Special Issue on Dispossession and Resistance in India and Mexico: Introduction

As literature on forced land acquisition, land grab, and its integral relationship with capitalist accumulation grows, Hall et al. caution against anticipating resistance to forced land acquisition as the natural or logical response. Instead, they make a call to examine the particular conditions and context within which such processes take place to understand the variety of ways in which “local communities” respond to land acquisition in the name of development. Heeding such caution and carrying the discussion forward, in this special issue, we examine the myriad processes that are unleashed in the aftermath of dispossession from lands and resistance to it in two Global South countries—India and Mexico. While the two nations have divergent histories of colonialism and postcolonial economic trajectories, by examining processes of dispossession and resistance in two countries of the Global South, we hope to initiate a discussion on the heterogenous and diverse forms of capitalist accumulation and people’s responses to them through the medium of a central resource of natural capital and primary factor of production.