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Twenty years of BRICS: political and economic
transformations through the lens of land
Mihika Chatterjee & Ikuno Naka
To cite this article: Mihika Chatterjee & Ikuno Naka (2022) Twenty years of BRICS: political and
economic transformations through the lens of land, Oxford Development Studies, 50:1, 2-13,
DOI: 10.1080/13600818.2022.2033191
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OXFORD DEVELOPMENT STUDIES
2022, VOL. 50, NO. 1, 2–13
https://doi.org/10.1080/13600818.2022.2033191
Twenty years of BRICS: political and economic transformations
through the lens of land
Mihika Chatterjee and Ikuno Naka
Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland
Introduction
November 2021 marked the 20th anniversary of the conception of BRICS. Two decades have passed
since the acronym BRIC – Brazil, Russia, India, China – was brought into our popular vernacular by
Jim O’Neill, an economist at Goldman Sachs.1 His influential paper, entitled ‘Building Better Global
Economic BRICs’ (O’ Neill, 2001), analysed the spectacular economic growth this group of
countries were set to experience, and the implications of these future trends for international
political economy. For enthusiastic consumers of the report and detractors alike, the term BRICs
(where the ‘s’ at the end denotes plural) and its embedding within unambiguously optimistic
economic predictions by a leading investment bank, was a clear indication of how these countries
were being constructed as profitable investment destinations to which global financial flows could
be directed. The external acronym, in fact, served as an impetus for the leaders of the four nations to
act on the economic optimism surrounding them, when they first met in 2006 alongside the UN
General Assembly. Delegates from the four countries met more formally in Yektarinburg, Russia in
2009 to give an institutional form to ‘BRICs.’ In the initial period that followed, the BRICs became
an aspirational bloc with its own internal dynamics: they held yearly summits, had diplomatic
ambitions, made commitments to large-scale infrastructure projects within their national bound­
aries as well as transnational ones in their regions. They flexed their economic muscle by establish­
ing a new lending institution – the New Development Bank – and challenging the hegemony of
European and North American countries in international finance.
In 2011, South Africa joined this country grouping as an economic outperformer in the Global
South – an emerging economy and a young democracy – taking the BRICs to BRICS, where the ‘S’
now stood for its newest member. With this addition, the BRICS countries accounted for 26% of the
global landmass and 20% of the total global GDP (Saran, 2015, p. 626). While sceptics and cautious
enthusiasts variously described the BRICS as a kind of ‘loose association,’ a ‘Potemkin village’
(Pomeranz, 2013), or a ‘club of coincidence’ (Saran, 2015), this grouping undoubtedly comprised of
countries with common economic aspirations and similar ideas on the type of multilateralism and
shifts in global political economy that would be required to achieve them. It is these underlying
economic aspirations that have served to reinvigorate the flow of capital within and across BRICS
countries amidst a financing vacuum within a post-financial crisis world. In 2017, nearly a decade
after the 2008 financial crisis, the BRICS accounted for 19% of global investment inflows (Garcia &
Bond, 2019, p. 226). Much of these financial flows have been channelled into capital-intensive landhungry infrastructure projects.
CONTACT Mihika Chatterjee
mihika.chatterjee@gmail.com
Department of International Development, University of
Oxford, International Development, 3 Mansfield Road, Oxford, OX13TB, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland;
Ikuno Naka
ikunonaka@gmail.com
Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford, International
Development, 3 Mansfield Road, Oxford, OX13TB, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
© 2022 Oxford Department of International Development
OXFORD DEVELOPMENT STUDIES
3
In this Introduction, we reflect on the BRICS countries, exploring the politics that underlie these
nations’ dynamic economic and political transformations over the past 20 years. We do so, more
specifically, through the lens of land where these larger transformations have come to be expressed.
In the last two decades, the BRICS countries have undergone dramatic land-use transformations or
initiated large-scale infrastructure projects within the regions of which they are a part, for example:
China’s attempts at re-establishing the Silk Road Economic Belt across Europe, Asia and Africa; in
India, the Modi Administration’s plan to develop 100 smart cities connected by bullet trains;
Moscow’s aspiration to build the Russian Far East into a ‘new economic bridge’ between Europe
and Asia through the development of Advanced Special Economic Zones; and, the expansion of
industrial large-scale farming in Brazil and South Africa, are all manifestations of the BRICS visions
for ‘sustainable’ and ‘smart’ development.’ These land-use transformations are results of shifting
economic interests and priorities, as well as imaginations about their past and future. Since “the
state, market and politics are deeply intertwined within the lives of land’ (Sud, 2021, p. 9), processes
and practices through which land is developed and transformed reveal the workings of economic
and social power (Hall et al., 2015). Land then serves as a compelling medium through which one
can pin down the combination of political and social institutions and economic interests that
ground spectacular amounts of capital as ‘investment’ in BRICS countries.
