About the group
Land and resources are back on the political agenda — at the heart of contemporary conflicts over livelihoods and environments. While global land grabbing for infrastructure, industries, agriculture, nature conservation, and carbon storage is central to the debate, these ongoing processes are linked to a much wider spectrum of interests.
Contemporary resource frontiers take various forms, including:
- Food production, food systems and food regimes
- agro-industrial plantations
- extractive industries
- energy production
- tourism
- nature conservation
Rural life is also shaped by domestic and international migration, deagrarianization, state and non-state forms of governance, international trade as well as new forms of authoritarian populism. And not least by threats posed by emerging infectious diseases to animal and human health such as avian influensa and African swine fever.
Responses from rural peoples involve not only passivity or resistance but also other – at times contradictory – forms of agency. Such agency manifests in projects and processes that both involve agriculture and go far beyond it. Consequently, in the 21st century, ‘the rural’ is increasingly decoupled from ‘the agrarian’ in ways that warrant critical rethinking of rural transformations.
Follow our blog: Terra Nullius
Academic programmes and courses
- Ph.D. Course: 'Rural Transformations in the 21st Century'
- Ph.D. Course 'The Political Ecology of Pandemics'
- SUM4027 - Food and Sustainability
- SUM4028 - Emerging Economies and Challenges to Sustainability
- SUM4200 - Key Issues in Development and Environment