Commodity Frontiers by Hanne Cottyn
Commodity Frontiers, 2021
Mission Statement Commodity Frontiers is the Journal of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative (CFI).... more Mission Statement Commodity Frontiers is the Journal of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative (CFI). Edited by a group of scholars and researchers from various disciplines and organizations in the CFI Network, the Journal explores the history and present of capitalism, contestation, and ecological transformation in the global countryside. The point of departure is the commodity frontier concept, which describes sites and processes of the incorporation of "resources" into the expanding capitalist world economy; resources like land, raw materials, knowledge, and labor. In the past 600 years, commodity frontier expansion has been characterized by ecological and distributional conflicts; the displacement and dispossession of Indigenous peoples and other groups; racialization and othering across colonial, settler colonial, and postcolonial geographies; and the production of class, gender, race, and other inequalities. Each themed issue of Commodity Frontiers includes articles about theorizing, studying, and teaching with commodity frontiers. The Journal features reflections and reviews on the uneven and often violent dynamics of capitalist expansion, social change, and ecological transformation on global as well as local scales, in the past and at the present. Contributors include historians, social scientists, (political) ecologists, artists, and activists who work on global commodity production and circulation, rural societies, labor history, the history of capitalism, colonial histories, social metabolism, and conflicts and counternarratives in the countryside. Commodity Frontiers endeavors to carry out one of the central goals of the CFI: to provide long historical perspectives on problems that are often assumed to be modern, and to link historical and contemporary research to critically recast our thinking about sustainability, resilience, and crisis. Commodity Frontiers is a biannual open-access publication housed at commodityfrontiers.com, through Commodity Frontiers in the Open Journal System at Wageningen University, and distributed through email subscriptions. Its editorial collective is committed to inclusive, antiracist, anti-sexist, decolonial scholarship and politics. Objectives Commodity Frontiers aims to provide accessible content from multiple perspectives on the past, present, and future of commodity frontier expansion and dynamics. We feature research and educational activities undertaken by academics, artists, activists, and other civil society actors. By inviting short contributions from our multidisciplinary and multi-sectoral networks, and distributing the open-access Journal through our website and the Open Journal System, we aim to reach a broader audience than typical academic publishing allows. We strive for "real-time" reports and reflections on contemporary issues, and contributions that link past and present. Editorial Process The articles in Commodity Frontiers are not double-blind peer reviewed. Rather, Section Editors purposely invite contributions related to the theme of each issue from experts in respective fields. All articles are reviewed by Section Editors and at least one Editor-in-Chief. Contributions Articles that appear in Commodity Frontiers are invited contributions. We do not accept uninvited manuscripts. If you would like to contribute to Commodity Frontiers or the CFI, there are four routes. Article contributions: If you would like to contribute an article to one of the sections of the Commodity Frontiers journal, please send a short note with your contact information and your area of expertise to the section editors (contact information is on the website) and to Mindi Schneider
Papers by Hanne Cottyn
This paper proposes a world-systems frontier perspective that both departs from and supplements W... more This paper proposes a world-systems frontier perspective that both departs from and supplements World-Systems Analysis. It approaches frontiers and frontier zones as conceptual tools in indicating and understanding the uneven local-global interactions underlying incorporation processes. The notion of frontier highlights the role of ‘peripheral agency ’ in local-global interactions, revealing incorporation as a deviating process of negotiation. The paper applies the proposed conceptual framework to the analysis of historical transitions in land rights regimes, in particular the implementation and contestation of a privatizing land reform in Andean peasant communities. The analysis of Bolivia’s nineteenth century land reform demonstrates how the interplay of the modernizing aspirations of a liberal government and strong communal land claims forced local communities, rural elites and government actors into a complex negotiation. The repercussions of the conflicts and alliances developi...
