Land grabs, labour regimes, and expanding plantations

The 2008 financial crisis and subsequent global “land rush” drew attention to an important social fact: plantations are again expanding to meet global demand for commodities such as palm oil, rubber, and sugar. I have conducted multi-scalar analysis of how large scale land-deals are conducted, how they are legitimated, and how they may unravel. I have also examined these processes ethnographically in Indonesia’s plantation zones, and examined land dynamics together with labour at both the regional and household scale. Partly in response to the land-grab literature, which highlighted what is being taken away when land is assigned to plantation corporations (customary land, diverse ecologies, farmer autonomy and territorial control) – I have been writing about the sets of economic, social and political relations that plantations install.

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