This Special Section and our reflections here in this Introduction emerged from an interdisci­
plinary conference held at the University of Oxford’s Department of International Development in
2019 and the discussions that have ensued since. At the time, our intention was to reflect on the
large-scale land transformations taking place in the BRICS bloc organised across three broad spatial
themes: 1) Belts, Corridors, Zones; 2) Trading Floor, Real Estate, the City; and, 3) Farms, Forests,
Commons. We identified these spaces as important for critical reflection on the BRICS countries
because they represent spaces of contestation: between the planned and unplanned, formal and
informal, the rural and urban, of shifting economic interests and priorities. The negotiations within
these contested spaces, thus, merit our attention.
The set of papers published in this special section of the ODS represents a slice of these initial
inquiries. They are diverse in terms of frameworks and methodologies – papers by Tim Zajontz
(China in Zambia), and Asmita Kabra and Budhaditya Das (conservation in India) use the concepts
of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and ‘regime of dispossession’ respectively to shed light on the
logics of capital accumulation at the transnational and national level. Papers by Daniela Barbosa,
Edmundo Oderich, and Angela Camana (soy production in Brazil) and Yimin Zhao (urbanisation
in China) provide ethnographically informed analyses and deploy the concepts of ‘cosmopolitics’
from political ecology and ‘performativity’ and ‘multidimensionality’ respectively to complicate
politics over land at the subnational level. Through the lens of ‘land,’ however, these papers capture
how local politics combine with larger structural economic forces in BRICS to actualise financial
flows in BRICS. In doing so, they also provide an account of the changing nature of the state and its
institutions in BRICS nations. Specifically, in highlighting the ways in which formal rules of land
governance are bent, modified, revised, and abandoned to accommodate the newer demands of
capital as well as visions of sustainable development (smart ‘urbanisation’ in the case of China, and
‘conservation’ in the case of India), the state can no longer be neatly categorised as
a ‘developmental,’ ‘predatory,’ or ‘Party-state.’ The state’s control of land through legal and bureau­
cratic manoeuvrings in India, and deployment of local party officials and discourses in China reveal
how the state remains formidable yet flexible to incorporate 21st century visions of ‘development.’
Academic scholarship on the implications of BRICS as an entity – the power of its pooling
together of economic resources, or its political valence as a discursive formation – is relatively
underdeveloped. Exceptions exist, such as the interconnected changes in industrial policy in the
BRICS (Santiago, 2020), and the reproduction of imperialist logics in amassing natural resources
and labour cheaply, emanating from its location as a ‘Southern’ bloc in the era of globalisation
(Garcia & Bond, 2019). The BRICS grouping has served as an empirical context for comparative
4
M. CHATTERJEE AND I. NAKA
analysis for a number of topics and issues, such as urban housing (Tiwari, Rao, & Day, 2016), but
also cumulative learning by analysing lessons from each of the composite units on water conserva­
tion and wastewater management (Singh, Milshina, Tian, Gusain, & Bassin, 2020).
As with a well-established strand of literature, discussed in the next section, we focus on
individual countries. The brief but contested potential of BRICS as a cohesive bloc has been in
decline in recent years (Amanor & Chichava, 2016). In fact, Mawdsley (2019) argues that the initial
cohesion is increasingly impossible to sustain amid differing and at times even conflicting political
interests amongst the BRICS nations. Heightened India–China hostility in recent years and the
muted economic performance of Brazil and South Africa have undermined the BRICS’ potential for
co-ordinated geopolitical influence and economic policies, respectively. Yet, the BRICS meet
annually, with the latest round being held in September 2021 under the chairmanship of India.
Additionally, the New Development Bank remains active, even if its initial glimmer has dimmed.
