This thesis examines the relationship between environmental stress and human mobility with a view to understanding the impacts of climate change on human migration. Using a conjuncture of political ecology and migration theory, it firstly explores the literature on 'environmental refugees' identifying a distinction between general agreement on the existence of a relationship between environmental stress and migration, and debate over the appropriateness of the 'environmental refugee' as a suitable means for representing that relationship. Secondly this conjuncture is used to examine accounts from farmers and migrants in northern Ethiopia, with a focus on understanding how environmental and non-environmental factors interact to shape mobility decisions in a context of environmental stresses, thought analogous to those predicted to accompany future climate change. The principal finding of the study is that although environmental stress matters in mobility decisions, it does so due to the context of non-environmental factors in which it occurs, not in spite of them. With this in mind the work provides a framework of additive, vulnerability, enabling and barrier effects as a means for elaborating our understanding of how environmental and non-environmental factors interact to determine mobility strategies in a context of environmental stress. Focussing on the role of non-environmental factors, the work reveals that while biophysical features operate at a macro-scale to shape mobility decisions, these decisions are determined by non-environmental features operating at a micro-scale. The research then traces differences in the existence of these micro-scale, non-environmental, factors across two field sites, finding that their origins lie in both historical and contemporary forces of regional and global political economy. As such, the work concludes that understanding the relationship between climate change and human migration will require a contextualisation of that relationship within this broader framework.

The recent revival of debates concerning livestock development in Africa follows the more widespread acceptance of paradigm shifts within rangeland science, and maintaining pastoral mobility is now recognised as fundamental for the future survival of pastoralism and sustainability of dryland environments. However, in southern Africa communal pastoral drylands continue to be enclosed and dissected by large-scale barrier fences designed to control livestock diseases, thus protecting lucrative livestock export agreements. This interdisciplinary research examines the extent to which these veterinary cordon fences have changed people’s access to, and effective management of, natural resources in northern Botswana and how fence-restricted resource use by livestock, wildlife and people has changed the natural environment. Critical political ecology informed the approach, given its emphasis on socio-political and historical influences on resource access, mobility and user relationships. This enabled the biophysical effects of social changes to be investigated fully, thereby moving beyond a tradition of discipline-based studies often resulting in severely repressive rangeland policies. The research demonstrates how enclosure by veterinary cordon fences restricts patterns of resource access and mobility within pastoral drylands, with serious implications for both social and environmental sustainability. Enclosure increases the vulnerability of people to risks and natural hazards, while resource access constraints and pastoral adaptations to enclosure have favoured the increasing commercialisation of livestock production, thus obstructing pathways into pastoralism. While widespread environmental change in livestock areas cannot be attributed thus far to enclosure, the curtailment of wild migratory herbivores at the wildlife–livestock interface has caused some large-scale structural vegetation changes and there are indications that fence induced sedentarisation could be accentuating existing degradation trends. Given these changes, future rangeland policies in Africa should be aware of the social and environmental impacts associated with export-led disease management infrastructure and consider alternative, less intrusive, approaches to livestock development and disease control in extensive pastoral drylands.

People's narratives, interpretations and understandings of the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline and pipeline actors emphasise the uneven exercise of power through which structural violence is effected and experienced. The complexity of the processes of structural violence along with local socio-political context and peoples' dynamic understandings thereof play major roles in shaping resistance practices, in complex ways in Kribi and Nanga-Eboko. Working from these narratives, I offer a theoretical re-articulation of structural violence as (i) tangible through the body, (ii) historically compounded, (iii) spatially compressed and (iv) enacted in a globalised geopolitical nexus by actors who are spatially nested within a racialised and gendered hierarchy of scale. Drawing from critical interdisciplinary work on violence, my theory of a triad of divergent, often interrelated and co-existing, distinguishable indexes of structural violence includes: infra/structural violence, industrial structural violence and institutionalized structural violence. The particular processes and mechanisms of uneven power within structural violence, local socio-political contexts and the epistemologies through which power is conceived (in this case I consider epistemologies of la sorcellerie, or witchcraft) inform resistance practices; I illuminate key operations (within geographies characterised by high levels of infra/structural violence) within the spatial practices of power that influence the tendency for resistance struggles to be quiet, spontaneous and/or labour-based. I conclude with a discussion of the political and intellectual value of academic work on life and being amid structural violence, emphasising the need to move beyond the invisible/visible dichotomy that has often informed intellectual work on structural violence.

