The Oxford Handbook of Land Politics

Access to land, in all its multiple meanings, is necessarily diverse, complex, and contentious, and facilitating and maintaining such access constitutes a mosaic of social relations and institutional instruments, rather than the minimalist and simplistic reduction of land to land property, that in turn tends to be interpreted always as individual private property. The Oxford Handbook of Land Politics offers heterodox analytical tools to help the reader make sense of the complexity of the politics of land.

The Oxford Handbook of Land Politics brings together key theoretical perspectives on the politics of land, as well as strategic thematic studies on land and social life, namely, food politics, climate change, labor regimes, nation-states and citizenship, and geopolitics. The contributors to this volume address the basic but complex questions of who gets to have access to land, why, how, what kind of land and how much, where and for how long, for what purposes, and with what implications as to who wins and who loses? These questions are grounded in social relations that are in turn rooted in class and other social group formations that are enacted within the inseparable spheres of state and society. Fundamental to this collection is its treatment of land in the context of production and social reproduction, where social reproduction is interpreted in a broad sense to include socio-ecological, socio-cultural, and socio-political reproduction. The definition of land used in this Handbook encompasses soil, farmland, grazing land, home lots, landscapes, socio-agroecological zones, territory, and homeland. Individually and together, the chapters show that making sense of the dynamics of global social life requires a fundamental understanding of the politics of land, and a grasp of land politics requires a comprehension of broader social life. For instance, land politics plays a key role in causing climate change, and at the same time it is centrally located in the competing solutions to the climate crisis. Understanding climate change politics necessarily requires a deep grasp of land politics. All contributing authors are critical of capitalism, and of theories that justify and celebrate it. While most contributions focus on dynamics of social change in and in relation to the rural world, these are cast in the context of rural-urban, agriculture-industry, national-global continuums. The Handbook is organically embedded in several disciplines and fields of study: political economy, political ecology, sociology, political science, economics, anthropology, legal studies, development studies, anthropology, environmental studies, and social movements. It is a critical resource for scholars and students who seek to understand the complex interactions between these various disciplines and land politics.