States and Corporate Land Acquisition

This book examines how states and corporations across the Global South acquire land, identifying distinct patterns of expropriation and resistance. Across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, economic growth in sectors such as mining, agribusiness, energy, infrastructure, and real estate is driving far-reaching land-use change. Yet the processes of dispossession that underpin these transformations vary considerably. It introduces a comparative framework to explain how legal mechanisms, coercion, and state–business alliances combine in different ways to shape land conflicts.

Drawing on detailed case studies—including India's solar parks, Indonesia's palm oil plantations, Cambodia's real estate developments, East Timor's oil and gas projects, and Brazil's land mafias—the contributors highlight three distinct regimes of dispossession: state-led expropriation, curtailed land rights, and decentralised coercion. By comparing these patterns across contexts, the book deepens understanding of how dispossession is organised and resisted, while offering insight into the broader political economy of land-use change.

This book is essential reading for scholars, researchers, and students in development studies, political economy, agrarian studies, geography, and sociology. It will also appeal to policymakers, civil society organizations, and activists engaged with land rights, resource governance, and social justice issues in the Global South.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Globalizations.

Ward Berenschot is Professor of Comparative Political Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and a Senior Researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV). He is the author of Riot Politics (2011) and co-author of Democracy for Sale (2019) and Rightless Resistance (2026).

Neil Loughlin is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Comparative Politics at City St George’s, University of London. His research examines authoritarian politics and the political economy of development, and has appeared in journals including Comparative Politics, Democratization, Third World Quarterly, and the Journal of Contemporary Asia. He is the author of The Politics of Coercion: State and Regime Making in Cambodia (2024).