What happened in the post-Soviet, European grain-belt after collective farms were dissolved and in what way can we say that collective farm legacies influence agrarian developments in this region today? These are the main questions of this thesis, which is a work of critical human geography, but is also inspired by theories, methods and approaches from the social sciences, broadly defined. Territorially, the focus is Ukraine, but several articles in this thesis take a wider geographic perspective beyond Ukraine, in particular taking into account the role of Nordic investors in the agrarian sector in Ukraine and Russia. The main aim of this thesis is to examine how farms of different sizes – from small peasant farms to super large corporate farms – develop and change in post-communist circumstances. Another purpose is to reinterpret Soviet agrarian history, in light of what happened after the collapse of communism, in order to incorporate the Soviet experience in a global historical narrative, and to better understand the legacy of collective farming today. These issues are explored in four papers and a comprehensive summary. The first article examines small-scale, household “peasant” agriculture in southern Ukraine and shows the conditions and factors, which have contributed to an impressive intensification of farming in certain villages. The second article investigates large-scale, Nordic investments in Ukrainian and Russian agriculture, with the aim of explaining why many (but not all) such investments have not succeeded to the degree that investors hoped. The third paper focuses on the legacy and afterlife of Soviet-era investments in large-scale irrigation in southern Ukraine, and uses the post-Soviet reincarnation of irrigation in this region to problematize traditional narratives on Soviet environmental management in a global context. The fourth paper, with a wider historical lens, explains the link between collective farms and today’s agroholding agriculture in much of the region, while also discussing the sustainability crisis in agriculture both in a Soviet and post-Soviet context, concluding with a description of a possible and ironic (but by no means inevitable) scenario whereby post-Soviet agriculture saves global capitalism.  Theoretically, this thesis is informed by agrarian political economy; related, contemporary debates on the financialization of agriculture; and critical human geography discussions on uneven development and the geographies of difference. This thesis also is inspired by Actor Network Theory, and the view that reality is constituted by hybrid subject-objects, which are instantiated through the agency of an assemblage or network of different actors, material things, discourses, institutions, etc... While such Actor Network approaches are certainly not new, their application to Soviet and post-Soviet change is relatively new. The source material, which is the basis for the empirical approach of this thesis, is eclectic, and produced via mixed methods from different locations. Analysis is based on interviews (75 interviews in southern Ukraine, in Kyiv, and in Stockholm, plus 28 visits to household farms in one study village in southern Ukraine); participant observation (carried out in the study village in southern Ukraine and in corporate shareholder meetings mostly in Stockholm); various texts, such as corporate documents and newspaper commentary; agricultural statistics; and satellite data.  Among other conclusions, this thesis argues that, given certain factors, small-scale, household agriculture can be viable, at the same time that the concentration and consolidation of agriculture into large-scale holdings is likely to continue, at least in the short term. This thesis also highlights similarities between Soviet and capitalist agriculture in a global historical context, which is one reason that the transformation from Soviet to capitalist agriculture could occur so fast in some areas. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 3: Manuscript. Paper 4: Manuscript.</p>