Historia Agraria de América Latina, 2020
The interaction of free convection with thermal radiation of a viscous incompressible unsteady MH... more The interaction of free convection with thermal radiation of a viscous incompressible unsteady MHD flow past a moving vertical cylinder with heat and mass transfer is analyzed. The fluid is a gray, absorbing-emitting but non-scattering medium and the Rosseland approximation is used to describe the radiative heat flux in the energy equation. The governing equations are solved using an implicit finite-difference scheme of Crank-Nicolson type. Numerical results for the transient velocity, the temperature, the concentration, the local as well as average skin-friction, the rate of heat and mass transfer for various parameters such as thermal Grashof number, mass Grashof number, magnetic parameter, radiation parameter and Schmidt number are shown graphically. It is observed that, when the radiation parameter increases the velocity and temperature decrease in the boundary layer. Also, it is found that as increase in the magnetic field leads to decrease in the velocity field and rise in the thermal boundary thickness.
The fate of rural societies in the past and today cannot be understood in a singular manner. Peas... more The fate of rural societies in the past and today cannot be understood in a singular manner. Peasantries across the world have followed different trajectories of change and have developed divergent repertoires of accommodation, adaptation and resistance. Understanding these multiple trajectories requires new historical knowledge about the role of peasantries within long-term and worldwide economic and social transformations. This paper aims to make sense of this diversity from a comparative, integrated, and systemic approach. The paper is structured around the notions of peasant work, peasant frontiers, peasant communities and peasant regimes. These concepts figure as key analytical tools in an innovative research framework to analyze the paths of peasant transformation in modern world history beyond idealization and teleologization.
On June 24th and 25th, 2015, the CCC research group, as member of the Ghent Centre for Global Stu... more On June 24th and 25th, 2015, the CCC research group, as member of the Ghent Centre for Global Studies, co-organized an international conference on “Social Struggles for Land in Latin America: An Historical, Comparative and Global Perspective”, together with the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Peru) and the Red Muqui – Proposal and Action Network (Peru), at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, in the city of Lima. The conference aimed to create a more profound dialogue between researchers, institutions, social organizations and rural communities, between historical and contemporary perspectives, and between comparative (cases of different countries) and global views, on change and continuity in rural Latin America.
Este texto cuestiona el papel historico de los vecinos en la relacion entre las comunidades altip... more Este texto cuestiona el papel historico de los vecinos en la relacion entre las comunidades altiplanicas y el Estado boliviano, entre fi nes del siglo XIX e inicios del XX. A partir de un estudio de caso en la provincia de Carangas (Oruro), se analizara como estas elites rurales se consolidaron como nexo de union entre la comunidad y el Estado y entre la comunidad y el mercado, y se senalara como, paradojicamente, las estrategias que desarrollaron para ello implicaron su integracion gradual en la comunidad, convirtiendose asi en unos ambiguos intermediarios entre dos mundos aparentemente opuestos.
The present article analyses the repercussions of the liberal laws implemented in Bolivia at the ... more The present article analyses the repercussions of the liberal laws implemented in Bolivia at the end of the nineteenth century for the indigenous communities of the (now fragmented) province of Carangas in the Oruro department. Despite the formal abolition of the community by the Alienation (Exvinculacion) Act of 1874, the community members (comunarios) of Carangas managed to maintain their lands out of reach of the imminent land usurpations and privatizations. While the conservation of the communal land system is generally ascribed to ecological and demographic factors, a detailed analysis of historical sources of the province evidences a more complex negotiation process. The communities and their representatives deployed a multifaceted strategy recurring to legal loopholes, legislative actions and rebellions. The principal object of this resistance was the land inspection (Revisita de tierras) announced as a conditional juridical-technical intervention for the dismantling of the c...
This essay reflects on my re-encounter with the llama herders of Turco (Bolivia) and their entang... more This essay reflects on my re-encounter with the llama herders of Turco (Bolivia) and their entanglement with histories of capitalism and indigenous resistance (after many years without visiting). The pandemic sheds a new light on these shifting entanglements.
Commodity Frontiers, 2021
Hanne Cottyn and Stha Yeni of the CFI spoke with Carrie Freshour about cheap meat, workers’ care ... more Hanne Cottyn and Stha Yeni of the CFI spoke with Carrie Freshour about cheap meat, workers’ care and resistance, and fieldwork in Georgia, USA, which has been named the “poultry capital of the world.” The article is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation from 5 August 2021.
European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 2021
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Commodity Frontiers by Hanne Cottyn
Papers by Hanne Cottyn