Accumulation by dispossession and hazardscape production in post-corporate gold mining in Itogon,Philippines

This study investigates the experience of a gold mining community two decades after corporate mining activities ceased and were replaced by informal subcontract small-scale mining in Itogon, Philippines. Drawing on David Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession and Daanish Mustafa’s hazardscape, we consider the lasting effects, from 1903, of dispossession upon the establishment of the first commercial mines in the Philippines as experienced by traditional miners in Itogon. Despite the closure of mining operations, mineral lands remain privately owned, resulting in the persistence of legal land dispossession among local small-scale gold miners. Mining activities still continue as small-scale miners are able to access abandoned mines through subcontract mining. Subcontract mining has changed the source of capital that funds mining activities from mining corporation to rent-seeking small-scale mining financiers, but the new economic relations still benefit from the capitalist logic of low natural resources and labour value. We argue that the production of hazardscapes is a consequence of accumulation by dispossession through (1) processes of expropriation of mineral lands and the consequent creation of free labour among local miners; (2) the externalisation environmental cost as an accumulation strategy that results in the production of socionatural hazards; and (3) exploitation of those who labour and who are made to work in precarious work environment while contributing to the production of hazardscapes.     

Conceptualising European Privatisation Processes After the Great Recession

A wave of privatisation is unfolding in Europe in the wake of the financial crisis, but it has yet to receive serious scholarly attention. This paper examines the case of Ireland, where an austerity strategy and European Union International Monetary Fund bailout conditionality have given impetus to the transfer of public assets to the private sector. Theoretically, the paper explains the roots of the phenomenon with reference to a reformulated concept of “accumulation by dispossession” whose usefulness lies in emphasising the politico‐economic drivers of privatisation, which have been neglected in the mainstream literature. A typology is presented that argues that accumulation by dispossession manifests itself, in practice, through four main processes: (1) private repossession of assets nationalised during the financial crisis; (2) restructuring of state‐owned enterprises; (3) commodification of assets and services hitherto located outside the market; and (4) privatised stimulus through public–private partnerships. The paper's framework should be useful to conceptualise ongoing privatisation processes in other European countries.     

Unpacking “Accumulation By Dispossession”, “Fictitious Commodification”, and “Fictitious Capital Formation”: Tracing the Dynamics of Bahrain's Land Reclamation

We explore the interrelationships between the concepts of fictitious commodities, fictitious capital and accumulation by dispossession. We do so through a detailed examination of the dynamics of land reclamation in the Kingdom of Bahrain during the years 2001–2014. Particularly, we dissect in‐depth the ensemble of social relations and chain of events involved in two specific real estate projects, Norana and Bahrain Financial Harbour, that have come to symbolize Bahrain's neoliberal era. Reclamation was a unique process in which land was explicitly produced as a commodity for market purposes. Primary material of land deeds, company registration documents, and news articles were used to map out the social relations across the state–finance–real estate nexus. We emphasize that our understanding of accumulation by dispossession involving land is greatly enhanced if we view it as a process of reconfiguring the ensemble of social relations using fictitious commodification and fictitious capital formation.     

Not About Land,Not Quite a Grab: Dispersed Dispossession in Rural Russia

In most literature in geography and agrarian studies, rural dispossession is neatly related to land rights or access, a trend that increased with debates about the recent wave of farmland investments worldwide. Drawing on long‐term fieldwork in rural Russia, this paper critiques that focus and the assumed nexus between rural dispossession and farmland, as is prevents an understanding of more dispersed stakes, modes and temporalities of dispossession. I introduce the concept of dispersed dispossession which advances our understanding of social and relational objects of dispossession beyond natural resources (such as sustaining institutions and infrastructures), and the tangled, complex, often slow and silent modes and temporalities of dispossession beyond spectacular events. I show how the concept sheds new light on current agrarian change in Russia, and how it contributes to debates on (rural) dispossession and “land grabs” more generally.     

The Subsumption of Space and the Spatiality of Subsumption: Primitive Accumulation and the Transition to Capitalism in Shanghai,China

Abstract: Based on extensive interviews, this study is the first systematic attempt to map the spatio‐temporal evolution of production networks linking urban, state‐owned enterprises and rural, township and village‐owned enterprises in reform‐era China. It identifies two distinct regimes of urban‐to‐rural subcontracting patterns and conventions. The first, which developed and prospered from the mid‐1980s until the mid‐1990s, brought rural workers and the countryside into a relatively extensive relationship with urban capital, and thus represented a partial transition to capitalism. Its violent reconfiguration in the wake of a series of sectoral crises in the late 1990s led to the widespread privatisation of rural enterprises, and the emergence and consolidation of a second regime that simultaneously constituted a significant intensification of relations, the capture of the rural by the urban, and a new stage in this region's transition. This paper argues that these regimes are analogous to the formal and real subsumption of labor to capital, respectively, and that subsumption may be a more useful analytic for understanding the process of capture and transition than primitive accumulation: the latter concept alone, without reference to the dynamics of the social/spatial division of labor, risks missing other ways that exploitive connections can be constructed between places. This paper thus seeks to recast the relationship between these two concepts, and to develop a larger vocabulary in which subsumption, like primitive accumulation, is both spatial and ongoing and internal to capitalist accumulation.     

