Selected books
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Political Dynamics of Transnational Agrarian Movements by Marc Edelman and Saturnino M. Borras, Jr. offers a state-of-the-art review of scholarship on transnational peasant and farmer movements, a synthetic history of those movements from the early twentieth century to the present, and an analytical guide to research. Published in 2016 in English by Fernwood in Canada for the North American market and by Practical Action in the UK for the rest of the world, the book will also appear in the following languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Chinese, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Thai. | |
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In The Logic of the Latifundio: The Large Estates of Northwestern Costa Rica since the Late Nineteenth Century (Stanford, 1992; Spanish edition, Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 1998) Edelman challenges the assertions of economists, historians, and other social scientists who for decades asserted that the massive underutilized properties found in rural Latin America were disappearing or would disappear with the rise of modern market economies. Instead, he argues, contemporary extensive land use is rooted in the availability of "institutional rents" (e.g., subsidized credit, pro-latifundist fiscal policies), high risk levels due to unpredictable precipitation, and patterns of inheritance within elite families which permit modern latifundists to ignore the price of land in their calculations of profitability. |  |
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Peasants Against Globalization: Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica (Stanford, 1999; Spanish edition, Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 2005) examines changing peasant responses to free market policies and to the dismantling of Costa Rica's "statist" economy and social welfare system. More broadly, it seeks to critique recent trends in studies of social movements, peasantries, and development theory. The research for this book involved an uneasy encounter with engaged ethnography and the ethical dilemmas that anthropologists confront during fieldwork. |  |
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Estudios agrarios críticos: Tierras, semillas, soberanía alimentaria y los derechos de las y los campesinos (Quito: Editorial del Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales, Colección Economía y Sociedad, 2016). Este libro reúne cuatro ensayos sobre temas clave de estudios agrarios críticos: tierras, semillas, soberanía alimentaria y derechos de las y los campesinos. Junto con la introducción, constituyen una muestra de los tipos de debates que animan este campo de estudio y acción, y presentan los estudios agrarios críticos, los debates y la bibliografía relevantes a los diversos públicos que tienen inquietudes por el mundo rural. |
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Global Land Grabs: History, Theory and Method (Routledge 2015), edited by Marc Edelman, Carlos Oya and Saturnino Borras, Jr., considers the surge of land grabbing that swept Africa, Asia and Latin America and even some regions of Europe and North America since the 2008 world food crisis. Early analyses of land grabbing focused on foreign actors, biofuels and Africa, and pointed to catastrophic consequences for the rural poor. Subsequently scholars carried out local case studies in diverse world regions. This volume advances the discussion to a new stage, critically scrutinizing alarmist claims of the first wave of research, probing the antecendents of today's land grabbing, examining large-scale land acquisitions in light of international human rights and investment law, and considering anew longstanding questions in agrarian political economy about forms of dispossession and accumulation and grassroots resistance. |
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Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty (Routledge, 2015), edited by Marc Edelman, James C. Scott, Amita Baviskar, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Eric Holt-Giménez, Deniz Kandiyoti, Tony Weis, and Wendy Wolford is a pioneering contribution to the study of food politics and critical agrarian studies, where food sovereignty has emerged as a pivotal concept over the past few decades, with a wide variety of social movements, on-the-ground experiments, and policy innovations under its broad banner. Despite its growing popularity, the history, theoretical foundations, and political program of food sovereignty have only occasionally received in-depth analysis and critical scrutiny. The aim of this collection is to advance this important frontier of research and organizing, and put food sovereignty on a stronger footing as a mobilizing frame, a policy objective, and a plan of action for the human future. This book is volume 2 of Global Agrarian Transformations, published in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Journal of Peasant Studies. | |
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“Development is a matter of life and death,” Marc Edelman and Angelique Haugerud argue in the Introduction to their edited volume, The Anthropology of Development and Globalization: From Classical Political Economy to Contemporary Neoliberalism (London: Blackwell, 2005). They ask whether development is a powerful vision of a better life for the half of the world’s population who subsist on two dollars a day or whether it is a failed Enlightenment “master narrative.” This book provides an encyclopedic overview of the history of the field, with extensive critical commentaries from the editors and contributions from thirty-one other authors. | |
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Social Democracy in the Global Periphery: Origins, Challenges, Prospects by Richard Sandbrook, Marc Edelman, Patrick Heller, and Judith Teichman (Cambridge, 2007; Turkish edition Phonix Yayinevi, 2012) examines social-democratic experiments in the Global South and their viability in the face of globalization. It analyzes four exemplary cases: Kerala (India), Costa Rica, Mauritius, and Chile (1964-73, and since 1990). These exemplars demonstrate that socioeconomic development and democracy can occur under divergent circumstances of capitalist transformation. They stand out as significant exceptions in a developing world mired in poverty, inequality, illiteracy, hunger, and authoritarian and corrupt governance. Their relative success in responding to globalization’s challenges derives from the legacies of past social-democratic policies: human capital investment, good infrastructure, industrial policies, and an advanced capability for conflict management. |  |
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In the Introduction to Transnational Agrarian Movements Confronting Globalization (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008; Indonesian edition, Sekolah Tinggi Pertanahan Nasional & Sajogyo Institute, 2010) editors Saturnino M. Borras, Jr., Marc Edelman and Cristóbal Kay ask how recent changes in global political-economy have affected the capacity of the “rural poor” to understand their condition, assess political opportunities and threats, frame their worldviews, forge collective identities and solidarity, build movements and launch interlinked collective actions. Borras, Edelman and Kay analyze little-known transnational agrarian movements of the early twentieth century and contemporary high-profile global alliances, such as Vía Campesina. Readers of this book will also encounter peasants and farmers who struggle at home and traverse national borders to challenge the World Trade Organization, activists in Brazil who uproot genetically modified soybeans, forest dwellers in Indonesia who chop down rubber plantations to cultivate rice to feed their families, “runaway villages” in China that take up arms to resist corrupt officials, and Mexican migrants who, having exited in desperation, return from abroad to transform their communities. | |
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Ciencia social en Costa Rica: Experiencias de vida e investigación (Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica y Editorial de la Universidad Nacional, 1998). Los cuatro ensayos que conforman este libro (por Marc Edelman, Fabrice Lehoucq, Steven Palmer e Iván Molina), aparte de su carácter autobiográfico y emotivo, exploran los vínculos entre Costa Rica y los otros países de Centroamérica; discuten los avances y las limitaciones de las ciencias sociales en el istmo; evidencian el trasfondo teórico, metodológico y epistemológico de toda construcción de conocimiento; colocan las relaciones Norte-Sur en el terreno en extremo visible de las experiencias vividas; y evalúan las actuales políticas económicas y sus efectos en la dinámica social y en la cultura. |
News from 2017 Excavations at the Rousay Fieldschool in Orkney, Scotland