The Bank, in fact, has gone on to admit Bangladesh, UAE, Uruguay, and most recently Egypt as
members eligible for borrowing for infrastructure development within its borders and in other
emerging economies (NDB, 2021). Even if the BRICS coalition exists in its reduced-form, inter­
rogating questions of political economy – economic interests, power, and governance – in the
constituent countries is a vital and reasonable choice because Brazil, India, China and South Africa
continue to be economic hegemons in their respective regions, and remain important as drivers of
‘Southern-led’ investment in the Global South more generally.
Our endeavour to reflect on land transformations in BRICS countries has been only partially
realised in this Special Section; a glaring shortcoming in putting together this collection through the
pressures of the pandemic is that we were not able to canvass and retain articles that focused on
these themes in Russia and South Africa. This disadvantage, we believe, is partially mitigated by our
efforts in drawing on the illuminating keynote address delivered by Ruth Hall, bringing in insights
from the existing scholarship on the two countries, and in offering tentative ideas on the broader
implications of land-driven development projects on the future of BRICS.
BRICS: its rise through changing economic geographies
The BRICS countries experienced solid economic growth in the first decade following their flagging
as dynamic investment destinations in the 2001 report. These countries, however, had been
undergoing dramatic transformation in their political-economic structure since the 1990s.
A common denominator across the heterogeneous economic development experiences of these
countries to their position as high-performers has been how the state has actively made policy
interventions for resource mobilization, trade policies, public procurement, the fostering of public
demand and the provision of financial support (Santiago, 2020).
The developmental role of the state has taken different forms in the BRICS countries. For
instance, the interventionist form of the Party-state in China, the set of ISI policies, and investment
in technological capabilities resulted in its status as an ‘independent’ late-industrial powerhouse
(Amsden, 1992, 2001). India’s ‘embedded particularism’ privileged certain industries and invest­
ment in heavy manufacturing as well as centres of higher learning in IT (Herring, 1999). The state in
Brazil, especially in the post-war period, demonstrated incredible generative capacity in aiding the
development of sectors such electricity, the auto industry, airlines, and petrochemicals, through
state ownership and being a ‘custodial’ to certain private players (Evans, 1995).
Liberalisation of the economy, as is well established, has not implied a retreat of the state in most
parts of the Global South. Remaining aggressively market-seeking, these countries shifted away
from the more neoliberal market-driven economic model of the Washington Consensus, to instead
assert a variety of political-economic approaches in the 1990s. Industrialization and capitalist
development in the primary sector have been driven through comparatively high stateownership, especially in Brazil, Russia, and South Africa (Di Maio, 2015; Santiago, 2015); protec­
tionism has allowed for monopoly positions across sectors in China and Russia (Cui, Jiao, & Jiao,
OXFORD DEVELOPMENT STUDIES
5
2016); an active state has served as a ‘benefactor’ in promoting technological capabilities, as in the
case of China (Santiago, 2020), and a ‘broker’ of cheap land (Levien, 2018; Sud, 2007, 2009) in each
of these countries.
Between 2000 and 2011, the BRICS countries’ share in global output increased from 8% to 19%.
The 2008 financial crisis affected the BRICS countries unevenly. As Figure 1 shows, Russia was
worst affected in terms of domestic output growth right after the crisis, though it recovered partially
by 2010. Brazil’s and China’s upward growth trajectories were similarly shaken, though China’s precrisis growth rates were significantly higher than Brazil’s to begin with. India stood out as an
anomaly in terms of its resilience to the crisis, its economy recovering rapidly to even surpass its
pre-crisis rate by 2010. Overall, however, the BRICS faired better than the industrialised Western
economies, especially those that had long dominated the international financial lending landscape.
As the traditional industrial powers of the West recovered from the aftermath of the global
financial crisis, the period saw a significant weakening of the World Trade Organisation and the
emergence of new bi- and multilateral trading arrangements. The optimism offered by this set of
countries through this phase bolstered their economic and geopolitical potential in global trade and
global governance circles. While the BRICS nations were firmly following their own economic
agenda of investing in long-term infrastructure projects, disbursing loans, and forging trade
agreements across the Global South, the shifts in global economic governance arrangements
provided further impetus to the grouping.
