Commodity & land rushes and regimes: Reshaping five spheres of global social life

Project Information

RRUSHES-5

Grant agreement ID: 834006

DOI

10.3030/834006

Project closed

EC signature date 18 September 2019

Start date 1 October 2019

End date 31 March 2025

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 499 062,50

EU contribution

€ 2 499 062,50

Coordinated by

ERASMUS UNIVERSITEIT ROTTERDAM
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - RRUSHES-5 (Commodity & land rushes and regimes: Reshaping five spheres of global social life)

Reporting period: 2024-04-01 to 2025-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Recent global commodity rushes have profoundly influenced societies across the globe. At least a quarter of a billion hectares of land have been affected, reshaping livelihoods and social and political relations. Contemporary commodity rushes are more complex and far-reaching than those we have seen before, requiring new thinking and practice to respond to such unprecedented challenges. This project aimed to explore contemporary commodity rushes, centred on the reconfiguration of land use and ownership, examining the implications for five spheres of global social life. At its core was the central research question: How do contemporary global commodity rushes reshape the politics of food, climate, labour, citizenship, and geopolitics in different contexts? To answer this, we examined the structural, institutional and political shifts caused by commodity rushes within broader commodity and land regimes and their impacts across the key spheres of global social life. Guided by a multi-disciplinary theoretical framework and grounded empirical work, we explored practical policy questions aimed at probing the potential for socially just and ecologically sustainable reforms. These reforms are anchored in the social justice principles of redistribution, recognition and restitution of wealth and power, and the regeneration and recalibration of human–nature relations. Our empirical research focused primarily on Colombia, Ethiopia and Myanmar—among global hotspots of commodity and land rushes—with complementary studies in Mozambique, Cambodia, the Philippines and China. This project has changed the way we study recent commodity and land rushes, demonstrating why and how they concern not only the 3.5 billion people who live in rural areas, but the entire world population. Conversely, it demonstrates why it is not possible to understand what happens in the five spheres of global social life without comprehending how these, separately and together, interact with commodity and land rushes.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The RRUSHES-5 project has produced a substantial body of high-quality scholarly work, both collaboratively and individually. Outputs to date include 33 peer-reviewed journal articles, 6 monographs, 5 blog posts and 2 interview conversation pieces. In addition, several manuscripts are currently under peer review in relevant journals.
We are also finalizing three journal Special Issues, 2 scheduled for publication in 2025 and 1 for 2026. First is a Special Issue of Agriculture and Human Values: “Migrants, Farmers and Farmworkers: Land and Labour, Production and Social Reproduction”. Second is in Globalizations journal: "The spectacular global land rush and its consequences". Third, is Scholar-activism and agrarian and environmental struggles for social justice in Third World Quarterly. These Special Issues— all guest-edited and featuring multiple contributions from the RRUSHES-5 team —emerged from international conferences and workshops organized by the project and represent key collaborative outputs of the project.
The project’s achievements in organizing high-impact conferences, workshops and webinars are substantial. These include three major international conferences—in Beijing (Oct 2023), Bogota (Mar 2024), and Brussels (Mar 2025)—and a series of well-attended ‘Agrarian Conversations’ Webinars.
RRUSHES-5 has made substantial contributions to policy engagement and capacity building. A notable highlight was that the PI and PhD researchers working on Colombia have been actively involved in public debates and policy advisory roles with policymakers regarding redistributive land reform. This exemplifies the project’s direct impact on shaping progressive policy in the Global South.
The project supported two completed PhD dissertations and three more in progress (due by end of 2025). This commitment to academic development extends beyond the project’s funded period through initiatives like the Myanmar Initiative, which aims to sustain and expand the project’s impact in training a new cohort of PhD researchers. The project also delivered a series of training on critical agrarian studies and Scholar-Activism for grassroots activists across Southeast Asia and the MENA region, particularly within the La Via Campesina network. Additionally, the project co-organized and led five consecutive annual writing workshops for PhD researchers and early-career scholars from or based in the global South.
In terms of career development, two postdoc researchers of the project secured tenure-track positions and editorial appointments in leading journals. The PI was appointed Erasmus Professor in recognition of his academic contributions and commitment to scholar-activism.
Looking forward, the RRUSHES-5 outputs and ongoing activities position it as a leading contributor to the understanding of contemporary commodity and land rushes. Its comprehensive approach, combining theoretical and empirical research, policy engagement, capacity building, and collaborative scholarship, ensures that its findings will continue to inform academic debates and practical interventions in the years to come.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project’s research outputs are trailblazing and highly impactful in terms of changing the way we understand and study global land rushes and their impact. For example, our article in Globalizations advances research on global land deals by underscoring non-corporate 'pin-prick' and medium-scale land grabs as co-constitutive of large-scale land grabbing. Another article in Land Use Policy, which combines theoretical, empirical cases, large global database reexamination, and systematic literature review on global land deals that were cancelled and withdrawn (a key theoretical building block in our research), changes the way the global land rush is studied and understood. By challenging the conventional wisdom in land grabs research that so-called ‘failed’ land deals have no impact on society, our research showed that non-operational land deals have actual and potential impacts on social relations and the environment. The study introduced the idea that both operational and non-operational land deals form a single, inseparable unit of inquiry—redefining the core subject of land grab research and pushing it beyond the state of the art.
Equally significant is our forthcoming Agriculture and Human Values special issue, which rethinks the role of land, not as a factor in either production or social reproduction, but as simultaneously central to both spheres—addressing a long-standing gap in land and migration studies.
Our publications on the issue of climate change and land that appear in World Development, Land Use Policy, Globalizations, and Journal of Peasant Studies, individually and as a set of scientific work, speak directly to and challenge the general tendency in numerous reports of the IPCC that suggest land/nature-based climate change mitigation and adaptation can and should be accomplished by instituting ‘land tenure security’ suggesting a market-based, individualized property rights system, which we argue may be quite problematic in many societies today.
Finally, our research outputs on regressive populism, land and environment carry significant scientific weight beyond the state of the art.

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