Since the 1960s, international aid organizations and governments have invested millions of dollars in promoting aquaculture as a way to stimulate local economies and improve food security. India is one such country, incorporating aquaculture research and extension programs as part of their development plans as early as 1971. India’s aquaculture promotion efforts gained momentum in 2004, following the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. The government sees aquaculture as a post-disaster development tool and a method to increase community resilience in rural areas of India. Aquaculture currently constitutes nearly half of global seafood production today. Due to this importance, and the attention such practices receive through funding and extension, many scholars have focused on the social impacts that aquaculture practices have on rural communities. In particular, scholars have investigated the effects of aquaculture on environmental conditions, food security, livelihoods, gender relations, and social conflict. However, more scholarship is needed concerning the historical legacies that have contributed to how aquaculture is promoted and practiced, particularly connections to the Green Revolution. Furthermore, there needs to be more research about commercial aquaculture as a post-disaster development strategy. My research – based on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork and archival analysis in Tamil Nadu, India – contributes to this body of literature. I synthesized post-development theory with that of environmental risk and vulnerability, building upon the work of scholars such as James Ferguson, Tania Li, and Piers Blaikie. My analysis uncovers large disparities between the goals of aquaculture development programs and actual aquaculture outcomes. I attribute this to the technocratic governance structure of the aquaculture industry, which leads to a lack of engagement and participation between aquaculture managers, researchers, and practitioners. This lack of engagement ultimately makes the communities in which aquaculture is being practiced more vulnerable to anthropogenic and natural disturbances. Additionally, I found that aquaculture practices in the study site are causing significant changes to local agrarian structures, particularly through changes to labor. These changes have implications for social stratification and disempowerment of women. Overall, these findings contribute to the anthropological study of aquaculture as well as to theories of post-development.

Die vorliegende Studie ist ein Beitrag zu einem wachsenden Bestand zeitgenössischer wissenschaftlicher Arbeiten zur politischen Ökonomie staatlich getriebenen Agrarwandels. Arbeiten zum Thema fragen, wie und warum Agrarwandel stattfindet und welches „Ergebnis“ dieser Wandel vor dem Hintergrund der vielfältigen sozialen und ökologischen Funktionen der Landwirtschaft haben sollte. Die Studie leistet zwei wesentliche Beiträge. Der erste Beitrag ist eine vertiefte empirische Fallstudie zur politischen Ökonomie des agrarischen Wandels auf der Kızıltepe Ebene inmitten der stark verarmten und notorisch gewalttätigen Region Südostanatolien. Der zweite Beitrag liegt in einer Integration von empirischen und theoretischen Arbeiten verschiedener Denkschulen und Disziplinen. Statt in epistemischen Silos zu verharren, wird hier argumentiert, dass die Integration verschiedener Perspektiven vielversprechend und notwendig ist, um die Forschung über den Agrarwandel voranzutreiben. Dies erfolgt zunächst durch eine bewusste und systematische Nutzung von Literatur aus verschiedenen Denkschulen und Wissenschaftsbereichen. Zweitens wird auf der Grundlage des von Hagedorn (2008) entwickelten Institutions of Sustainability Frameworks ein integrativer theoriebasierter Analyserahmen vorgestellt. Wichtige Bausteine hierfür ergeben sich aus Ansätzen der neoklassischen Agrarökonomie, der marxistischen Politischen Ökonomie und ökonomischer Theorien institutionellen Wandels. Die Fallstudie zeigt, wie staatliche Politik zu einer grundlegenden Veränderung der Agrarproduktion im Sinne einer deutlichen Intensivierung und Produktivitätssteigerung geführt hat. Gleichzeitig hat der Agrarwandel, im Widerspruch zu offiziellen Verlautbarungen zu schwerwiegenden negativen Auswirkungen auf die sozialen Produktions- und Reproduktionsbeziehungen und zu massiven ökologischen Problemen geführt. Der Agrarwandel in Kızıltepe erscheint so vor allem als Negativbeispiel staatlicher Einflussnahme. / This study is a contribution to a growing body of research on the political economy of state-driven agrarian change. Scholarship on agrarian change commonly asks how, why and to what end agrarian change occurs. Related to this is an on-going debate about what “kind of agriculture” humanity should strive for to fulfil multiple social purposes and meet ecological needs today and in the future. The study’s contribution is twofold. First, it provides an in-depth empirical case study on the political economy of agrarian change on south-eastern Turkey’s Kızıltepe plain. The plain is located amidst Turkey’s impoverished and violence-stricken South-east Anatolia region, which has been at the centre of major development efforts since the late 1990s. Second, the study seeks to integrate empirical and theoretical works from different epistemic communities. In stressing the need to avoid the common tendency of remaining within epistemic silos, the study argues that integrating these different perspectives is both promising and necessary to further advance research on agrarian change. Using Hagedorn’s (2008) Institutions of Sustainability framework as a point of departure, an integrative theory-based analytical framework is introduced. Important building blocks are derived from neoclassical agricultural economics, Marxist agrarian political economy and economic theories of institutional change. The case study shows how the state’s policies have resulted in a fundamental change to the modus operandi of local agricultural production. State intervention has been highly successful in catalysing intensification and productivity. Yet, contrary to official claims, agrarian change has not yielded prosperity and growth across all social strata. Intensified agriculture has led to severe repercussions for the social relations of production and reproduction and major ecological problems. Agrarian change in Kızıltepe is thus much less a success story, but rather a cautionary tale.

