Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India

By Manjusha Nair. Contemporary Sociology, 2019

125 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Literature on global land-grabbing is flourishing remarkably, both in the social sciences but also in more militant and activist sections of civil society as pressure for land massively increases in southern contexts with respect to energy and food issues. Michael Levien’s Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India deals with questions of land appropriation in the Indian context of economic liberalization, and more precisely with a local dispossession situation in Rajasthan’s first and largest Special Economic Zone (SEZ), the Mahindra World City (MWC). This information technology services space required more than 3,000 acres of both private and public (grazing) land taken largely from the village of Rajpura through a complex process of compliance using mainly market-based compensation and real estate speculation. In his introductory remarks, Levien presents briefly the different theoretical debates around dispossession and capitalism and situates himself within them: he doesn’t comply with the modernization theories or the Marxist theories, as both see dispossession as a structural process leading either to development and progress or to the end of capitalism and the rise of socialism. On the contrary, David Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession (ABD) might be more relevant to understand contemporary dispossession situations, as it integrates land alienation into the over-accumulation crises that neoliberal capitalism is currently experiencing. But Levien rejects the assumption that dispossession is a mechanic and structural “new imperialism” driven by a global capital in crisis. Instead, he tries to assess the specific role of states in this process, and the historical and geographical particularities driving each dispossession situation. He comes therefore with this original concept of “regimes of dispossession”, where land dispossession is in fact a complex political mechanism orchestrated by state forces for different social classes and different economic purposes over time and space, each regime serving a specific phase of capitalism’s

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

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