The growing legitimacy of BRICS as an ‘aspiration bloc’ and ‘alternative’ to Western lending in
the post-2008 crisis world manifested in the inauguration of the New Development Bank in 2014
(hereafter referred to as NDB), a multilateral development bank with a capitalisation of USD
100 billion – around half that of the World Bank (Steele, 2017). The granting of structural
power – understood here in terms of more institutional representation and bargaining power
within global governance – was the intended hope behind the NDB’s formation (Roren &
Beaumont, 2019). The founding nations’ claim was that this new institution would give developing
countries greater representation, and one that would focus on infrastructure development while
leaving geopolitics out of lending and financing. The NDB institutionalised a stream of intra-BRICS
financial flows but, it also projected the BRICS countries as important and viable destinations of
investments globally.
Much was discussed at the time about the implications of this new institutional player within
the landscape of international lending and development. Was a kind of paradigm shift in
international financing and development cooperation underway? A change in the old guard?
Questions were raised as to whether this represented some turning point, an assertion of a kind of
alternative to the long-held US-dominated Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Kirton, 2015; Schirm, 2010; Wang 2017). Some argued the
Figure 1. Annual GDP growth rates, 2005–2019. Authors’ Tabulation based on World Indicators Data, World Bank.
6
M. CHATTERJEE AND I. NAKA
move represented an attempt on the part of these emerging economic powerhouses to increase
presence in global governance and in so doing to promote non-western values/norms towards the
desired end of creating a multipolar structure to global politics (Chakraborty, 2018; Petropoulos,
2013; Roberts, 2019). While some celebrated this move as being a diversification in the very
structures of financing, including actively challenging the dominant principles of the ‘Washington
Consensus’ (Stuenkel, 2016), sceptics raised concerns as to whether this would erode interna­
tional governance over lending standards and the social and environmental safeguard (Duggan,
Ladines Azalia, & Rewizorski, 2021).
Changing economic geographies
The dramatic economic rise of the BRICS nations since the early 1990s described above has become
the focus of a growing body of scholarship that has sought to explore the implications of their rapid
economic development on the global political economy. Much of this literature has explored how
the political and economic emergence of the BRICS countries has given rise to new geographies of
commodity production, value chains, investment, distribution, circulation and consumption. These
new emerging production and consumption relations, they argue, have incrementally shifted what
has thus far been a predominantly EuroAmerican dominated global economy to one more poly­
centric (Chakraborty, 2018; Nayyar, 2016; Roren & Beaumont, 2019).
The agro-food economy in particular has been a significant focal point of much of this academic
discussion within the fields of agrarian political economy and development studies. Most notably
the BRICS Initiative in Critical Agrarian Studies (BICAS)2 – a network of academics and research­
ers either based in or associated with the BRICS countries – have explored how the BRICS have
been transforming the flow and concentration of capital and labour in agro-commodities produc­
tion (Cousins, Borras, Sauer, & Jingzhong, 2018; McKay, Hall, & Liu, 2016). Much of this scholar­
ship has been somewhat Africa-centric, exploring the BRICS’ agribusiness expansionism into
African countries and the subsequent land rush that has resulted from it (Amanor & Chichava,
2016; Cabral, Favareto, Mukwereza, & Amanor, 2016; Hall, Scoones, & Tsikata, 2015; Scoones,
Amanor, Favareto, & Qi, 2016; Scoones, Cabral, & Tugendhat, 2013).
The agro-food economy is but one of many sectors being transformed by the dramatic economic
rise of the BRICS nations. The kind of structural transformations one observes within the agro-food
economy can be seen in other economic sectors of the BRICS. The technology and innovation
sector, for example, has received much attention, particularly from scholars and researchers in the
disciplines of economics and international political economy. Massive research and development
(R&D) investments on the part of China, for example – now second only to the United States in
terms of investment volume (UIS, 2019) – have rapidly enhanced the country’s innovation
capabilities, diversified its technology knowledge base and in so doing allowed China to enter
dynamic frontier-pushing areas of technological development. The expanding share of high-tech
and knowledge-intensive patent applications being made by China is an important instance of this
trend (Lacasa and Shubbak 2018). (Lee, 2019) argues that this in itself represents a significant
structural change within technology global value chains – rupturing the hitherto dependencyrelationships with foreign actors and external knowledge transfer (Lee, 2019).
