Dispossession

This essay offers a genealogy of dispossession in agrarian studies across three key episodes – Marx’s formulation of primitive accumulation, subsequent attempts to theorize dispossession’s persistence in new historical settings, and the land grab debates. Focusing on a set of often-implicit parameters of dispossession – subjects, objects, agents, means, functions, and outcomes – it shows both the conceptual ambiguities and historical specificities in Marx’s primitive accumulation. Later reformulations such as accumulation by dispossession often resolve Marx’s historical limits by loosening conceptual boundaries, at the cost of turning dispossession into an umbrella term for heterogeneous losses. To restore analytic sharpness and political coherence, the essay favors a more restrictive definition based on coercive means and absence of consent, but adds to it an unjust relationship between the agent and subject. It then tests the boundary of the concept through three contentious cases – market-induced land loss, compensated state expropriation, and redistributive land reform. This more restrictive conceptualization helps to differentiate dispossession from overlapping terms such as expropriation, enclosure, and proletarianization. Working together with a vocabulary of non-dispossessory processes, this conceptualization can form a framework of regimes of (non)-dispossession for the comparative analysis of divergent pathways in agrarian change.