Some 5 million people were classified as internally displaced in Colombia at the end of 2012, which represented about 10 per cent of the population and the highest number in the world at the time. Colombia differs from other countries with high levels of displacement in that it is comparatively politically stable, has effective national institutions, a relatively strong formal economy, and can by no means be described as a ‘failed’ or ‘failing’ state. The displacement literature tends to characterise the phenomenon as a humanitarian crisis and a side effect of the long-running civil war. But Colombians continue to be displaced in very large numbers despite the formal demobilization of the paramilitaries in 2006 and the diminished military capacity and engagement of the guerrillas since about the same period: the same groups that are widely regarded as being the main perpetrators of displacement. This thesis contends that displacement of the civilian population in Colombia is frequently not a consequence of violence, but rather the primary objective, where violence plays a facilitatory role. Moreover, the thesis asserts that these massive levels of displacement are substantively linked to predominantly economically-motivated logics and are regionally specific. By examining an agricultural commodity that has significantly expanded relatively recently in Colombia - African palm oil - this research examines if and how expanded cultivation may be linked to displacement. Using a political economy framework of analysis combined with empirical fieldwork, it explores the ‘localised displacement logics’ whereby land is coercively acquired by powerful local groups. The thesis concludes that the abandonment and dispossession of land from poor and marginalised groups constitutes part of an ongoing process of capitalist expansion and statebuilding in Colombia. Contrary to assertions that it is the intra-state conflict that constitutes the central obstacle to development, Colombia’s current trajectory of capitalist development may actually be a central obstacle to sustainable peace and not lead to an end to displacement.

This thesis examines the relationship between ethnicity and violent group mobilisation in Liberia’s civil war (1989-2003). It focuses on Gio, Mano and Mandingo mobilisation to investigate how and why internal dynamics about moral norms and expectations motivated leadership calls for violence and ethnic support. Much of the existing literature interprets popular involvement in violent group mobilisation on the Upper Guinea Coast as a youth rebellion against gerontocracy. I argue that such an approach is incomplete in the Liberian case, and does not account for questions of ethnic mobilisation and the participation of groups such as the Gio, Mano and Mandingo. At the onset of hostilities, civilians in Liberia were not primarily mobilised to fight based on their age, but rather as members of ethnic communities whose membership included different age groups. I explore constructivist approaches to ethnicity to analyse mobilisation for war as the collective 'self-defence' of ethnic groups qua moral communities. In the prelude to the outbreak of civil war, inter-ethnic inequalities of access to the state and economic resources became reconfigured. Ethnic groups—as moral communities—experienced external 'victimisation' and a sense of internal dissolution, or threatened dissolution. In particular, the understanding of internal reciprocal relations between patrons and clients within ethnic groups was undermined. Internal arguments about morality, personal responsibility, social accountability/justice, increased the pressure on excluded elites and thus incentivised them to pursue violent political strategies. Mobilisation took on an ethnic form mainly because individuals believed that they were fighting to protect the moral communities that generate esteem and ground understandings of good citizenship. Therefore, ethnic participation in the Liberian countryside differed from the model peasant rebellion that seeks to overthrow the feudal elites. Rather than a revolution of the social order, individuals regarded themselves as protecting an extant ethnic order that provided rights and distributed resources. Even though some individuals fought for political power and resources, and external actors facilitated group organisation through the provision of logistical support, the violence was also an expression of bottom-up moral community crisis and an attempt by politico-military elites to keep their reputation and enforce unity.