The transformation in the technological capabilities of China and Russia, agro-commodities in
Brazil, minerals in South Africa, and IT-enabled services in India has significantly altered global
economic geographies of production, consumption, and exchange. As capital flows get redirected in
search for greater profits, cheaper raw materials and labour, relaxed regulations and reduced taxes
across the South, less-viable and less-profitable areas in the North are economically enfeebled. The
decline of the American Industrial Belts like the so-called Rust Belt of the Northeast and Midwest
captures this story. These landscapes of deindustrialization and increasing abandonment that have
been marked by unemployment, endemic poverty, an absence of economic opportunities and rising
crime have taken a stark form as the new South–South alliances have spun unequal pockets of
OXFORD DEVELOPMENT STUDIES
7
prosperity and poverty (Neuman, 2016). Accompanying these economic transformations, then, are
changing politics in these new economic geographies of the North. The rising nationalist con­
servatism and far-right populism have become increasingly emboldened, and are emblematic of the
kinds of politics that have capitalized on the increasing marginalization and powerlessness being felt
in these deindustrializing landscapes. Such economic marginalization has been in turn politically
weaponized in the form of xenophobia and racism.
More remarkably, and of relevance here, is the mirroring of the authoritarian-populist turn in
politics across the BRICS nations – a surge in populist politics in Brazil and India, in addition to
authoritarianism in China and Russia, are not mere coincidence but endogamous to the particula­
rities of the economic change that these countries have experienced in the last two decades and one
that is dubbed as their ‘rise.’ The increasing commodification of raw resources and labour; the
opportunities for rents for private capital through lax regulations and taxation are economic drivers
for such transformations. There exists space for more research to examine how the changing
complex in the spatial refiguration through flows of capital are having far-reaching implications
within the more local social and political dynamics as scholars of the BICAS group have pointed out
(Cousins et al., 2018).
The larger macro-level structural changes in the economic geographies manifest more concretely
in the transformations of land. The articles in this section, based on long-term fieldwork, ethno­
graphic methods, interviews with key stakeholders, allow us to explore, at a more granular level, the
dynamics that have been driving these changes in land and the key actor, the state.
Examining BRICS through the lens of land
The larger macro-level structural changes in the economic geographies manifest more concretely in
the transformations of land. As both drivers and destinations of economic growth in the postfinancial crisis world, BRICS reinvigorated the flow of finances: FDI inflows have consistently
increased across all five countries between 1990 and 2020. Furthermore, ‘South-South cooperation’
has South-washed loans, channelling capital towards land-hungry projects. The intensification of
financial flows into large capital-intensive and infrastructure projects have had significant implica­
tions for pressures on land within these countries as well as in those regions where the BRICS
countries have been active as investors.
‘Land is multidimensional,’ as Nikita Sud writes (2021). By this, she calls to attention how land is
‘imbued with diverse meanings, relations and materialities’ (ibid, p. 6). The question then is to
explore the ways by which this multidimensionality of land becomes ‘fixed’ as commodity capital. It
is here in the processes and politics of ‘fixing’ land – that is in the ways by which land is transformed
and developed for certain ends and objectives – wherein the nature of the state and its workings and
logics, as well as the motivation and interests of various local actors come to be revealed. Land,
therefore, is a conduit through which one can understand how actors, interests and ideas help
materialise these large financial flows on the ground. It helps examine the character of the state,
across and within these BRICS nations, that are driving these changes in much larger economic
geographies. For this reason, the land transformations over the past two decades within the BRICS
nations become particularly pertinent and interesting to explore.
National interests and local meanings of land
We argue closer attention must be paid to how local dynamics – national and local economic
interests, national discourses, local politics and contestations – enable and actualise investments in
large infrastructure. We highlight three points in relation to the local dynamics in BRICS nations.
First, beyond macro-structural motivations of ‘seeking markets’ and ‘over-accumulated capi­
tal,’ denser and local networks of rents, patronage, and power sustain investments in land. The
state certainly has taken the lead, ahead of private sectors, in building on existing strengths of the
8
M. CHATTERJEE AND I. NAKA
economies. Until recently, this has meant orienting investment decisions in ‘seeking markets’ for
manufacturing goods and raw commodities that the countries had been specialising in since the
early 2000s. In the case of China, the state’s strategies have been in large parts oriented towards
finding markets for their cheap intermediate value-added products meant for integration into
global value chains. For Brazil, on the other hand, minerals continued to occupy the primary
export. This trend has meant ‘lower integration’ amongst BRICS (Santiago, 2020), as understood
through flows of FDI within BRICs nations, and close and clear ties with other countries more
regionally (Cousins et al., 2018; McKay et al., 2016). In analysing the investments, thus, BRICS’s
activities regionally – Brazil in Latin America; South Africa in Africa; China’s investments in
Malaysia and Vietnam – is as important as intra-BRICS interactions, as the BICAS group, cited
above, have argued. However, the politics between national elites of transacting countries, and
those between national and local elites illuminates how transitional aspirations are grounded.
