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The chapter seeks to reflect on the dynamics of the reconstruction of family farming and peasant agriculture in agrarian reform settlements (“assentamentos”) in Brazil, exploring the limits and potential of government food purchases from family farming, particularly the Food Acquisition Program (Programa de Aquisição de Alimentos – PAA), in the creation of alternative paths of rural development. The work analyzes the different strategies through which farmers and their organizations mobilize public policy instruments and market connections, expanding their room for maneuver and agency capacity. Research was conducted in the Baixo Sul Territory of the state of Bahia, focusing the heterogeneous web of social organizations involved in the implementation of the Food Acquisition Program in this setting.

China’s new rural pension program (NRPP), a fully funded defined contribution plan among the rural residents with heavy government subsidy toward contributions, has expanded rapidly since its introduction in 2009, and is expected to achieve universal coverage by the end of 2012. Empirical evidence, however, shows that although those close to pension eligibility age are enthusiastic, take-up rate is low among younger people, and participants tend to choose plans with the least contribution requirements, threatening the long-term viability of the program. We calculate the net benefits of participation on behalf of rural residents and demonstrate that poor designs are responsible for these problems. A proper rate of return on individual investment is not only essential for encouraging participation and ensuring a higher replacement rate but will also require less government subsidy and relieve fiscal burdens on the government.

Why did peasants in old-regime Europe scatter their land in small strips within open fields? According to an influential theory advocated by Deirdre McCloskey, the system’s main aim was risk reduction. By spreading out land, peasants were less exposed to the caprices of nature: heavy rains, droughts, frost, or hailstorms. In a time when other insurance institutions were lacking, this approach could be a rational solution, even if, as McCloskey suggests, it could be achieved only at the expense of overall agricultural productivity.

Over the years, McCloskey’s theory has repeatedly been debated. Still, it has never been empirically established to what extent the open fields actually reduced risk. McCloskey offered only indirect evidence, based on hypothetical calculations from short series demesne level yields. Risks on enclosed and open-field land farms were thus never compared.

This chapter presents farm-level harvest variation series, including observations from both types of land. It is based on tithe records of 1,700 farms in Southern Sweden from 1715–1860. Results show that scattering had a limited effect on agricultural risk. The system did protect against small-scale local crop failures. It was less efficient, however, when it came to the large-scale regional harvest disasters that constituted a much more serious threat to peasants of the time. From this perspective, the inner logic of the open-field system is taken up for renewed consideration.

Colombia has one of the highest levels of inequality in landholding in the world. This inequality has persisted in spite of numerous state-led land reform efforts, which leads to the question: why has it been so difficult to reverse unequal land distribution in Colombia? To answer this question, the chapter examines the role of the state, non-state armed groups, land inequality, land reform efforts, and a history of violence to reveal the relationship between land, inequality and violence in Colombia. This chapter explores the nature of this relationship to understand Colombia’s enduring inequality and to inform theoretical approaches to statehood and power. Rather than reducing state capacity to common Weberian binary constructions of state and statelessness, I explore how state capacity takes on different forms in different regions of Colombia – analyzing how various actors shape land inequality and violence across the territory. Using a comprehensive longitudinal panel data set of displaced persons, I use a negative binomial regression model to demonstrate how land reform, land inequality, and a history of violence have directly affected current displacement of citizens. I argue that several constellations of powerful social actors have at various points converged to control land, through non-state armed groups, to exert a local form of logistical control outside the scope of the federal state, deeply affecting the dynamics violence across different territories. These groups have subsequently engaged in a land grabbing process that has resulted in a reverse form of land reform – leading to persisting inequality in Colombia.

In Zimbabwe, a curious set of events has occurred since early 2000. Land reform, usually taken to be in defence of rural democracy, is being employed by a government determined to remain in power and veering increasingly toward violent authoritarianism.

The introduction of the 22 member countries of the 4+10+2+6 model of the Asian economy is the immediate task. Japan, Korea, China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar constitute the now-famous 4+10 model. Following the principle of inclusion, Mongolia, Chinese Taipei, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka, as they belong to the regional map of the continent of Asia, are the eight remaining member countries (see Chapter 1). An overview of Asia's 22 member continental economy the AE-22, with its 3.6 billion people (2006) who have made the region of Asia their home in a land area of 20.5 million km² should be welcome. To put these figures in perspective, the AE-22 comprises only 13.7 percent of the world's land area, but is home to over half the world's population. Tables 2.1–2.4, presented below, illustrate the various figures relating to population, land area, GDP, and GDP per capita of the member nations of the AE-22.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

Transition into modernity takes very different roads, depending on the sequencing of bureaucracy and democratic regime. This is demonstrated by comparing Sweden and Greece. At an early stage of the long-term modernisation of Swedish society, due to early penetration of the internal territory and before the extension of suffrage and political modernisation, a number of state organisations were established at the interstices between state and society, creating direct relations between the state and society. The impressive Lantmäteriet, the organisation of tax authorities, the establishment of authorities for registering the population and the Tabellverket are typical illustrations of such organisational structures. Such organisations functioned as social mechanisms that elucidated society making it legible and thus strengthened the infrastructural capacity of the state. In Greece, where the state was built after political modernisation, the establishment of similar organisations proved to be more difficult. Although there is evidence that similar Swedish practices were known in Greece to be possible paths, they were not chosen. The establishment of a land registry system, for instance, was discussed in the decades prior to the 1871 land reform. On other issues, such choices could not be materialised given opposition or political counter-mobilisation to abolish the reforms after they were approved by parliament. These reform efforts were rather short-lived or countered by new reforms and exemptions, creating an ambiguous labyrinth of regulations of state–society relations and a state without the capacity to intervene in society and implement logistically political decisions throughout the realm. On the whole, the state remained a distant entity, mostly a distrusted one, and relations between the state and society were mediated by parties and by social and kinship-based networks.

One of the intractable problems in all democracies is how to deal with the paradox of political equality alongside economic inequality. All democracies uphold political and civil equality, yet they all maintain material inequality. A host of constitutional rights and liberties makes everybody in a democracy equal in a formal-legal way. Simultaneously, all democracies protect private property. Since property is always unequally distributed it follows that constitutional guarantees of property rights may undermine efforts to ensure material equality. If, as in South Africa, land was acquired by settlers through colonialism, then constitutional protection of property rights provides a legal sanction for colonial land theft.

Major pillar of Via Campesina in Brazil, the Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra – MST) political platform combines land reform and agro-ecology, claiming for a profound change in the hegemonic agriculture model in the country, hoisting the ‘food sovereignty’ flag. However, this was not a linear trajectory. Focusing on events that took place in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, the birthplace of the MST, this chapter aims to analyse the different path followed by MST there in order to consolidate the ‘conquered’ settlements. The organization approached, initially, a network of technicians and social organizations critics of the technological package of the Green Revolution in Brazil. Afterwards, choose to support the deployment of conventional agriculture in the agrarian reform settlements, prioritizing collective organization of labour through cooperatives of production, practicing an agriculture based in the intensive use of pesticides, chemical fertilizers and commercial seed varieties. Thanks to the growing international connections of the MST, that paved the way for the creation of Via Campesina, and to the proximity to ‘militant technicians’ coming mainly from the agronomy student movement, in the end of the 1990s, MST resumed its dialogue with alternative agriculture strands, particularly with agro-ecology, campaigning for an agriculture based on principles of environmental conservation and valorization of the peasant way of life.