Land grabbing ten years on
The Land Deal Politics Initiative was launched 10 years ago as a loose network of scholars and activists concerned about the rise of land, water and green grabs across the world and the consequences for rural livelihoods and agrarian relations.
A massive wave of investment in land, resulting in expropriation and displacement, emerged following the financial, food and energy crises of 2008-2009. We wanted to understand what was going on and how best to respond.
Between 2009 and 2019, LDPI organized a series of events to analyse the social, economic, political and environmental dynamics of large-scale land deals and their implications for policy and social movements.
On its 10 anniversary, LDPI is organizing two new exciting initiatives
The global debate around land deals has diminished over the past few years, but important research and political questions remain:
- What happened to the hundreds of land grabs documented by researchers, non-governmental organisations, activist groups, news media and aid agencies?
- What new configurations of land, labour and capital have emerged since?
- How has the rise of authoritarian, state-led populism and politics re-shaped the tensions between ‘foreignization’ and extraction?
The international conference in March 2024 in Bogota hopes to bring together academic researchers, policy experts and political activists to have discussions and conversations around old and new themes related to land grabbing, aiming to understand the contemporary dynamics of land and resource ‘grabbing’.
- Andrea Sosa (CONICET, Argentina),
- Arnim Scheidel (ICTA-UAB Barcelona, EJAtlas)
- Barry Gills (U of Helsinki; and EXALT)
- Ben White (ISS, The Hague; LDPI)
- COHD/China Agricultural University (Ye Jingzhong, Wang Chunyu and Liu Juan)
- Diana Aguiar (Federal University of Bahia, Brazil)
- Diana Ojeda (U de los Andes, Bogota)
- Ian Scoones (IDS Sussex; LDPI)
- Jacobo Grajales (U of Lille)
- Jampel Dell’Angelo (VU, Amsterdam)
- Jun Borras (ISS, The Hague; LDPI)
- Lorenzo Cotula (IIED)
- Marc Edelman (CUNY; LDPI)
- Murat Arsel (ISS, The Hague)
- Rama Salla Dieng (U of Edinburgh; and DSA Land, Politics & Sustainability Study Group)
- Ruth Hall (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town; LDPI)
- Sergio Sauer (U of Brasilia)
- Tor A. Benjaminsen (Norwegian University of Life Sciences and Political Ecology Forum)
- Transnational Institute/TNI (Katie Sandwell, Sylvia Kay and Jennifer Franco)
- Wendy Wolford (Cornell University)
- Universidad Javeriana (Julio Arias)
- CINEP (Sergio Coronado)
- Universidad Nacional (Francisco Gutierrez Sanin)
- Universidad Rosario (RocÃo del Pilar Peña Huertas)
- Universidad Externado (Flavio Bladimir RodrÃguez Muñoz)
- Universidad de los Andes (Angela Serrano)
- Colombian team of RRUSHES-5 (Itayosara Rojas and Lorenza Arango)