Two papers here illustrate this well.
Tim Zajontz’s article on China’s financing of infrastructure in Zambia shows the dialogic
relation between macro-economic compulsions and local interests. Indeed, it is the case that
the drive to seek markets to ameliorate overcapacity in well-developed sectors within BRICS
countries motivates and structures new investment decisions abroad, as pointed out by
existing literature. This becomes clear in observing political–economic patterns of the ‘Chinain-Africa’ financing in general. As Zajonz shows here, China’s solution to dwindling domestic
demand and overcapacity in construction and infrastructure sectors has been to finance
Africa’s ‘infrastructure investment gap’:
To boost demand for Chinese firms abroad, the government has drawn on a host of financial instruments,
such as the extensive disbursement of loans and export credits from SOBs, sovereign guarantees and insurance
schemes as well as the promotion of mergers and acquisitions and equity investment in infrastructure
projects . . . New multilateral financial institutions, such as the Silk Road Fund, the BRICS New
Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, were established to raise further liquidity
for infrastructure projects across the world . . . (p. 17, this issue)
In addition, however, attention should be paid not just to the state as ‘investor’ but also to the
state as recipient of loans and the practices that govern the investor–debtor relations (Wolford
et al., 2013). Zajontz’s paper additionally helps in that regard. As Zajontz argues, this Chinese
infrastructural fix unfolds through neopatrimonial patterns of governance. On the one hand,
these neopatrimonial patterns are reflected in the larger state-steered regimes of China’s new
forms of capital accumulation. More interesting, however, are the ways by which this neopa­
trimonial logic ‘trickles down’ along more local clientelistic networks as a ‘comprador class of
politically well-connected business people’ in Zambia seek to ensure their stake in the Chinese
investment. In so doing, Zajnotz manages to unearth a much thicker substratum of rentseeking networks at the local levels, capturing the complex and multi-scalar political economy
surrounding this ‘Chinese infrastructural fix.’
In radically different ways, Edmundo Oderich, Danielle Barbosa, and Angela Camana’s
paper complicates not just the determinate characterization of ‘accumulation by disposses­
sion’ or ‘new imperialism’ in understanding the expansion of agro-food value chains in
Brazil, but also the extent to which material interests of production and profit alone motivate
individuals working on land to be sucked into global forces of capitalist development. With
soybean constituting nearly 25% of the country’s primary exports in Brazil, land conversion
for soybean monocropping has been dramatic in the last two decades. Interrogating largescale land conversion for soy plantations in the Rio Grande de Sol in Southern Brazil, the
paper explores the complex nature of capitalist expansion in agriculture amongst the region’s
Kaingang indigenous community and white ‘family farmers’ (of European descent). Moving
away from a dichotomised understanding of power between the state and farmers/indigenous
people, it directs our attention to contradictory practices of these different social groups in
OXFORD DEVELOPMENT STUDIES
9
relation to land. These contradictory practices are a result of, not simply of economic
interests of production and accumulation, but the different meanings the groups attach to
land mediated today by soy. Analysing the multitude of responses received by Kaingang
people about their ongoing demand for land as well as the integration of some into soy
production, the authors tell us:
These answers show that soy production on Kaingang lands is also of mediation with non-indigenous society
that surrounds them, and can be understood as cancelling a radical otherness - the land as mother instead of
factory of production - which is not taken seriously in the worlds informed by modern ontologies. Therefore,
soy among the Kaingangs is a matter of partial connections, of devices that allow them to exist side by side
with non-indigenous peoples . . . (p. 35, this issue)
These varied and conflicting ways of valuing land, the authors show, exist not simply amongst
indigenous groups, as is sometimes romanticised in the land literature, but also amongst capitalist
small-scale farmers. These diverse and divergent meanings of land result in conflict over land
manifesting in long judicial battles with the state, violence, and death amongst the different social
groups; they also enable unexpected and contingent alliances between indigenous groups and
family farmers expanding soy monocropping in the region and making what the authors call
‘partial connections’ between the local and global.
