In 1953, Juan Rulfo, one of the most important Latin American writers of the 20th century presents, El Llano en Llamas (Burning Plain), a collection of realistic short stories about rural life in the land of his childhood in Jalisco, Mexico. About 60 years after El Llano en Llamas, this daughter of Mexican campesinos, has also decided to write about the land of her childhood: the same El Llano en Llamas. This thesis examines the water dispossession experienced by agricultural laborers living in the municipalities of Tonaya, and San Gabriel, which are symbolically part of the Llano en Llamas. By focusing on a corporate socially responsible agricultural company and a mining company in the state of Jalisco, Mexico I argue that both projects of development are dispossessing the communities of their water sources. I also intend to illustrate that currently, the processes of dispossession use modes and logics of power rooted in colonialism. / text

This thesis asks how neoliberal enclavisation produces precarity. It focuses on eight months of fieldwork on large-scale dispossession of rural and peri-urban populations caused by the coal mining enclave in Tete, Mozambique, and my interpretation of Judith Butler's work on precarity, Henri Lefebvre's conceptualisation of the production of capitalist social space and Jacque Ranciere's understanding of politics. Bringing theory and empirical research together, I construct an original theoretical approach to explore how precarity as a condition of life, as well as the (im)possibility of politics, is constituted by contemporary capitalist expansion in Mozambique. I explore how precarity is produced through the interplay of structural, symbolic and direct violence of contemporary capitalist expansion, such as the coal mining enclave and resettlement sites inhabited by the dispossessed populations, in Tete. These processes of precarisation, I argue, result in the non-politics of abandonment that, whilst enabling life to be lived on precarious terms at the margins of the neoliberal mining enclave, does not openly challenge and only unwillingly reinforces the socio-material order of the neoliberal enclave. I demonstrate how this dynamic reconstitutes the precarity created by the violence of the neoliberal enclave and overshadows possibly different and progressively anti-neoliberal imaginaries of life and space in Tete. I conclude that these dynamics of precarity disactivate the possibility of transformative politics, and thus sustain and stabilise global capitalist expansion in Tete, and Mozambique more broadly. This reading of precarity makes several contributions to the literatures on the politics of precarity. It explores the condition of precarity outside the usual empirical and analytical focus of labour relations in the Global North, as well as developing a spatial reading of precarity. The thesis also challenges these, as well as broader literatures on agency in the context of structural inequalities and opportunities in Sub-Saharan Africa, for overestimating possibilities of resistance in situations characterised by extreme precarity. Finally, the thesis contributes to the literature on contemporary neoliberal capitalist expansion in Sub-Saharan Africa by demonstrating how neoliberal enclaves result in human suffering outside of their own exclusionary spaces of accumulation.

This thesis examines the corporate appropriation of human right to water and sanitation discourse. David Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession provides the political- economic basis for this analysis while enabling a discussion of water conflicts that looks at neoliberalization strategies beyond the privatization of services. Inspired by Gramsci’s notion of a “war of position”, this thesis investigates the role of corporate appropriation of human right to water and sanitation discourse in legitimating strategies of accumulation by dispossession. Through content and critical discourse analysis of publications of a corporate policy consortium called the 2030 Water Resources Group the investigation concludes that this lobby group simultaneously undermines human rights while actively using key elements of rights discourse to advance its neoliberal water policy objectives.

