Agrarian Change Working Group

Please find the call for contributions to the Second Online Conference – IIPPE Agrarian Change Working Group (June 18-19, 2026) below!

The IIPPE Agrarian Change Working Group (ACWG) aims to bring together researchers interested in agrarian political economy.  The Working Group is articulated to the group of editors of the Journal of Agrarian Change which promotes the investigation of the social relations and dynamics of production, property and power in agrarian formations and their processes of change, both historical and contemporary. It encourages work within a broad interdisciplinary framework, informed by theory, and serves as a forum for serious comparative analysis and scholarly debate. As with the Journal, contributions are welcomed from political economists, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, heterodox economists, geographers, lawyers, and others committed to the rigorous study and analysis of agrarian structure and change, past and present, across different parts of the world.

The main annual event of the working group is the Agrarian Change sessions at the annual in-person IIPPE conference where normally 30+ agrarian change-related papers are presented and discussed.

The working group also maintains an email based members’ discussion forum and in 2025 it also organised an additional online Agrarian Change conference, see below.

The ACWG aims:

• to provide a forum for conversation and joint work to the mutual benefit of all;
• to develop a range of activities to advance the perspectives of political economy across this field of enquiry; and
• to extend the work of the ACWG within the wider research community, including in relation to progressive development policy and social movements.

Coordinators

Elena Alvarez

Email: ealv111@aol.com

Sabelo Mcinziba

Sabelo Mcinziba is a transdisciplinary activist-scholar interested in the praxis of the asset-based community development approach through the water, energy, land and food (WELF) nexus. His research focuses on people’s collective power to address their challenges independently and sustainably. He writes on food pathways with a historical perspective on agrarian change, indexing food as a signifier to assess capitalism’s assault on global diets to compromise the health and life-chances of entire populations.

E-mail: sabelo.mcinziba@gmail.com

Noelia Parajua

Noelia Parajuá is Professor (Assistant) at the University of A Coruña and Researcher at the CISPAC – Interuniversity Research Centre for Atlantic Cultural Landscapes in Spain. Her research focuses on past and future transformation of food systems, using an interdisciplinary approach that combines Agrarian Political Economy, Rural History, Ecological Economics and Agroecology. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Historia Agraria. Email: noelia.parajua@udc.es

Enrique Castañón Ballivián

Enrique Castañón Ballivián is a Lecturer in International Development at the Institute of the Americas, University College London (UCL). He researches the dynamics, theory and politics of agrarian change and environmental governance in Latin America, with a focus on agribusiness expansion and resource politics. Enrique is an editor of the Journal of Agrarian Change. E-mail: e.castanon@ucl.ac.uk

Sarah Graf

Sarah Graf is a research associate at the Department for Agricultural economics at the University of Hohenheim. Her reserach focusses on the interrelations of production systems, class relations and environmental change. Her dissertation project further advances concepts and methods for researching class structures using social network analysis and applies these in West African tree crop regions. E-mail: sarah.graf@uni-hohenheim.de

Other Members

We encourage presenters of past and present IIPPE Agrarian Working Group sessions to join as members: Email: Sarah Graf sarah.graf@uni-hohenheim.de

 

Activities and initiatives:

Agrarian Change Webinars, current series

The Journal of Agrarian Change and SOAS Department of Development Studies have been organizing the Agrarian Change Seminar Series since 2008. Since 2020 the sessions are hybrid or fully online. These webinars are open to the public across the world. Registration links for each webinar are available a week before each event via Zoom and Youtube. 

Selected past sessions   2022 Agroecology and the agrarian question in the twenty-first century: The ties that bind? – Haroon Akram-Lodhi (Trent University)   2021      Peasant movements and agrarian change in 21st century Pakistan – Noaman G Ali (Lahore University of Management Sciences)   2020 Corporations and development: Lessons from Indonesia’s plantation zone – Tania Li (University of Toronto) All recordings are available

Click here to see older seminar series.

Agrarian Questions, companion website

Agrarian Questions is the companion website of the Journal of Agrarian Change. It provides a space for discussion and debate among researchers, activists, and students of the political economy of agrarian change. Check the website for: current and past contributions to the Journal; announcements about events organised by the working group; our blog and series of short videos on agrarian change. We are always looking for new contributions!

Sign up here to the mailing list; or subscribe to the calendar of events

Agrarian Questions, YouTube channel

A compilation of interviews, seminars, workshops on a wide-ranging array of themes in agrarian political economy.