The pluralisation of meanings and interests around land and its role beyond production in the
current context of neoliberal economic growth has been observed in South Africa as well (du Toit,
2018; Ferguson, 2013). There are ‘things’ people do with rural land outside of agriculture; when
poor people rely on land for livelihood, it is ‘via processes not of production, but of distribution’
(Ferguson, 2013, p. 169). In South Africa’s post-apartheid economy defined by ‘jobless deagrarianisation,’ land, therefore, takes on an urgent meaning in enabling landless black people
to plug themselves into a larger social and political order of claims. For example, land tethers
kinship networks and kinship-based claims on social grants (du Toit, 2018). Recent literature,
such as that quoted here, as well as most recently by Sud (2021) on India, centres the multiple
‘social’ meanings of land in analysing land politics, where such politics include resistance against
dispossession and demands for land redistribution, but also everyday frictions and skirmishes.
Joining this growing strand, our argument is that local dynamics based on plural meanings and
diverse compulsions, as observed in these papers, enable global land investments in BRICS
without stiff contestation and conflict.
State and land
The variety of actors that go into the making of land investments are multiplying, as all papers in
this section show. However, none remain as central to land transformations as the state. In
supplying land in BRICS nations, state institutions are adopting new ideological frames and
practices and deploying several state actors at different scales, in order to forge ‘compliance’
(Levien, 2018). Two of the papers in the section show how the state sustains transformations to
land, including dispossession and deforestation, over time in India and China, respectively, high­
lighting how local state officials, interfacing with land-owning people, legitimate ambitious national
and transnational projects.
A series of recent studies on India and China have studied land dispossession (Andreas, Kale,
Levien, & Zhang, 2020). In the case of India, a number of studies have shown that large-scale land
dispossession does not necessarily meet with opposition and resistance (Balakrishnan, 2013; Chatterjee,
2020; Levien, 2018; Vijayabaskar & Menon, 2018). The paper by Das and Kabra, in this section,
contributes to this literature, asking the still relevant question: how has the Indian state managed to
forge ‘consent’ to enclose forests for conservation over time? They focus on India’s Tiger Reserves,
which have expanded in terms of forests and commons they occupy to protect the charismatic tigers of
India. The authors historicise the specificities of the conservation apparatus, including the authority of
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the forest bureaucracy, which has uniquely combined coercion and patronage towards Adivasis, and
show how the institution entwines with newer legal formulations and elite discourses around the
urgency of conservation but also ‘consent’ of Adivasis. Building on Levien’s (2018) concept, the authors
identify a set of ‘ideology, institutions, and actors’ that form a distinct ‘regime of dispossession for
conservation’ (DfC). The result of DfC has been paradoxical – it has generated limited resistance from
Adivasis around Tiger Reserves while also curtailing their access to commons and forests legally
guaranteed within a larger panoply of 21st century ‘rights-based’ movements:
. . . how the DfC regime played on elite anxieties about tiger extinction to legitimise inviolate TRs and hold up
implementation of the FRA [Forest Rights Act]. It destabilised a hard-won consensus against forced displace­
ment among mainstream conservation actors by framing voluntary relocation as a win-win solution for
conservation and communities in TRs [Tiger Reserves]. Assembling volition in this manner has obviated the
requirement of safeguarding the rights of individual forest dwelling citizens. (p. 57, this issue)
In his paper, Yimin Zhao explores new patterns of speculative rentiership that have emerged in
Dahongmen, the urban peripheries of Beijing. In examining the regime of benefit-sharing among
the state, capital and villagers. The paper captures how the very process of this reconfiguration of
land (what Sud refers to as the ‘fixing’ of land) is situated in evolving political economic dynamics
through which the state too seeks to refashion itself. He reveals how the governing techniques in
dealing with land transformation in Beijing’s urban peripheries become in many ways
a performative moment for the central state government; that is to say, it becomes a conduit
through which the state can embrace a kind of ‘market society’ drawn by the promise of economic
growth via the commodification of land, while renewing its ethos and commitment as a Party-State.
As such, what emerges in the process of these land assembling initiatives in Dahongmen is the
refashioning of a new and ad hoc governing regime of a ‘socialist market economy.’
