Wendy Wolford & Saturnino M. Borras 
Governing Global Land Deals 
The Role of the State in the Rush for Land

This collection of essays in Governing Global Land
Deals provides new empirical and theoretical analyses of
the relationships between global land grabs and processes of
government and governance.

* Reframes debates on global land grabs by focusing on the
relationship between large-scale land deals and processes of
governance

* Offers new theoretical insights into the different forms and
effects of global land acquisitions

* Illuminates both the micro-processes of transaction and
expropriation, as well as the broader structural forces at play in
global land deals

* Provides new empirical data on the different actors
involved in contemporary land deals occurring across the globe and
focuses on the specific institutional, political, and economic
contexts in which they are acting

Table of Content

List of Contributors vii

1 Governing Global Land Deals: The Role of the State in the Rush
for Land 1

Wendy Wolford, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Ruth Hall, Ian Scoones
and Ben White

2 State Involvement, Land Grabbing and Counter-Insurgency in
Colombia 23

Jacobo Grajales

3 Road Mapping: Megaprojects and Land Grabs in the Northern
Guatemalan Lowlands 45

Liza Grandia

4 Land Regularization in Brazil and the Global Land Grab
71

Gustavo de L.T. Oliveira

5 Negotiating Environmental Sovereignty in Costa Rica 93

Dana J. Graef

6 Building the Politics Machine: Tools for
‘Resolving’ the Global Land Grab 117

Michael B. Dwyer

7 Indirect Dispossession: Domestic Power Imbalances and Foreign
Access to Land in Mozambique 141

Madeleine Fairbairn

8 Competition over Authority and Access: International Land
Deals in Madagascar 163

Perrine Burnod, Mathilde Gingembre and Rivo Andrianirina
Ratsialonana

9 Regimes of Dispossession: From Steel Towns to Special Economic
Zones 185

Michael Levien

10 The Political Construction of Wasteland: Governmentality,
Land Acquisition and Social Inequality in South India 211

Jennifer Baka

11 Chinese Land-Based Interventions in Senegal 231

Lila Buckley

12 Identity, Territory and Land Conflict in Brazil 253

La Shandra Sullivan

Index 275

About the author

Wendy Wolford is the Robert A. and Ruth E. Polson Professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University.

Saturnino M. Borras, Jr. is Associate Professor of Rural Development Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, The Netherlands.

Ruth Hall is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape.

Ian Scoones is a Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex and co-director of the ESRC STEPS Centre at Sussex and joint convener of the IDS-hosted Future Agricultures Consortium.

Ben White is Emeritus Professor of Rural Sociology at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, the Netherlands.
The editors are co-coordinators of the Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI: iss.nl/ldpi) an international network of scholars doing engaged research on the issue of global land grabbing.