Dessaisir ou ne pas dessaisir, telle est la question intéressant la situation du débiteur en liquidation judiciaire. À l’ouverture de la procédure, le débiteur perd l’exercice de ses droits et actions ayant une incidence patrimoniale au bénéfice de la qualité pour agir du liquidateur. Omniprésente, la notion de dessaisissement n’en demeure pas moins incertaine. D’abord, la nature et le régime juridique de la mesure ne peuvent se concevoir de manière autonome. En effet, seule l’étude du gage commun des créanciers permet la compréhension du dessaisissement. Le lien établi entre les deux notions permet d’affirmer qu’au morcellement du gage commun s’en suit un affaiblissement corrélatif du dessaisissement. Ensuite, si le dessaisissement est objectivement dépendant des fluctuations de l’effet réel de la procédure, ce sont, en outre, les droits conservés par le débiteur qui atteignent la consistance de la mesure. Le respect des droits fondamentaux du chef d’entreprise restreint le domaine du dessaisissement au bénéfice des droits propres procéduraux du débiteur. Ces considérations participent à la mise en œuvre des exigences européennes en la matière et plus particulièrement celle du droit au rebond du débiteur en difficulté. Dans ces conditions, la pérennité du dessaisissement devient source d’interrogations. Entre un anachronisme prononcé de la mesure ou une simple nécessité d’évolution de la notion ; dessaisir ou ne pas dessaisir telle ne pourrait plus être l’exacte question. / Dispossessing a debtor in liquidation proceedings, that is the interesting question which naturally appears in such situations. At the start of the proceedings, the debtor must hand over the ability to exercise his rights and take actions over his assets to the liquidator. Even though the notion of dispossession is omnipresent, it remains an unclear notion nonetheless. Firstly, the type of procedure and the governing legal regime are not mutually exclusive. Secondly, it is indeed only the analysis of the creditor’s common pledge that allows us to understand dispossession. The link established between the two notions asserts that the fragmentation of the common pledge leads to a correlative weakening of the dispossession. If the dispossession is objectively dependent on the fluctuations of the real effect of the proceeding, it is furthermore the rights retained by the debtor that will have an impact on the substance of the measure. Respecting the entrepreneur’s fundamental rights restricts the effect of dispossession on the debtor’s procedural rights. These considerations contribute to the implementation of the European requirements in this area, and more specifically, the debtor’s right to a fresh start. In such conditions, the longevity of the dispossession raises other questions. We must decided between a pronounced anachronism of dispossession or the necessary evolution of the notion – to dispossess or not to dispossess, that is the heart of the question under study.

Masters of Art / Nandi, Java and Uuka are students at a Cape Town university, where they are enrolled in a film making course. Adela, their lecturer, will supervise their screenplay and film on a story which depicts the experience of the loss of land in South Africa. They are however also deeply involved in student protests for free university education for all. When the #feesmustfall protests reach a deadlock at their university and the university is temporarily closed, they decide to leave for the Eastern Cape to look for a story. There they stay with Uuka’s grandparents and spend their time trying to understand the family history and the family’s ownership of land, as well as the broader history of land dispossession. They do not only discover more about Uuka’s ancestors and about distant history, but also about themselves. As the characters delve more deeply into the past in their search for a story for a screenplay, the margins between their own stories and the screenplay shift and merge, as do the forms of novel and screenplay

In developing the Bird Commission, its commissioner, Henry I. Bird, and other officials eventually chose to compensate Japanese Canadians for the forced sale of their property below free market value using property categories and set percentages. They developed strict formulas for each category that should have been easy to follow when reimbursing claimants. However, this was not the case. Commission officials failed to follow the procedures that they had developed when awarding compensation to Japanese Canadians. Claimants could collect awards that were below or above the amounts that the commission’s procedure predicted. This thesis aims to understand the reasons why Bird Commission officials failed to follow the formulas that they had developed when compensating Japanese Canadians for the dispossession of their property through an examination of the Bird Commission Casefiles and Custodian Casefiles. Using information gathered from these government records, this analysis employs statistical analysis to explain the factors which influenced commission officials to alter awards. Considering the historical context of the commission, this analysis also offers explanations for why the factors uncovered using regression analysis may have impacted the commission and its outcomes. Recognizing the deviations in the Bird Commission’s compensation offers new insights into the commission’s operations and impacts on Japanese Canadians. It highlights a close relationship between the commission and officials from the Office of the Custodian of Enemy Property, and it participates with the work of other scholars in acknowledging the efforts that Japanese Canadians made in making the Canadian government confront the injustices it had conducted against them. / Graduate

