State Spaces of Resistance: Industrial Tree Plantations and the Struggle for Land in Laos

Land grabbing has transformed rural environments across the global South, generating resistance or political reactions “from below”. In authoritarian countries like Laos, where resource investments are coercively developed and insulated from political dissent, resistance appears absent at first glance. Yet, it is occurring under the radar, largely outside transnational activist networks. In this article, we examine how resistance can protect access to rural lands in contexts where it is heavily repressed. Resistance here occurs with, rather than against the state by foregrounding the contradictions of land use and ownership within state spaces, such as competing goals of large‐scale industrial plantations versus smallholder agriculture and national forest conservation. Such contradictions are engaged by using historical, place‐based political connections to exploit the scalar frictions of a fragmented state and occupying plantation clearance sites to highlight contested lands in situ. Nonetheless, such strategies remain spatially and socially uneven amongst the Lao peasantry.     

Why the Homeless Rebel: Housing Struggles in post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Post-apartheid housing struggles urgently need to be addressed in order to consolidate the inclusivist democracy in South Africa. Former white minority governments restricted housing in order to control the movement of Africans and their labour. This paper analyses aspects of post-apartheid housing protest. The argument is that such protests are rooted in a problematic rights discourse of the anti-apartheid struggle, and in the new constitution's recognition of the right of access to adequate housing, which is nonetheless, subjected to fiscal constraints. The article's second focus is on a legacy of land dispossession, which also hinders housing delivery. Failure to realise the right to housing fuels some of the most important conflict that will shape future organisation of state institutions and relations between the state and society.     

Nuclear Weapons: The Global and Popular Context of Policy

Book reviewed:
Lawrence S. Wittner. Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement , 1971 to the Present . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. 491 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $75.00 (cloth), $32.95 (paper).     

皖南事变之后国共两党的政治较量

皖南事变发生之后,国民党内随即产生四派意见：何应钦主张为叶挺另编一新四军;白崇禧主张取消新四军番号;徐永昌主张政治上与中共全面破裂;王世杰、张治中、贺耀祖等则力主缓和。蒋介石采纳了白崇禧的意见。国共在尖锐对立的同时,又都为避免全面破裂设置了各自的限制,这一设限集中表现为避免新四军牵扯八路军。在势态得到控制之后,最后一个问题即皖南事变政治了结的条件。国共围绕条件的较量集中在二届一次参政会。第三方面以调解国共纠纷为契机,提出了自己独立的条件。蒋介石运用现实利益的杠杆作用,满足了第三方面的条件从而将其吸引过来。结果,中共通过拒绝出席参政会,将皖南事变的政治性质暴露出来,而蒋则通过吸引第三方面使参政会全票否决中共条件,双方互有胜负。两党关系转入“拖”的局面。