. He was a member of the international agrarian movement La Via Campesina's International Coordinating Committee (ICC) in 1993-1996. He has engaged, selectively, with international inter-governmental institutions on specific issues: a member of  UN FAO's High-Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) on Large-Scale Land Acquisitions, lead-author of a European Parliament-commissioned study on EU registered corporations engaged in international land deals, and took the lead in synthesizing the FAO studies in 17 countries of the global land rush as it unfolded in Latin America and the Caribbean, among others.

He is in the Web of Science Highly Cited Researchers List for six consecutive years, 2018-2023. He has received the Ester Boserup Prize for Research on Development (2020), the Interpreting and Changing the World Award: The COHD Prize (China Agricultural University, Beijing, 2023), and is a winner of the National Book Award 2009 in the Philippines. He is a co-editor of the ICAS small book series in critical agrarian studies, all of the available titles in it are now Open Access and available in multiple language editions, co-coordinates the Initiatives in Critical Agrarian Studies (ICAS), Land Deal Politics Initiatives (LDPI), Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiatives (ERPI), and BRICS Initiatves in Critical Agrarian Studies (BICAS). He collaborates with the Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Activists in the South (CASAS) on a number of training initiatives, especially the Annual Writeshop in Critical Agrarian Studies and Scholar-Activism, and with the Transnational Institute (TNI) for its Activist Course for Activists (in Critical Agrarian Studies and Scholar-Activism) running regularly in Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa regions.

He serves on the Editorial Board of Journal of Agrarian Change, Third World Quarterly, Canadian Journal of Development Studies, Journal of World-Systems Research, Journal of Russian Peasant Studies, Alternatives Sud, and Cambridge University Press Elements Book Series (Global Development Studies)