Special Issue on Dispossession and Resistance in India and Mexico: Introduction

Land in its many forms—as a field, home, territory, space for social reproduction, and a resource for productive and valuable extraction activities, among others—is central to the story of development across the world. As societies have transformed over time, the social form of holding land, the nature of activities carried out on it, the meanings of land, and the relations these processes produce have also transformed. In this story of transformation, colonialism and the development of capitalism have had a long-lasting impact on the way in which land and relations around land are organized. A history of capital accumulation is one where capitalists have sought to constantly reshape the many forms and meanings of land so that it may best serve the dynamic of capital accumulation. In the Global South, this was initiated in a systematic way with colonialism and the introduction of the notion of private property in land as the most “efficient” ordering of land for profit maximization. In the postcolonial period, it was furthered by the discourse on “modernization” or “catching up” to the West in a bid to mimic the advanced industrialized countries’ experience. Even as the model failed to achieve the desired results and critiques of “development as modernization” were politically sharp and intellectually scathing, the discourse of development as capitalist development oriented toward increasing capital accumulation has remained firmly rooted within the Global South.

In fact, the project of development has served as an important legitimizing discourse to further capital accumulation, where capitalism itself could not be championed because of its lack of public legitimacy (Jairath, 2021). The reordering of space/land has been central to this story of development as capital accumulation (Lefebvre, 1992). As space is reorganized, the contours of territories are transformed, land use patterns change, as do the relations between land, labor, and capital. The recasting of land to be best adapted to the dynamic of capital accumulation has lent land a central place in debates about development. Moving beyond Marx’s theorization of violent and coercive dispossession from land as part of the “primitive accumulation of capital,” recent writings point to the continuous and contemporary character of dispossession as constitutive of capital’s expanded reproduction (Harvey, 2004; Levien, 2015; Sanyal, 2014). Dispossession of land then constitutes a central aspect of the history of development in the Global South. In this context, Trujillo notes,

Historically, capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy have converged to create a mode of production that reproduces itself based on multiple mechanisms of separation and the constant appropriation of work, material, and energy to convert these elements into value and to guarantee the logic of accumulation. In this dynamic, violence and dispossession have claimed a central role, fracturing and transforming the relationships of interdependence, reciprocity, symbiosis, and care-taking among many human and nonhuman communities that have traditionally ensured sustainability for life on the planet. (Trujillo, 2021, p. 131)

While Mexico and India have fairly divergent histories of colonialism and postcolonial economic trajectories, and their relationship with imperial powers in the twentieth century similarly saw distinct paths, their broader location within the global political economy remains similar. As countries of the Global South, their economies have grown within an unequal global footing, and each has chosen distinct paths to negotiate that inequality. Today, India’s GDP is more than double that of Mexico, while Mexico’s per capita GDP is five times that of India’s. The Global South has witnessed capitalist expansion in diverse and heterogenous ways. At first glance, it might seem that Mexico and India have such large social and geographic differences that comparing capitalist land acquisition processes in these two contexts might not be fruitful. However, our point of departure emphasizes that by comparing these two different nations, it is possible to see the nuances of the capitalist land acquisition and dispossession processes taking place all across the Global South.

These are the following differences: India’s land mass is nearly twice as large as that of Mexico, and India’s population is 10 times larger than that of Mexico. Mexico’s 2020 census found only 1,825 Indians living in Mexico, and only 71 Mexicans lived in India in 2022 (Mexico News Daily, 2024). However, the common recent economic experiences of both nations are above all what makes the comparison we are offering so worthwhile. The powerful commonality in the examples of both Mexico and India is that both fully and willingly adopted neoliberal (free market) economic policies that brought enormous new opportunities for capital investment, foreign and domestic, in a wide array of economic undertakings, including vast land acquisitions. This profound economic change took place in one significant and quite similar socioeconomic context: Both nations have situations of extreme concentrations of wealth, in both cases as an inheritance from their colonial pasts. We believe that by looking inside the global processes playing out in these two nations, some intriguing comparisons and conclusions result. In both Mexico and India, we can observe similar powerful economic processes. Within each case study offered here, therefore, we can better understand how particular localities have responded to the sweeping impact of global forces so well beyond their control.

Even as we highlight the centrality of the multiple mechanisms of separation resulting in violence and dispossession as central to the accumulation process, we are also acutely aware of the various precapitalist forms of violence, and separation, as we find in the case of the structures of caste in India. That is to say, while we recognize relationships of interdependence and reciprocity in certain forms of traditional societies that, to be sure, capitalism has broken down and continues to do so, we are also cognizant of the various structures of inequality, oppression, and exploitation that were part of many of these traditional societies. However, such an acknowledgement does not take away from the predominant tendency of capitalism to break down forms of reciprocity and symbiosis to remold social relations such that accumulation may be maximized.

