An anatomy of dispossession: post-apartheid land rights and farm dweller relocation in the context of a private game reserve initiative,northern KwaZulu-Natal

This article is a detailed examination of the impact that the development of a private game reserve initiative in northern KwaZulu-Natal had on the lives of farm dwellers in the late 1990s. The reshaping of this landscape for ecotourism purposes – a decision taken by a group of private landowners – meant that the residents of the former cattle farms were relocated, a process which had serious consequences for them. The outcomes of relocation from the farms are explored through conversations with the relocated farm dwellers. In an attempt to convey the texture of the emotional geography of dispossession, we document both the tangible and the less tangible losses suffered from the farm dwellers' point of view, as well as their experience with the state bureaucracy. The legal and bureaucratic process leading up to the relocation is then retraced through court documents and other archival evidence. At one level, this case raises questions about the capacity of the post-apartheid South African land reform programme to secure the land rights of marginalised groups such as farm dwellers, despite legislation passed to protect them. At a deeper level, this article is about the conceptual inadequacies of the law. While the law finds it easy to render visible and to protect (saleable) private property, it struggles to fully recognise more complex land relationships. The people whose experience is described in this article felt disempowered, their lives effectively invisible. We problematise the continuing primacy of private property in post-apartheid South Africa and argue that the voices of those with other histories on the land should receive more serious attention.     

Sir Charles Lucas and The Empire at War

Abstract

This article gives an overview of the British Empire’s participation in the First World War. The roles of Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and South Africa are well documented but there was also a significant contribution from and impact on the smaller and more peripheral territories. These are well covered in Sir Charles Lucas’s multi-volume series The Empire at War. Although very much of its time, written for and by an imperial elite and now neglected, it remains an invaluable record.     

Migrant women breadwinners in Italy during the crisis: improvement or trap?

Gender gaps in some aspects of the labour market in Europe narrowed during the recent economic crisis, mainly because men were hit harder and because of the ‘added worker effect’. Therefore, the number of families with a single wage-earner, in particular female-headed households, increased. However, the differential impact of the crisis on male and female labour force in part was an unintended effect of the ‘gendered’ and ‘racialized’ structure of the labour market. Occupational concentration in care and reproductive work and the public sector in fact protected women from unemployment. Adopting an intersectional approach and using individual and household data from the Labour Force Survey from 2008 to 2015, the aim of this paper is to assess to what extent the gendered and ‘racialized’ structure of the Italian labour market has changed, both from a quantitative and qualitative point of view, and to what extent the increase in female breadwinner families, especially among migrants, hides widening or narrowing intersectional inequalities by gender and citizenship.     

The rise of a capitalist subsistence economy in Peru

The Peruvian economy depends for its growth on the export of its mineral resources. This dependency is derived from the country’s role in the international division of labour and is expressed in its export structure, economic structure and business structure. Peru’s dependency on its mineral resources, an economic structure that is principally made up of non-tradable sectors and a business structure dominated by micro businesses, make lasting economic progress very difficult. We argue that although the Peruvian economy is divided into an advanced economy and a capitalist subsistence economy, the country is not a dual economy where two sub-economies are economically and socially separated from each other and have structurally different modes of operation. The capitalist subsistence economy is characterized by low productivity levels and is expressed in remuneration rates at or near the minimum wage level. This structural feature of the Peruvian economy impedes the successful implementation of a process that would make the country less dependent on its natural resources and would set it on a development course of increased value-added production.     

Piecing Together the ‘Turkish Puzzle’ on Female Labour Force Participation: Comparative Insights from Southern Europe

Southern Europe has seen remarkable turnarounds in female labour force participation (FLFP) over the past four decades. In Turkey, however, scores of women have yet to join the labour force. To address this ‘Turkish puzzle’, we present comparative data on women’s work in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece (SE-4) and Turkey. Through Qualitative Comparative Analysis, we identify the factors behind rising FLFP in Southern Europe to explore the prospects for a steeper rise of FLFP in Turkey. We reveal two causal pathways to rising FLFP: (i) left party rule, or (ii) combinations of higher levels of take-up of early education and care, higher levels of tertiary education among women and larger size of service sector employment.     

