Jostein Jakobsen

Authoritarian Populism and Bovine Political Economy in Modi’s India analyses how the twin forces of Hindu nationalism and neoliberalism unfold in India’s bovine economy, revealing their often-devastating material and economic impact on the country’s poor.

This book is a rare, in-depth study of India’s bovine economy under Narendra Modi’s authoritarian populism. This is an economy that throws up a central paradox: On the one hand, an entrenched and aggressive Hindu nationalist politics is engaged in violently protecting the cow, disciplining those who do not sufficiently respect and revere it; on the other hand, India houses and continuously promotes one of the world’s largest corporate-controlled beef export economies that depends on the slaughter of millions of bovines every year. The book offers an original analysis of this scenario to show how Modi’s authoritarian populist regime has worked to reconcile the two by simultaneously promoting a virulent Hindu nationalism that seeks to turn India into a Hindu state, while also pushing neoliberal economic policies favouring corporate capital and elite class interests within and beyond the bovine economy.

The book brings out the adverse impacts of these political-economic processes on the lives and livelihoods of millions of poor Indians in countryside and city. In addition, it identifies emerging weaknesses in Modi’s authoritarian populism, highlighting the potential for progressive counter-mobilisation. It will be of interest to scholars in the fields of development studies, South Asia studies, critical agrarian studies, as well as scholars with a general interest in political economy, contemporary authoritarian populism, and social movements.

A new wave of encroachments is unfolding in Northern Sweden on the lands of Indigenous Sámi reindeer pastoralists. Even if the State and corporations may accept that landscape transformations represent threats to reindeer pastoralists' cultural and livelihood practices, attempts to redress these grievances often involve money to cover costs associated with feeding practices or mechanized transport. This paper considers these landscape transformations as driven by industrial capitalist expansion and underlying colonial relations, examining their broader implications on human-animal relations in pastoral landscapes. We apply an ecologically informed radical geography approach and conduct a content analysis of claims-making instances around the new wave of encroachments and their associated compensation schemes, complemented with basic GIS data. Relying on three cases of public contestations, we argue that encroachments represent threats that disturb, degrade, and destroy pastoral landscapes, and that while counter-hegemonic struggles try to diminish the reach of capital into these landscapes to maintain human-animal relations based on natural pastures, hegemonic actors seek to alter such relations to deepen capital's reach. Although reindeer pastoralists have many allies, we argue that broader coalitions are likely necessary to push for reforms of planning regimes that can enable multi-functionality and sustainability of landscapes in rural areas.

The global poultry industry culls approximately seven billion day-old male layer chicks annually. Superfluous to both egg and meat, male 'brother' layers constitute a momentous problem, simultaneously economical and ethical, to the poultry industry. In this article, we scrutinize present and proposed alternatives to routine killing involving multiple biotechnological innovations, including novel methods for fetus sexing, genome editing technologies and re-sexing. We utilize a political ecological perspective that views attempts to solve the 'brother layer problem' as discursive and techno-scientific 'fixes' to problems of the capitalist poultry industry's own making and to rising demands for ethics and environmental-friendly animal agriculture. This context opens new avenues for profitmaking by and for an expanding matrix of actors we view as an evolving 'economy of repair' that is built in part by public resources. Further, these fixes constitute an ostensible 'ethical sustainability' meant to signal both animal welfare and environmental improvements, which seem to work towards stabilizing agro-industry, thereby foreclosing alternatives to agro-industrial intensification.

While authoritarian populism and its relationship to the rural world have gained analytical prominence recently, few have attempted a systematic exploration of how various authoritarian populisms emerge from, and are embedded within, dynamics of capital accumulation, state, and class struggle. Drawing on Poulantzas' approach to "state contradictions", we focus on the ways by which bovine meat figures in Narendra Modi's authoritarian populist project in contemporary India. On the one hand, violent authoritarianism in the country uses beef eating as a powerful tool for subjugating subaltern groups to Hindutva rule. On the other hand, the country houses a rapidly expanding beef meat agro-industry, accounting for as much as 20% of global exports and based on corporate concentration around dominant class interests. We argue that this points to state contradictions in Modi's India witnessing strained accumulation patterns. These contradictions, we emphasize,have distinct ramifications for India's classes of labour in the countryside, as certain groups experience what we describe as a process of“double victimization.”

This article examines conflicting conceptualizations of the human subject in political ecology and geography: Foucauldian views of "subject-making" and Gramscian views of "the person". While Foucauldian work holds that the more complete exertion of power, the more coherent subject-making, Gramscian historicalgeographical perspectives counter that, the more complete exertion of power, the more incoherent persons and their class-based collectivities. Outlining incongruities between these approaches, I argue that the "dark side" of Gramscian political ecology-with its emphasis on incoherence and fracture-allows geographers new nuance in understanding the human subject, although not without challenges to the actual writing of such scholarship.

