Hetherington, Kregg. 2012. "Promising information: democracy, development, and the remapping of Latin America." Economy and Society 41(2): 127-150.
‘Information' is an enormously promising, if ambiguous term in post-Cold War development thinking. In the last three... more ‘Information' is an enormously promising, if ambiguous term in post-Cold War development thinking. In the last three decades, international development agencies have argued that Latin American land reform policy should focus not on redistributing land but on creating more information about land and making it as widely accessible as possible. These proposals, which I call ‘cadastral fixes' to rural underdevelopment, are understandably attractive and seem to fit well with democratic values of transparency and openness. But I argue that the use of the word ‘information' to connote both democratic rights and the apparatuses devised by economists to improve the rural economy is misleading. ‘Information' is productively vague, allowing development experts to change their projects in the face of failure without questioning the fundamental economic premises on which their reforms are built. As I show in this case study of Paraguayan cadastral reform, the history of these refinements shows a shift, under the rubric of open information, towards increasingly disciplinary forms of intervention in the politics of land.
The Beginnings of a Movement: Leagues of Agrarian Communities, Unions of Industrial Workers, and Their Struggles in Mexico, 1920-1929
Ph.D. Doctoral Dissertation, Harvard University, 2010, 344 pages
This study is the history of a worker and peasant movement that organized in Mexico during the 1920s. At the beginning... more This study is the history of a worker and peasant movement that organized in Mexico during the 1920s. At the beginning of 1929, labor unions and agrarian leagues united into a single worker-peasant movement, with organizational components dedicated to meeting worker and peasant demands through agrarian reform, union struggle, and electoral politics. The study thus follows as closely as possible the internal and broader struggles of each separate organization, how the organizations built power, first in the period when they were separate (1920-1926), then in the period when they united (1927-1929), and finally in the period when they divided (March-July, 1929). The first chapter is dedicated to discovering the ways in which leagues of agrarian communities arose in many regions of Mexico in the early 1920s, and how the agrarian league in Veracruz then combined with other leagues on a national level. Because workers in the railroad industry made the greatest difference for the ways in which workers in the country's main, national industries, and in independent, autonomous unions, united during this decade, the second and third chapters detail the struggles of railroad transportation workers during a major class conflict. In chapters four and five, on mass struggles for worker- peasant unity, I argue that the unification of worker and peasant organizations into two different kinds of alliances, an independent union confederation and an electoral bloc, derived from earlier experiences of conflict, contemporaneous debates on worker-peasant unity, and opportunities opened by the growing national crisis. After it united on political grounds, the movement divided on military grounds, during and immediately after the Escobar Rebellion of 1929, which is the subject of the final chapter.
Land consolidation for increasing cotton production in Uzbekistan: also adequate for triggering rural development?
with Lamers, J.P.A. and I. Bobojonov (2010): In: Labar, K., Petrick, M. and G. Buchenrieder (eds.): Challenges of Education and Innovation. Proceedings of the Fourth Green Week Scientific Conference. IAMO Studies on the Agricultural and Food Sector in Central and Eastern Europe, 56, Halle (Saale), pp. 140-149.
Property, rights and community in a South African land claim case
Published in Anthropology Today
In the context of South Africa's land reform programme, the concepts of ‘property’ and ‘rights’ carry a heavy... more In the context of South Africa's land reform programme, the concepts of ‘property’ and ‘rights’ carry a heavy ideological baggage. This is evident in the country's land reform policies, which have sought to reach a compromise between differing and often contradictory histories involving both rights and property. A shift in government policy, from treating land reform as a question of rights to a question of the transfer of land, has been accompanied by a reification of the idea of community. The result is a policy that is seriously out of touch with the complex legacy of dispossession that the land reform programme was meant to address. As shown by the case presented in this article, these problems become exacerbated when the land in question is part of a conservation area