Capitalist Formations of Enclosure: Space and the Extinction of the Commons

Despite their theoretical and political potential, recent debates on enclosure usually lack an effective consideration of how space is mobilized in the process of dispossession. This article connects the analysis of enclosure's general spatial rationality to a range of illustrations of its particular formations and procedures. Enclosure is understood as one of capitalism's “universal territorial equivalents”, a polymorphous technique with variegated expressions in time but also with a consistent logic that uses the spatial erosion of the commons to subsume non‐commodified, self‐managed social spaces. In response to the ever‐changing nature of commoning, successive regimes of enclosure reshape the morphologies of deprivation and their articulation to other state and market apparatuses in order to meet shifting strategies of capital accumulation and social reproduction. Through a spatially nuanced account of these phenomena, I outline a tentative genealogy of enclosure formations that allows tracking diverse geographies of dispossession across different scales and regulatory contexts in various historical stages of capitalist development.     

Classifying Like a State: Land Dispossession on Eastern Crete’s Contested Mountains

Despite the widespread attention to capital investments in land and property around the globe, the active re-regulating role of the neoliberal state in processes of “accumulation by dispossession” remains underexplored. Through an in-depth look at the dispossession of highly fragmented and loosely regulated private land for windfarm investments on Crete’s eastern corner, Sitia, this paper re-affirms the political nature of the forcible appropriation of land for large-scale investments; dissects the specific mechanisms in which the state dispossesses land on behalf of investors and promotes the forcible appropriation of land from below; and problematises the dialectic relationship of both rupture and continuity between crisis and inherited, path-dependent relations embedded in land. The transformation of Sitia’s loosely regulated, informal relations on land is made possible through the mobilisation of the state’s bureaucratic and normalising powers, which redefine the concept of forest and dispossess through classifying land as such.     

Ways In and Out of Vulnerability to Climate Change: Abandoning the Mubarak Project in the Northern Nile Delta,Egypt

Abstract: Climate change is already exerting significant pressure on humanity, but some people have the resources to cope, while others do not. What, then, determines vulnerability to climate change? This article presents a case study of one site of vulnerability in Egypt, known as the Mubarak Project villages on the shores of the Mediterranean. The soil of these villages is now undergoing rapid salinization, forcing farmers to apply sand to “elevate” their fields above the rising salty water table—but not all farmers can afford to buy the requisite sand. Accumulation by dispossession under the Mubarak regime has pushed some people towards the frontline of climate change, while at the same time denying them the resources to stay there. Using our case, we explore the connection between accumulation by dispossession and vulnerability to climate change and ask if an end to the former could reduce the latter in Egypt.     

Securing the Return: How Enhanced US Border Enforcement Fuels Cycles of Debt Migration

Expanded border enforcement has made unauthorised migration to the US more risky, costly, and prone to failure. Research on the material consequences of border enforcement for migrant‐sending households in Central America reveals that the economic hardships enforcement exacts on migrants at times diminishes enforcement's desired deterrent power. Heightened risks have driven up the cost of migration and pushed many to fund their trips through loans. Consequently, migrant detention, deportation, or death can result in poverty and privation for indebted households and the seizure of loan collateral, typically homes and land, in turn prompting crises in household reproduction. With a US wage the most viable means to ameliorate economic hardships, enforcement outcomes push some to return migration. Our findings suggest that US border enforcement efforts at times perpetuate the very unauthorised migration they seek to impede, while also helping to reproduce the border itself by deepening the marginalisation that drives migration decisions.     

‘Being in Being’: Contesting the Ontopolitics of Indigeneity

This article critiques the shift towards valorizing indigeneity in western thought and contemporary practice. This shift in approach to indigenous ways of knowing and being, historically derided under conditions of colonialism, is a reflection of the “ontological turn” in anthropology. Rather than seeing indigenous peoples as having an inferior or different understanding of the world to a modernist one, the ontological turn suggests that their importance lies in the fact that they constitute different worlds and “world” in a performatively different way. The radical promise this view holds is that a different world already exists in potentia, the access to which is a question of ontology—of being differently: ‘being in being’ rather than thinking, acting and world-making as if we were transcendent or “possessive” modern subjects. We argue that the ontopolitical arguments for the superiority of indigenous ways of being should not be seen as radical or emancipatory resistances to modernist or colonial epistemological and ontological legacies but rather as a new form of neoliberal governmentality, cynically manipulating critical, postcolonial and ecological sensibilities for its own ends. Thus, rather than “provincializing” dominant western hegemonic practices, such discourses of indigeneity extend them, instituting new forms of governing through calls for adaptation and resilience.