Dispossession has been playing a central role in capitalist accumulation over the last four-hundred-year history of modern capitalism. This dissertation theorizes how dispossession contributes to producing and reproducing the capitalist mode of production in Bangladesh. To do so, the dissertation empirically examines three interrelated aspects of dispossession in its three analytical chapters. First, it explores how the state and the market work in tandem to organize and control dispossession while grabbing land and expelling peasants from their places. Next, it investigates how dispossession contributes to providing 'potential capitals,' such as grabbed land and dispossessed peasants, to the production sites to be converted into 'constant capital' and 'variable capital' and to creating antagonistic class relations. Finally, it explores how market and non-market actors control those dispossessed peasants-turned-workers inside and outside factories to produce surplus values in order to reproduce the capitalist system locally and globally. These three interactive components of dispossession show three successive phases of capitalist accumulation: land-grabbing by divorcing independent producers from their livelihoods (the initial phase), converting land into capital, peasants into wage workers, and non-capitalists into capitalists (the intermediate phase), and controlling and exploiting those wage workers to produce surpluses or a cycle of new capital (the final phase). This dissertation accordingly advances a full-scale theory of dispossession in its concluding chapter by examining how the starting, intermediate, and ending points of dispossession contribute to capitalist accumulation. The dissertation draws on a wide range of empirical evidence collected from Panthapath, Dhaka, Bangladesh. These include 77 life histories, 50 interviews, a land-use survey of 1,007 structures, and a short survey of 147 slums. It also uses various historical records and archival documents. The three major findings of this dissertation are as follows. First, the dissertation shows that the state acts as a class to organize land grabs, often working in tandem with the private sector, but also in direct competition with the market. Not only does the state monopolize extra-economic means to grab land, but the market also often gains access to extra-economic means. Next, the dissertation shows that dispossession works to privatize the commons, proletarianize subsistence labor, create antagonistic class relations, and redistribute wealth upward. Finally, the dissertation identifies a new regime of labor control, called social despotism, that dominates and exploits workers in factories to produce surpluses. I conclude this study with policy recommendations designed to address the various dimensions of structural injustice described in this dissertation. / Doctor of Philosophy / This dissertation theorizes how dispossession contributes to producing and reproducing the capitalist mode of production in Bangladesh. In its three analytical chapters, the dissertation empirically examines three interrelated aspects of dispossession. First, it explores how the state and the market work in tandem to organize and control dispossession while grabbing land and expelling peasants from their places. Next, it investigates how dispossession contributes to providing grabbed land and dispossessed peasants to the production sites and to creating various class hierarchies. Finally, it explores how market and non-market actors control peasants-turned-workers inside and outside factories to produce surplus values in order to reproduce the capitalist system. These three interactive components of dispossession show three successive phases of capitalist accumulation: land-grabbing by evicting peasants from their places (phase 1), converting land into capital, peasants into wage workers, and non-capitalists into capitalists (phase 2), and exploiting wage workers to produce surpluses (phase 3). This dissertation accordingly advances a full-scale theory of dispossession in its concluding chapter by examining how the starting, intermediate, and ending points of dispossession contribute to capitalist accumulation. The dissertation draws on a wide range of empirical evidence collected from Panthapath, Dhaka, Bangladesh. These include 77 life histories, 50 interviews, a land-use survey of 1,007 structures, and a short survey of 147 slums. It also uses various historical records and archival documents. Some of the major findings of this dissertation are as follows. First, the dissertation shows that the state acts as a class to organize land grabs, often working in tandem with the private sector, but also in direct competition with the market. Not only does the state monopolize extra-economic means to grab land, but the market also often gains access to extra-economic means. Next, the dissertation shows that dispossession works to privatize the commons, proletarianize subsistence labor, create exploitative class relations, and redistribute wealth upward. Finally, the dissertation identifies a new regime of labor control, called social despotism, that oppresses and exploits workers in factories to produce surpluses.

Abstract This dissertation is a study of social reproduction in different classes of migrant households in Emnambithi, a town in northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It traces the history of households in this community under the impact of racialised dispossession and migration, and illustrates how households were stratified into distinct classes. The three classes identified are a semi-professional, educated class, a migratory working class, and the marginalised, a segment of the “bantustan” population who never had the possibility of working in the capitalist economy during apartheid. The research then focuses on the gendered nature of social reproduction in households in the post-apartheid era, when this community continues to be shaped by migration. The research illustrates that class-based advantage and disadvantage are reproduced in post-apartheid South Africa. The dissertation analyses the different ways in which household members – predominantly migrant and resident women – deal with daily provisioning and consumption, education and care of the dependants of migrants in the absence of some members of the household. The study argues that social reproduction varies significantly in different classes of households. The class-based and gendered nature of social reproduction has implications for an understanding of developmental needs in post-apartheid South Africa, and this research opens up ways in which job creation and social policies could lead to class-based redress and gender equity.