Agrarian political economy and modern world capitalism: the contributions of food regime analysis

This paper provides a selective survey of food regimes and food regime analysis since the seminal article by Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael in 1989, and further traced through their subsequent (individual) work. It identifies eight key elements or dimensions of food regime analysis, namely the international state system; international divisions of labour and patterns of trade; the ‘rules’ and discursive (ideological) legitimations of different food regimes; relations between agriculture and industry, including technical and environmental change in farming; dominant forms of capital and their modalities of accumulation; social forces (other than capitals and states); the tensions and contradictions of specific food regimes; and transitions between food regimes. These are used to summarise three food regimes in the history of world capitalism to date: a first regime from 1870 to 1914, a second regime from 1945 to 1973, and a third corporate food regime from the 1980s proposed by McMichael within the period of neoliberal globalisation. Questions of theory, method and evidence are noted in the course of the exposition and pulled together in a final section which criticises the ‘peasant turn’ of the ‘corporate food regime’ and the analytical and empirical weaknesses associated with it.     

The autobiographical you: letters in the gendered politics of the labour movement

In this article, I consider the importance of epistolary narratives in the interface of autobiography and politics. In doing this, I read the letters of Fannia Mary Cohn, a Jewish immigrant worker, trade union activist and ardent labour organizer in the garment industry in the USA in the first half of the twentieth century. Cohn was a prolific writer and political activist and left a rich body of labour literature, but never wrote an autobiography or a diary or journal. It is in her letters to her comrades and friends in the labour movement that short autobiographical stories erupt and it is on such stories across her correspondence that this article focuses. The analysis is informed by Hannah Arendt's theorization of narratives in their interrelation with politics and history. Drawing on a rich body of feminist literature around the relational self, what I argue is that an Arendtian reading of epistolary narratives is a useful analytical tool in understanding gendered politics in the diverse histories of the labour movement.     

Feasibility and Acceptability of an Impact of Crime Group Intervention with Jail Inmates

The current study evaluated the feasibility and acceptability of a manualized Impact of Crime (IOC) group intervention implemented with male inmates (N = 108) at a county jail. Facilitator adherence to the intervention and participant attendance, homework completion, and feedback were assessed. On average facilitators covered 93.7% of each manual topic. Victim speaker recruitment was a challenge—43.5% of relevant sessions lacked victim speakers. Findings suggested significant participant engagement—67.3% attended at least 75% of sessions and 93.3% of homework assignments were submitted on time. Overall, participants indicated satisfaction with the intervention. Successful strategies, challenges, and potential enhancements are discussed.     

Three decades of agrarian reform in Zimbabwe

This article examines the empirical facts about the actual outcome of Zimbabwe's land reform, based on years of field research. It shows that the popular assumption about failed land reform in Zimbabwe is wrong on several counts: the character of Zimbabwe's land reform has been redistributive, and the extent of this has been wide enough to trigger significant progressive changes in the agrarian structure. This is despite some elites having benefited from the process and foreign-owned agro-industrial estates and conservancies being retained. The distribution of land among land reform beneficiaries has been relatively uneven, with some receiving larger land allocations than others, and this in turn influenced the differentiated access of these groups to farming services and infrastructure. Yet the productivity of small producers has grown slowly with output escalating recently. Three decades of land reform has recast land-based social relations in important ways, with the poor gaining more than previously believed.     

Capital–labour separation and unequal value-added distribution: repositioning land grabbing in the general movement of contemporary agricultural transformations

ABSTRACT

While family agriculture is above all characterised by the non-separation of capital and labour, the recent developments in various forms of production – the land grabbing process in particular – can be analysed from the viewpoint of capital/labour separation. In-depth research conducted in several regions of the world shows that this process is accompanied by a distribution of value added which is particularly favourable to capital holders but to the detriment of workers, an imbalance which is partly due to the disconnection between salaries and productivity, which is behind the profitability of these projects (the capacity to remunerate invested capitals).