The Journal of Agrarian Change

The Journal of Agrarian Change produces four issues each year, with contributions dedicated to the study of agrarian political economy. Aside from the production of the Journal, the editors have also engaged in initiatives that we hope will lead to new and exciting future publications. In May 2008, we held a workshop and conference entitled ‘Agrarian questions: lineages and prospects’, which brought together a range of scholars representing the gamut of approaches and research in the field of the political economy of agrarian change. The workshop was also a unique occasion to have an open discussion about the Journal’s present and future and to celebrate the outstanding work of Henry Bernstein and Terry Byres, as ‘founding fathers’ of JAC. For more information on the journal, please visit the homepage and also have a look at this sample issue.

SECOND ONLINE CONFERENCE - IIPPE Agrarian Change Working Group. A new initiative, in addition to our annual in-person conference.

June 18-19, 2026

The Agrarian Change Working Group, functioning within the International Initiative for the Promotion of Political Economy (IIPPE), invites paper-abstracts for its second online conference.

The online conference is in addition to the annual Agrarian Working Group in-person sessions of the IIPPE in-person conference September 9 – 12, Lisbon, Portugal. The online initiative seeks to create a platform for scholars and students, especially from the Global South, who are willing but unable to attend the IIPPE in-person conference in September.

A sense of urgency animates the study of agrarian change in this conjuncture of global climate emergency, entrenched extractivism, corporate monopoly control, and far-right ideology and rule. The convergence of multiple crisis around labour, land, climate, biodiversity, food, fuel, finance, and migration is radically transforming landscapes and social relations in agrarian formations across the world. Agrarian Political Economy faces the challenge of providing critical analysis of the dynamics and contradictions of this conjuncture. A deeper understanding of the changing social relations and dynamics of production, reproduction, property and power is a necessary condition to build effective counter-hegemonic political projects.

While there are important efforts to promote closed cycle production, territorial and food sovereignty, climate justice, shorter commodity chains, and collective organisation, these have not yet seriously eroded the dominance of neoliberal globalisation. Agribusiness control over global production networks has increased. Agriculture’s financialisation has intensified. And grabs of different kinds (land, water, forests) have continued. These accumulation strategies have a direct but also contradictory impact on agrarian class relations. Capitalist agrarian classes consolidate themselves while petty commodity producers, peasants and rural labourers reproduce themselves under ever more precarious conditions, which requires more than ever to have one foot in the non-agrarian economy. Both outmigration from agriculture and the continued increase in migrant agricultural labour are part and parcel of these processes. This is in turn changing social reproduction, not only by further increasing the feminization of labour but also increasing the pressures on women’s unpaid labour within households and across generations. However, some sectors of the subaltern agrarian classes have managed to insert themselves in agribusiness-led commodity chains through different economic and political strategies, benefiting from the high prices of food.

This raises important questions about the processes of integration into global capitalism, farmer/peasant resistance, social conflicts in the countryside, territorial reconfigurations, semi-proletarianisation, and surplus populations. Are the global and local movements promoting food sovereignty and/or indigenous autonomy leading to more sustainable ways of protecting and managing natural resources? Are these alternatives capable of mounting a challenge to neoliberalism, agribusiness, extractivism, and right-wing populism? Will urban and rural poor be priced out of access to sufficient food, again? Politically, the recurrent crises and instability have led to calls for, and promises of, greater role for the state in regulating economic life – but to what effect?

Submissions are open to all aspects of Agrarian Change, but we especially encourage contributions on the following themes:

• Wars, invasions and agrarian capitalism
• Financialization and global food systems/politics
• Agricultural trade: tariffs, subsidies, and flows
• Labour regimes, migrant labour, and precarity
• Climate change, biodiversity loss, and agrarian climate justice
• (Neo)extractivism, commodity rushes, and dependency
• Authoritarian populism and left-wing agrarian populism
• Agribusiness and global production networks
• Agrarian social movements: composition, agendas, and perspectives
• Social reproduction, care, and gender
• Class formation: commodification, differentiation, and politics
• Accumulation strategies: dispossession, exploitation, and speculation
• Racial capitalism: class, race, ethnicity, caste
• Energy transition and the green economy
• Alternatives to globalised neoliberal agriculture

Abstracts of individual papers must be submitted via google form: https://forms.gle/FiQKnA2zmfzTQ3Ap8

Please submit your proposal by April 18, 2026.

The online conference is free of any registration fees.

For questions and additional information, contact the Agrarian Change Working Group Conference email: agrarianchangewgconference@gmail.com

Organising committee: Amod Shah, Ranjini Basu, Gaurav Bansal, Saurabh Rastogi, Irna Hofman, Navpreet Kaur