Introduction: New directions in agrarian political economy

For four decades, The Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) has served as a principal arena for the formation and dissemination of cutting-edge research and theory. It is globally renowned as a key site for documenting and analyzing variegated trajectories of agrarian change across space and time. Over the years, authors have taken new angles as they reinvigorated classic questions and debates about agrarian transition, resource access and rural livelihoods. This introductory essay highlights the four classic themes represented in Volume 1 of the JPS anniversary collection: land and resource dispossession, the financialization of food and agriculture, vulnerability and marginalization, and the blurring of the rural-urban relations through hybrid livelihoods. Contributors show both how new iterations of long-evident processes continue to catch peasants and smallholders in the crosshairs of crises and how many manage to face these challenges, developing new sources and sites of livelihood production.     

Women in Contemporary Democratization

Over the past two decades authoritarian regimes in many parts of the developing world, as well as in East/Central Europe, have been replaced by democracies. This paper looks at the issue of democratization from a gender perspective. While many of the problems afflicting the new democracies, such as the elitist character of political parties, and the failure of the state to guarantee civil and political rights or make a significant dent in poverty affect all citizens, they are manifested and experienced in gender-specific ways. Women's persistent exclusion from formal politics, in particular, raises a number of specific questions about how to reform democratic institutions since these institutions are not automatically gender-equitable.