Description
Book SynopsisThe politics of land are vital. They stretch from fights over fracking, gentrification, and taxation to land grabs, dispossession, and border conflicts. And they raise crucial questions about power, authority, violence, populism, and neoliberalism. This volume of Research in Political Sociology seeks to carve out a renewed political sociology of land, bringing together classic questions about the state, commodification, and social change and contemporary studies of contentious land use in various parts of the world.
An introductory essay sketches foundations for a political sociology of land and specifies what is unique about land in comparison to other political objects. Chapters are based on highly original qualitative, quantitative, and/or historical analyses to shed light on numerous dimensions of land politics. They include analyses of anti-fracking campaigns, property tax caps, and "green gentrification" in the United States, soil protection regulation in Europe, squatter settlements in Peru, land grabs in peri-urban China and rural Senegal, violent expulsions in Colombia, and the privatization of property rights in Morocco. The volume brings together high quality, peer-reviewed research, opens up novel comparisons, and enriches theories of the state, commodification, and collective resistance.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Toward a Political Sociology of Land;
Tim Bartley 1. The State's Unintentional Production of Turf-Controlling Neighborhood Elites in 20th century Lima, Peru;
Simeon J. Newman 2. Land, Power, and Property Tax Limitation;
Isaac William Martin 3. A Seat at the Table: Coalition Building, Fragmentation, and Progressive Polarization in an Anti-fracking Movement;
Amanda Buday 4. Agenda-Dynamics in the European Politics of Land: Explaining the Soil Protection Gap;
Henning Deters 5. Assembling Land Access and Legibility: The Case of Morocco's Gharb Region;
David Balgley 6. Urban Agriculture, Revalorization, and Green Gentrification in Denver, Colorado;
Joshua Sbicca 7. Resistance Against Land Grabs in Senegal: Factors of Success and Partial Failure of an Emergent Social Movement;
Marie Gagné 8. Land for Social Security: Political Survival and Welfare Distribution in Rural China;
In Hyee Hwang 9. The Intersection of Violence and Land Inequality in Modern Colombia;
Laurence Gabriel Nelson
