Book Launch with Cocktail Hour
Disenchanted Modernities: Mega-Infrastructure Projects, Socio-Ecological Changes and Local Responses, 2023, Lit-Publishers, Berlin-London-Wien-Zürich
Editors: Tobias Haller and Samuel Weissman, Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern
Presenters: Tobias Haller and Samuel Weissman
Mega-Infrastructure Projects (MIPs) represent a central element of globalized development. MIPs like the Chinese driven `Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) include large-scale agrarian, road, rail, port and energy networks. They are complex ventures involving international capital and multiple stakeholders. `Disenchanted Modernities’ presents 16 case studies showing that the promise of a sustainable modern development by MIPs leave many local users disenchanted: They don’t profit from the MIPs but lose access to their resources often held in common property and governed by local institutions. The book describes the strategies of states and companies leading to commons grabbing as well as local responses to MIPs in Asia, Africa, Americas and Europe. This book adds to the debate on the drama of the grabbed commons.
Tobias Haller is Professor in Social Anthropology at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern, Switzerland and lecturer at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
Samuel Weissman is a PhD researcher at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern, Switzerland.
Drylands Facing Change: Interventions, Investments and Identities, 2023, Routledge, London
Edited By Angela Kronenburg García, Tobias Haller, Han van Dijk, Cyrus Samimi, Jeroen Warner, 2023, Routledge, London.
Presenter: Tobias Haller
This edited volume examines the changes that arise from the entanglement of global interests and narratives with the local struggles that have always existed in the drylands of Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia/Inner Asia.
Changes in drylands are happening in an overwhelming manner. Climate change, growing political instability, and increasing enclosures of large expanses of often common land are some of the changes with far-reaching consequences for those who make their living in the drylands. At the same time, powerful narratives about the drylands as ‘wastelands’ and their ‘backward’ inhabitants continue to hold sway, legitimizing interventions for development, security, and conservation, informing re-emerging frontiers of investment (for agriculture, extraction, infrastructure), and shaping new dryland identities. The chapters in this volume discuss the politics of change triggered by forces as diverse as the global land and resource rush, the expansion of new Information and Communication Technologies, urbanization, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the spread of violent extremism. While recognizing that changes are co-produced by differently positioned actors from within and outside the drylands, this volume presents the dryland’s point of view. It therefore takes the views, experiences, and agencies of dryland dwellers as the point of departure to not only understand the changes that are transforming their lives, livelihoods, and future aspirations, but also to highlight the unexpected spaces of contestation and innovation that have hitherto remained understudied.
This edited volume will be of much interest to students, researchers, and scholars of natural resource management, land and resource grabbing, political ecology, sustainable development, and drylands in general.
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Routledge Handbook of Global Land and Resource Grabbing is now available open access
Presenter: Andreas Neef
This handbook provides a cutting-edge, comprehensive overview of global land and resource grabbing.
Global land and resource grabbing has become an increasingly prominent topic in academic circles, among development practitioners, human rights advocates, and in policy arenas. The Routledge Handbook of Global Land and Resource Grabbingsustains this intellectual momentum by advancing methodological, theoretical and empirical insights. It presents and discusses resource grabbing research in a holistic manner by addressing how the rush for land and other natural resources, including water, forests and minerals, is intertwined with agriculture, mining, tourism, energy, biodiversity conservation, climate change, carbon markets, and conflict. The handbook is truly global and interdisciplinary, with case studies from the Global South and Global North, and chapter contributions from practitioners, activists and academics, with emerging and Indigenous authors featuring strongly across the chapters.
The handbook will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in land and resource grabbing, agrarian studies, development studies, critical human geography, global studies and natural resource governance.
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