Food regime analysis is a prominent approach to the role of food and agriculture in global capitalism. Yet recent advancement within the approach has not received as much attention as it deserves outside of specialized circles of agrarian research. Food regime scholarship has over the last few years taken several steps to move away from its previous prevalent emphasis on macro-scale phenomena to make it more applicable to empirical research on agricultural development. This article reviews recent scholarship in food regime analysis to bring out central aspects of such advancement. In particular, this review discusses three key aspects of recent food regime scholarship: First, I find an increased problematizing of spatiality and scale with calls for downscaling the food regime approach. Second, I find a rising centrality of theorizing and analyzing the state. Third, despite these advancements, an important gap remains in sustained attention to questions of labor. I call for further scrutiny of labor in order to bring food regime analysis forwards.

The 'grain hypothesis', postulated by James Scott, suggests that cereals are 'political crops' intrinsic to state formation. Drawing the classical agrarian political economy of maize into dialogue with recent more-than-human political ecology, we explore the grain hypothesis with empirical material from present day Malawi and India. The evolution and ecology of the maize plant, we argue, has made it a strong agent of history, one that has enabled resilience, but also facilitated state and capital entanglement in the global agro-food system. This imperial maize assemblage is set on expansion, but it will continue to meet resistance in coevolved peasant-maize alliances.

This article introduces compounding aspirations as a key concept for interrogating complex and contradictory rural transformations in India. We argue that compounding aspirations are central to the conjunctural grounding of hegemonic processes of neoliberalisation in lived experience. Taking such aspirations as constitutive elements to hegemonic processes, we question prevailing perspectives on rural transformations in India as we speak to emerging interest in critical agrarian studies to transcend dichotomous views of consent and coercion. We illustrate this argument with select empirical cases from India, focusing in particular on adverse incorporation in corporate agriculture in rural Karnataka.

This contribution explores how new regions and crops are integrated in the contemporary food regime through a fieldwork-based approach to maize cultivation in rural Kar-nataka, South India. As an intrinsic part of the industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex, maize is an important component of the contemporary food regime. I argue that the expansion of maize at the village level follows commodity frontier dynamics, located at the conjuncture of processes "from above" pushing the industrial grain-oilseed-complex forward and processes "from below" that integrate maize in everyday livelihoods. Focusing on how villagers make use of maize in ways that cross, but simultaneously are differentiated along, lines of class and caste, this article seeks to contribute to our understanding of the everyday dynamics of contemporary food regime. K E Y W O R D S agrarian political economy, classes of labour, commodity frontiers, food regime analysis, India, political ecology, world ecology

This contribution explores the role of the state in the contemporary food regime in light of critical theories of neoliberalisation. Heeding recent calls for downscaling food regime analysis, I suggest a Gramscian reinterpretation of recent right-to-food legislation in India on the backdrop of longer histories of capital, power and nature. I argue for seeing the recent right-to-food case in India as partaking in a longstanding hegemonic process of neoliberalising the country’s agro-food system, where hegemony is negotiated through unstable equilibria facilitating renewed capital accumulation for dominant classes.

A B S T R A C T This article develops an initial framework for a Gramscian and political ecological food regime analysis of India's ongoing agrarian crisis. Criticizing readings of Polanyi in food regime analysis in light of Gramscian perspectives, I seek to contest food regime analysis's approach to counter-movements. I suggest, further, that close attention to the Indian case of 'actually existing crises' helps us avoid some of the capital-centric limitations in food regime literature. Working towards an incipient understanding of the absence of a sustained smallholder counter-movement at the current conjuncture in India, I argue for locating our investigation at the intersection of crises of accumulation and of legitimation. I analyze India's decentralized form of petrofarming as a socioecological cycle of accumulation that is presently facing a condition of exhaustion of Cheap Nature. Drawing on Gramscian perespectives, I argue that an analytics that foregrounds the dynamics of class forces in the integral state can help us rethinking the possibilities for resistance to the contemporary food regime more broadly.

This chapter seeks to explore changing forms of Maoist mobilization in the plains of northern Telangana from the 1970s onwards. Bringing to view mutually constitutive relations between Maoist mobilization, the state and agrarian change, this chapter challenges the dominant view of the decline and collapse of the Maoists in northern Telangana.I argue that prevailing scholarly accounts leave unexplored patterns of mobilization and demobilization that are crucial to a comprehensive understanding of the Telangana case. Presenting empirical material in the form of oral historical narratives, I show that the disintegration of landlordism in the region profoundly affected the Maoist movement and gave shape to subsequent developments. This chapter thus seeks to show the value of centering regionally specific processes of state formation and agrarian political economies in analyses of Maoist trajectories in India.

Et ferskt utvalg av Antonio Gramscis Fengselsopptegnelser foreligger i norsk utgave, oversatt av Geir Lima. Utgivelsen gir oss mulighet til å stifte nytt bekjentskap med en av 1900-tallets viktigste marxistiske tenkere. Og dessuten: utforske Gramscis relevans i dag.