Unsettling Land

Unsettling Land brings together anthropologists and geographers examining land relations across South Asia, the Americas, Northeast Africa, Eastern Europe, and Oceania to show how land’s forms, affordances, and meanings shift across diverse historical contexts and uses. Land is not a fixed, passive surface or static resource but a dynamic entity with agency that is shaped by social, historical, and material relations. As such, land is crucial to understanding contemporary political challenges around climate change, capitalism, and conflict.

Unsettling Land offers vital conceptual and methodological tools that challenge the familiar sociomaterial binaries centered on nature/culture, Indigenous/capitalist, and land/water dichotomies. Scholars make land sensible across its diverse relational forms and by placing it at the center of contemporary politics. Land’s relationalities manifest in animal sanctuaries, wetlands, plantations, forests, conflict zones, urban settlements, and in extractive, infrastructural, and national frontiers. They emerge as identities mobilized through historical, social, and institutional relations of power, and through relationships tied to financialization, assetization, rentierism, and extractivism.

Accessible and theoretically ambitious, Unsettling Land investigates new and old political projects based on questions of care, solidarity, identity, rights, and power across the world. It is essential reading for students and scholars of anthropology, geography, political ecology and economy, and environmental, development, Indigenous, urban, and agrarian studies, as well as readers interested in climate justice and the future of land politics worldwide.