Join us for the lunch seminar ‘From Agrarian Reform to Land Regrabbing: Oil Palm and Rural Struggles in the Brazilian Amazon’! All are welcome.
When: Monday, October 13
Time: 12:30 – 13:30
Where: Leeuwenborch B077
If agrarian reforms promise redistribution, why do they so often lay the groundwork for dispossession? This talk examines agrarian reforms and counter-reforms in Pará, Brazil, showing how both the Workers’ Party (2003–2016) and Bolsonaro (2019–2022) administrations were shaped by enduring colonial and racialized logics of property. Drawing on critical legal theory, racial capitalism, and field research on oil palm expansion, the analysis shows that redistribution and regrabbing are not opposites but co-constituted processes that reproduce inequality. Reforms recognized family farmers yet relied on Eurocentric property regimes such as titles, productivity criteria, and corporate contracts that marginalized Indigenous and Quilombola territorialities. By situating capital regrabbing within longer histories of colonial property, the talk shows how counter-reforms build on the foundations of redistributive policies and how reforms themselves can prepare the ground for future dispossession.
Bio: Diana Córdoba is a rural sociologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Global Development Studies at Queen’s University, Canada. Her research focuses on land-use change, territorial governance, and agrarian and environmental conflicts in Latin America, with particular attention to their roots in ethnic-racial and class-based discrimination. She has conducted extensive fieldwork and participatory research in Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, and Mexico, engaging closely with communities to explore alternatives to neoliberal development.
Centre for Space, Place and Society 