Num contexto onde a produção do espaço urbano tem cada vez maior relevância, seja pela provisão de infraestrutura, seja pela produção imobiliária, ou por sua articulação; muitas famílias residentes em assentamentos autoconstruídos são ameaçadas de desapropriação e remoção forçada com baixas indenizações em função de projetos urbanos. Tal situação suscita diversos conflitos políticos entre as comunidades ameaçadas de desapropriação, os órgãos públicos e interesses privados envolvidos. No centro do conflito estão pautas como a permanência no local, os procedimentos (cadastramento, avaliações, indenizações), a alternativa habitacional, etc. O Objetivo Geral do trabalho é compreender o papel dos processos de remoção e reassentamentos forçados na atual produção do espaço urbano em suas dimensões política (hegemonia, dominação e luta de classes) e econômica (espoliação, exploração, acumulação e reprodução ampliada do capital) e o seu entrelaçamento na reprodução ampliada e acumulação de capital. A hipótese é de que, no contexto atual, onde a produção do espaço urbano é cada vez mais relevante à acumulação e à reprodução do capital, os processos de remoção e reassentamentos forçados urbanos - enquanto mecanismos geográficos de adequação do espaço às necessidades de reprodução do capital - ensejam não somente uma acumulação por \"espoliação\", mas também por \"exploração\" dos bens patrimoniais (terra e/ou edificações) de comunidades pela expropriação; complementada pelo \'novo\' espaço (infraestruturas, moradias, etc.); assim como ensejam e expressam, dialeticamente, a (crise de) hegemonia, a dominação e a luta de classes. O método adotado consiste na conjunção entre pesquisa bibliográfica, documental, entrevistas semiestruturadas e no estudo de caso da Comunidade Aldaci Barbosa, em Fortaleza, Ceará. Os processos de remoção e reassentamentos forçados urbanos tem crescente centralidade na produção do espaço urbano, enquanto mecanismos geográficos de operação do poder e de ampliação da hegemonia e da dominação das relações de propriedade privada e do modo de produção capitalista, entrelaçados por uma \"conexão orgânica\" entre a exploração e a espoliação que impulsionam a reprodução ampliada e a acumulação capitalista pela produção do espaço urbano. / In a context where the production of urban space is increasingly important, whether by the provision of infrastructure, by the production of real estate, or by its articulation; Many families living in self-built settlements are threatened with forced eviction and forced removal with low compensation for urban projects. This situation raises a number of political conflicts between communities threatened with expropriation, public agencies and private interests involved. At the center of the conflict are guidelines such as the permanence in the place, the procedures (registration, evaluations, indemnifications), the alternative housing, etc. The General Objective of the work is to understand the role of forced removal and resettlement processes in the current production of urban space in its political (hegemony, domination and class struggle) and economic dimensions (espoliation, exploitation, accumulation and amplified reproduction of capital) and their interweaving in expanded reproduction and capital accumulation. The hypothesis is that, in the current context, where the production of urban space is increasingly relevant to the accumulation and reproduction of capital, urban forced relocation and resettlement processes - as geographic mechanisms of space adequacy to the reproduction needs of the Capital provide not only an accumulation by \"dispossession\", but also by \"exploitation\" of the patrimonial assets (land and / or buildings) of communities by expropriation; Complemented by the \'new\' space (infrastructures, housing, etc.); Just as they dialect and express, dialectically, the (crisis of) hegemony, domination and class struggle. The method adopted consists of the combination of bibliographic and documentary research, semistructured interviews and the case study of the Aldaci Barbosa Community, in Fortaleza, Ceará. The processes of urban forced eviction and resettlement have a growing centrality in the production of urban space as geographic mechanisms for the operation of power and expansion of hegemony and domination of private property relations and capitalist mode of production intertwined by an \"organic connection\" between the exploitation and the dispossession that impel the amplified reproduction and the capitalist accumulation by the production of the urban space.