Both papers demonstrate how land or, more specifically, the reconfiguration of land becomes
a means through which the state seeks to rearticulate itself and to reassert its ‘legitimacy’ (borrowing
from Das and Kabra). For Das and Kabra, the ‘legitimacy’ of these new forms of accumulation
emerges in the form of environmental and wildlife protectionism of an increasingly ‘conservationist
state.’ In the case of Zhao’s paper, we see how the state’s power of eminent domain are legitimised
via narratives of ‘speeding up economic growth.’ In so doing, the Party-State continues to renew its
own identity and authority while embracing a market ethos.
Conclusion: land in BRICS through the populist turn
The discussion here has focused on the structural changes in global production, consumption, and
circulation relations and the location of BRICS in it in relation to land. We have examined more
specifically how these transformations in economic geographies have precipitated out of the rise of an
increasingly empowered ‘market-seeking’ state within these BRICS nations whose actions are changing
the structures of the global economy. The state has been voraciously consuming land and directing
capital in pursuit of channels of accumulation. The specific practices, policies, ideas and discourses of
the state through the neoliberal era require persistent attention as they not only determine the shape
of the economic geography of profit and debt, jobs and joblessness, aspirations and disenfranchisement,
they also shape politics. Both aspirations and subversion of local communities as a result of rent
generation and brokerage, spectacular but short-lived pathways of profits, dispossession, displacement,
job loses and precarious livelihoods, and intense competition in making claims to livelihoods and safety
nets, have enabled populist politics. It marks the current era of ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ (Boffo,
Saad-Filho, & Fine, 2019); financialisation ‘as the main driver of economic and social restructuring both
nationally and globally’ (ibid, p. 251) has created a tendency of ‘short-termism,’ reshaping the geography
of poverty, prosperity and inequality. The turn to authoritarian politics in BRICS nations, as suggested
by several scholars (Adrade, 2020; Cousins et al., 2018; Sud, 2020), therefore, need to be evaluated
keeping in mind the economic transformations of the last two decades.
OXFORD DEVELOPMENT STUDIES
11
What then of the BRICS? The heterogeneous economic performance of various BRICS nations,
some believe, will be a significant challenge to the coherence of economic and strategic interests of
the bloc. In particular, China’s superior industrial performance, income growth, technological
advancement, and its ability to meet financial commitments to the coffers of the NDB (Santiago,
2020). In the pages of this journal in 2019, Emma Mawdsley presciently identified the inevitability
of more ‘muscular’ policies in the South–South Cooperation mode of geopolitical operations. Given
the authoritarian populist politics that has underscored large land transformations within Brazil,
India, Russia and China, the ideational base for BRICS is transforming to a more interventionist
stance. Furthermore, we suspect that the alignment over nationalist-populist politics will keep alive
the ‘non-West’ posturing as both investors of and destinations for grand infrastructure projects,
allowing for continuity in this alliance in the near future.
While the increasingly authoritarian turn in these states have given rise to new forms of legalized
violence and regimes of exclusion, there have been moments and instances of, what scholars like
James Holston (2009) have referred to as, the ‘realizations of citizenships’: grassroots mobilizations
and ‘insurgent citizenships’ that have accompanied on the ground provide hope. Captured most
strongly within their explorations of the Kaingangs, vis-à-vis the much larger transformations of
agro-commodity farming rapidly underway in Rio Grande de Sol, there is a hopefulness that the
authors bring to this Special Section. The hope is to be found in the ‘cosmopolitical’ perspective in
understanding conflict over land. As they write, ‘it is about helping to compose possibilities of coelaborated formulations – possibilities that do not demean the immeasurable, allowing political
projects with space for different worlds.’
Notes
1. Our thanks to the ODS journal and Green Templeton College for their generosity in funding the workshop
and enabling this Special Section. Thanks also to Ruth Hall for her intellectual input at the workshop, as well as
Geoff Goodwin and Idalina Baptista for discussing different papers.
2. The BICAS research network is convened by academic institutions in Brazil (UFRGS, UnB, FUP), China
(China Agricultural University), and South Africa (PLAAS at the University of Cape Town), as well as
international organisations, such as The Transnational Institute, and other academic institutions, such as
the International Institute of Social Sciences at The Hague.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding
This work was supported by Green Templeton College, University of Oxford and Oxford Development Studies
Journal.
Notes on contributors
Mihika Chatterjee is a Departmental Lecturer at ODID, University of Oxford. Her research interests include the
politics of land and rural change, labour relations, and rural inequalities.
Ikuno Naka is a doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, examining the dream-works and imaginations that
surround finance and real estate.
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