Landscapes of deracialization : power, brokerage and place-making on a South African frontier

This thesis deals with the politicized struggles for land in South Africa’s Limpopo Province. With land having been an essential part of colonial and apartheid segregation policies and practice – with 87% of land appropriated by whites –, a land reform programme was imperative after the African National Congress came to power in 1994. One of the three branches of the land reform programme, land restitution, is a key focus of this thesis. It is particular in its goal to do justice to victims of past land dispossessions who lost land rights as result of racially-discriminatory laws by compensating them for this past loss of land and livelihoods. Where compensation for lost rights involves the government buying and redistributing land to groups with historical rights to land, such land deals present particular challenges around the ideal of restorative justice and what is means to ‘bring the past into the present’

Rethinking the divide: Exploring the interdependence between global and nested local markets

The debate on smallholder commodification trajectories tends to be polarised between mainstream approaches that advocate tighter integration of smallholders into global value chains, and alternative approaches that favour localised markets on the grounds that these provide greater autonomy over production and marketing, and allow a greater share of value to be realised for producers and the wider community. This debate obscures the interrelations and possible synergies between them; a critique taken up in this paper. Using a case study on agricultural diversification in the former homeland of Venda, South Africa, we explore the usefulness of the nested markets concept to make sense of smallholders' patterning of markets by combining tree crops for export with seasonal vegetables for local markets. Exploring the drivers of diversification, we show how farmers’ patterning of markets depends on their profiles and corresponding trajectory of accumulation. Local markets are articulated systems that function as hybrid spaces of interaction that enable farmers without any alternative off-farm income to gain and sustain access to global commodity markets. This challenges the framing of nested markets as an act of resistance as well as the dichotomy between local versus global markets as mutually exclusive. Instead, we argue that these markets can be interconnected and mutually supportive and are opportunistically used as such by petty commodity producers to sustain their export-oriented production system. If these relations are better understood, they stand to enable agrarian policy, which currently favours high-value tree crops, to be more inclusive of young and less well-resourced farmers

Urbanization in (post-) New Order Indonesia: connecting unevenness in the city with that in the countryside

This article explores the relationship between the uneven outcomes of development in Indonesian cities with exclusionary outcomes of capitalist development in rural areas. Combining concepts of planetary urbanization with critical agrarian studies, we show how sociospatial and socionatural differentiations in (post-) New Order Java result in the emergence of the Kaum Miskin Kota, a ‘stagnant relative surplus population’ residing in precarious flood-prone urban spaces. These forms of differentiation are dialectically related to rural enclosures caused by the creation of political forest and political water. Tracing such relations forms a good basis to connect rural- and urban-based social movements