Within a history of separations provoked by the dynamic of capital, scholars have pointed to the deterioration in the conditions of living and social reproduction of working classes, now separated from their means of production and more deeply integrated into market structures, but forever on the margins. Development has come at a cost. Urbanization, industrialization, and modernization have together been borne by large displaced and dispossessed populations, who have often not found a place within these very processes. Partha Chatterjee (2014) reminds us that capital-intensive industrialization has never had the capacity to absorb all the displaced, not even in its classic form in England during the industrial revolution. We are, therefore, left with what Tanya Li has termed the “surplus population”—a population that is surplus in relation to the needs of capital that is “hungry for land, but spits out the people that live on it” (Jairath, 2020). In the context of India, Levien (2015) has pointed to the crisis of legitimacy of a discourse of development with the onslaught of the neoliberal turn. With the advent of neoliberalism, the changing dynamics and priorities of capital have accordingly influenced the shape of the development project as well. The rise of finance capital in general and the centrality of big corporate capital in the context of the increasing pace of dispossession of lands in the pursuit of development have led to a gradual shedding of even a facade of social welfare to give way to a more naked hunger for profit maximization (Levien, 2015). The role of the state has accordingly changed to increasingly play the role of facilitator more than executor, where land itself has become the commodity whose sale/rent has become a central source of income. However, despite these important changes, an ideology of development, with its moral basis in the notion of “improvement” of lands, spaces, and resources (Fields, 2017), continues to be just as powerful a legitimating tool as ever. As development has always remained a subject of the state, this has meant that the state and law continue to remain key elements that shape the structure and political economy of dispossession.

There exists a large body of work on dispossession and forceful acquisition of lands in the name of development, whether by the state or private capital, but always facilitated by the state, as well as resistance to such processes (Borras et al., 2011; Levien, 2013; Padhi & Sadangi, 2020; Perry, 2013; Nielsen, 2018; Nilsen, 2010; Whitehead, 2010). However, we are cautioned by Hall et al. (2015) to be wary of anticipating resistance to forceful land acquisition as a necessary, natural, or logical response. Instead, they make a call to examine the particular conditions and context within which such processes take place to understand the variety of ways in which “local communities” respond to land acquisition in the name of development. Levien’s (2018) work on the establishment of a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in Rajasthan, India, demonstrates this heterogeneity veritably to point to the opportunities it creates for some, while severely impoverishing and disadvantaging others, and facilitating conditions of continuous precarity for still others. Taking this discussion forward, in this special issue, we further examine the myriad processes that are unleashed in the aftermath of dispossession from lands and the resistance to them. Moving beyond engaging with the “reactions from below” (Hall et al., 2015), from resistance to acquiescence to incorporation, we look at the complex set of nonlinear processes of mobilization and negotiation that dispossession provokes, thereby initiating a reordering of spaces, institutions, identities, and/or livelihoods. In this collection, the essays collectively explore the various ways in which capital is both negotiated by those impacted by dispossession from land, as well as how capital shapes and acts on communities and spaces in question. It is a generative process, then, one that is dynamic and dialectical. Acquiescence can then transform into resistance; resistance may not be merely co-opted but transformed into modes of negotiating with states, corporates, and capital, and as these processes reshape identities, new subjectivities emerge in the renewed context, bringing about a change in the ordering of spaces of social reproduction. This approach will contribute to the literature on displacement and dispossession from land to examine the diversity of processes that are sparked off that cannot be written into simply resistance/opposition, or compliance, but in fact take on myriad forms. The collection of essays here presents some of this diversity across two Global South countries—Mexico and India.

The selection of these two countries is the result of a longer process of dialogue and exchange across contexts. On the one hand, it represents a process of exchange between any two Global South countries, itself a political project in an academic global structure that is dominated and mediated by the North and/or the Anglo-Saxon West. The challenges of talking across two Global South countries without such a mediation have been immense. At the same time, it has been particularly productive to talk across contexts as diverse as India and Mexico, whose postcolonial histories have been quite different, whose state policies and legislation on land distribution and ownership have been fairly divergent, and whose present political context sets the two countries apart. Speaking across these differences, even as they converge on certain broader political economy structures, has allowed us to identify certain specificities of processes of dispossession and resistance in each of the two contexts as well as broader tendencies that converge despite these specificities.