Num contexto onde a produção do espaço urbano tem cada vez maior relevância, seja pela provisão de infraestrutura, seja pela produção imobiliária, ou por sua articulação; muitas famílias residentes em assentamentos autoconstruídos são ameaçadas de desapropriação e remoção forçada com baixas indenizações em função de projetos urbanos. Tal situação suscita diversos conflitos políticos entre as comunidades ameaçadas de desapropriação, os órgãos públicos e interesses privados envolvidos. No centro do conflito estão pautas como a permanência no local, os procedimentos (cadastramento, avaliações, indenizações), a alternativa habitacional, etc. O Objetivo Geral do trabalho é compreender o papel dos processos de remoção e reassentamentos forçados na atual produção do espaço urbano em suas dimensões política (hegemonia, dominação e luta de classes) e econômica (espoliação, exploração, acumulação e reprodução ampliada do capital) e o seu entrelaçamento na reprodução ampliada e acumulação de capital. A hipótese é de que, no contexto atual, onde a produção do espaço urbano é cada vez mais relevante à acumulação e à reprodução do capital, os processos de remoção e reassentamentos forçados urbanos - enquanto mecanismos geográficos de adequação do espaço às necessidades de reprodução do capital - ensejam não somente uma acumulação por \"espoliação\", mas também por \"exploração\" dos bens patrimoniais (terra e/ou edificações) de comunidades pela expropriação; complementada pelo \'novo\' espaço (infraestruturas, moradias, etc.); assim como ensejam e expressam, dialeticamente, a (crise de) hegemonia, a dominação e a luta de classes. O método adotado consiste na conjunção entre pesquisa bibliográfica, documental, entrevistas semiestruturadas e no estudo de caso da Comunidade Aldaci Barbosa, em Fortaleza, Ceará. Os processos de remoção e reassentamentos forçados urbanos tem crescente centralidade na produção do espaço urbano, enquanto mecanismos geográficos de operação do poder e de ampliação da hegemonia e da dominação das relações de propriedade privada e do modo de produção capitalista, entrelaçados por uma \"conexão orgânica\" entre a exploração e a espoliação que impulsionam a reprodução ampliada e a acumulação capitalista pela produção do espaço urbano. / In a context where the production of urban space is increasingly important, whether by the provision of infrastructure, by the production of real estate, or by its articulation; Many families living in self-built settlements are threatened with forced eviction and forced removal with low compensation for urban projects. This situation raises a number of political conflicts between communities threatened with expropriation, public agencies and private interests involved. At the center of the conflict are guidelines such as the permanence in the place, the procedures (registration, evaluations, indemnifications), the alternative housing, etc. The General Objective of the work is to understand the role of forced removal and resettlement processes in the current production of urban space in its political (hegemony, domination and class struggle) and economic dimensions (espoliation, exploitation, accumulation and amplified reproduction of capital) and their interweaving in expanded reproduction and capital accumulation. The hypothesis is that, in the current context, where the production of urban space is increasingly relevant to the accumulation and reproduction of capital, urban forced relocation and resettlement processes - as geographic mechanisms of space adequacy to the reproduction needs of the Capital provide not only an accumulation by \"dispossession\", but also by \"exploitation\" of the patrimonial assets (land and / or buildings) of communities by expropriation; Complemented by the \'new\' space (infrastructures, housing, etc.); Just as they dialect and express, dialectically, the (crisis of) hegemony, domination and class struggle. The method adopted consists of the combination of bibliographic and documentary research, semistructured interviews and the case study of the Aldaci Barbosa Community, in Fortaleza, Ceará. The processes of urban forced eviction and resettlement have a growing centrality in the production of urban space as geographic mechanisms for the operation of power and expansion of hegemony and domination of private property relations and capitalist mode of production intertwined by an \"organic connection\" between the exploitation and the dispossession that impel the amplified reproduction and the capitalist accumulation by the production of the urban space.