Doctoral Dissertation Research: Land Access, Agrarian Relations, and the State

Cuny Graduate School University Center, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

The research funded by this award addresses the question of what happens to rural people when the state-owned lands where they traditionally had use rights are taken from them for agribusiness projects. The appropriation of state lands for commercial agriculture and the associated dispossession of rural occupants constitute a widespread phenomenon that goes back centuries. But social scientific research on "land grabs" in the more interconnected world of today is just beginning. The researcher asks, How are state and public lands defined and delimited today? Who can use them and for what purposes? How are local people responding? And what does all this tell us about the nature of contemporary forms of governance and citizenship? To answer these questions, the researcher has identified a region where these processes are active and can be examined as they develop. By investigating a case of political and cultural disputes over land closely, this research will provide a unique window into emergent state transformation and changing definitions of private and public in the contemporary world. The research will be undertaken by Julio Arias Vanegas, a City University of New York anthropology doctoral student who is supervised by Dr. Marc Edelman. The active site that Arias has identified for this project is the Altillanura region of post-conflict Colombia. Arias will conduct twelve months of fieldwork in different locations in Colombia, collecting data through multiple methods, including document analysis, oral history, interviews, and participant observation. He will focus on two dissimilar but interrelated cases: (a) the case of state property that was home to an important regional agricultural research center and over which various groups now claim rights; and (b) an emerging regionalist agrarian movement that has confronted state legislation over the designation of specific land holdings as baldíos (vacant public lands). The study of these cases will allow the researcher to examine: how conceptions of regional people, nature, and territory, as well as public and private properties, have changed through legal and scientific debates; how racial and regional identification and belonging are deployed; and how different land-holders and occupants challenge and reshape state projects through their own notions and forms of land tenure. In doing so, this study will shed light on the making of the relationship between state formation, property conflicts, and the production of frontier regions. The research will contribute to social scientific theory on the state, regionalism, and dispossession. Findings also will be relevant for policymakers interested in land distribution and its political and cultural consequences, particularly in transitional contexts.