This special issue seeks to carry forward the thematic dossier published in 2018 on the digital platform of Ritimo, titled Dispossession and Resistance in India and Mexico. ¹ The texts published here were based on a number of case studies that highlighted some of the convergences and divergences mentioned above. For example, we found that the state, in both contexts, has played a central role in facilitating the entry of private capital in all sectors of the economy, including strategic industries historically controlled and regulated by the state. The corruption and impunity of state officials have served to allow and propitiate the process of dispossession. What was also notable in both contexts was the intensification of criminalization of protests, both in legal terms and in nonlegal forms—environmental defenders and those fighting for their right to land and natural resources were being persecuted, jailed, and murdered in both contexts. Regarding some of the specificities that emerged, a significant issue was the manner in which violence played a role in both contexts, and while violence itself was common to both, in the case of Mexico, the presence of organized crime is clearer than in the case of India. However, in the case of India, this process has been more directly related to megadevelopment projects, whereas in Mexico, it is simultaneously marked by a more brutal form of violence as part of the “war against drugs.” Similarly, forms of resistance also have particular expressions, where the manner in which communities express their opposition and, in some instances, search for alternatives is marked by specific historical trajectories and a particular culturally situated comprehension of the world around them.

The characters of governments, so different from each other, deserve mention here. In the case of Mexico, the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018–2024), considered progressive, has pushed forward an important campaign against corruption and has greatly supported economic assistance programs to economically disadvantaged sectors, while in India, Narendra Modi’s government (2014–present) is considered an ultraright government that has moved forward with greater speed in strengthening the neoliberal agenda, diluting labor laws, facilitating easier and faster land acquisition, and cutting further back on social welfare mechanisms. Despite these political and ideological differences, both governments push forward “development” projects leading to territorial dispossession and the dispossession of natural resources, which have led to the rise of resistance and powerful critiques put forth by organized elements of local civil society. For example, in Mexico, emblematic projects of the present government include the Tren Maya, the airport of Santa Lucia, and the refinery of Dos Bocas. While these projects are pushed forward and resistance is increasing across contexts, in this collection of essays we examine the very many processes that are sparked off in and through dispossession, whether of new forms of resistance, of negotiations in the light of “failed” resistance, of the transformation of land and space, and of the social relations that inhabit these spaces. The collection here demonstrates a window into this diversity, which has many more forms and shapes.

Bastian Duarte’s essay in this special issue explores the transformation in the lives of women and of gender relations in Mexico as a result of women participating in processes of resistance. This transformation is not a straightforward story of women’s empowerment, even as we are told of the ways in which traditional gender roles are challenged within agrarian communities that resist dispossession. Instead, the resistance process sparks off a series of frictions, changes, and negotiations, as well as the strengthening of patriarchal values or their remolding based on the renewed context. Minati Dash’s essay on the postdisplacement situation following the successful establishment of Utkal Alumina International Limited’s mining project in Odisha traces some of the ways in which a new assertion among young Adivasi–Dalit men emerges following the failure of the movement to prevent dispossession of their lands. Based on political acumen and collective bargaining undergirded by the threat of resistance or mobilization, Dash’s essay depicts the complex ways in which local communities continue to negotiate with capital, even though the principal aim of the resistance movement—to resist the forceful acquisition of land—fails. They eke out however small a share of the pie from the company, having lost the land to capital, and this often rests on their role as leaders within the movement. It is, therefore, neither a story of “the movement” nor one of co-optation or acquiescence, but one of continued negotiation within a highly unequal social structure.

Ram Wangkheirakpam’s essay on the resistance to displacement from Loktak Lake in Manipur tells the story of collective organization and mobilization against the state’s initiatives at forcibly removing people from the wetland system. It is neither a settled matter of successful mobilization nor of displacement. Instead, the essay places the complex ecological site and the communities that live on and off it in their historical context, and it examines the ways in which they have spurred innovative methods of resistance that are rooted in the physical, social, and politico-economic features of the site. With a mastery over the lake waters and expertise over the technologies to navigate them, the fishers’ union, through evolving customary norms of living on the lake and governing its resources, has so far fought off state onslaughts on their access to the wetland.

César Enrique Pineda’s essay on the two-phase struggle against the forceful land acquisition for Mexico City’s new international airport highlights the creative ways in which strategies of resistance are forged based on changing conditions and the political climate in order to build successful campaigns against forced dispossession. Through an analysis of dispossession in the local historical and ecological context, this case study highlights the role of capital and the state in attempting to reshape spaces, the local ecology, and communities. However, in resistance, local communities develop a range of strategies and alliances with new actors and methods to challenge the megaproject.

Jiménez-Martínez and Galindo Pérez examine an altogether distinct aspect of the mechanism of dispossession and the manner in which it transforms spaces and the people that live in them. Distinct from displacement due to land alienation, this essay looks at the process by which certain lands and territories are demarcated as “territories of trash,” which are used to externalize the waste produced by capitalist production and consumption, rendering them unusable for other purposes through ecological degradation, pollution, and contamination. Productive lands are thereby transformed into lands of waste, a process that is integral to the continued expanded reproduction of capital.

Together, the essays in this special issue contribute to understanding the ways in which capital, through the use of a discourse of development and modernization (still very powerful and centered on land and territory), shapes and structures social relations, transforms landscapes, produces new social subjects, provokes complex processes of resistance, engenders new ways of knowing and understanding, and shapes the life worlds of people in the Global South.