Land acquisitions, or “land grabbing”, have become a key research topic among scholars interested in agrarian change, development and the environment. A new volume of International Development Policy, the Graduate Institute’s journal on global development, offers the first major collection of articles on the subject with a focus on South-East Asia, a region that has attracted relatively little attention to date.

 

Large-Scale Land Acquisitions, edited by Christophe Gironde, Christophe Golay and Peter Messerli, brings together a broad range of disciplines (history, sociology, economics, geography, law, agrarian and development studies) to analyse the impact of large-scale land acquisitions in Indonesia, the Philippines, Cambodia and Laos.

A series of case studies puts “land grabbing” into specific historical and institutional contexts, looking not only at global actors, but also at the role of political and economic elites at the national and local levels, and examines the potential and limits of human rights mechanisms to prevent and mitigate the negative consequences of land grabbing.

The volume can be ordered in paper format from the publisher, Brill – Nijhoff, or read online in open-access on International Development Policy’s website. A launch event, including presentation of the main findings by the editors and critical discussion, will take place at the Graduate Institute on 7 December 2015 between 12:30 and 14:00.

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