Articles

ABSTRACT

This article explores the relationship between rural livelihood transformations and the land struggle in the West Bank between 1979 and the Oslo Accords. During this period, the Israeli adoption of the state land doctrine opened a new terrain of struggle, prompting specific responses among Palestinian rural communities. Bringing Agrarian Political Economy and Agrarian System Analysis in dialogue with Settler Colonial and Indigenous Studies, and relying on an extensive fieldwork, it analyses drivers and outcomes of de-agrarianization and semi-proletarianization in the villages of Al-Walaja and Wadi Fukin, showing how wage work in Israel contributed to uproot Palestinians from their land.

Résumé

La situation mondiale de l'alimentation est très contrastée : d'un côté, suralimentation pour près de deux milliards de personnes ; de l’autre, faim continuelle pour environ une personne sur dix, soit autour de 800 millions de personnes. Près d'un tiers de l’humanité est en situation de précarité alimentaire. Les causes profondes de la malnutrition relèvent de l’organisation économique et sociale des populations. Pour garantir une alimentation adéquate pour tous les humains à l’horizon 2050, il faut entreprendre des actions résolues en faveur de régimes alimentaires sains et du développement agricole durable. Cela implique de relever des défis techniques, mais aussi et surtout des défis économiques et sociaux.

Abstract

Amid a general trend toward the informalization of employment, the globalizing sector of high-end hospitality services creates a limited number of formal employment opportunities for manual workers in specific locations with large pools of potential recruits. This paper examines the hiring criteria and recruitment process for waiting staff positions at an international luxury hotel in coastal Vietnam. Data collected through interviews and observation suggest that particularly young, taller-than-average, fair-complexioned candidates with foreign-language skills and the financial resources to compensate local brokers through traditional gift-giving rituals are more likely to get formal jobs. Aspiring formal employees perform work on their bodies and outfit to meet these requirements—a process we call “fitting.” The paper makes a contribution to the sociology of labor markets and to the understanding of access to formal employment in the context of globalization.

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Abstract

This article examines the strategies of land use and property that Palestinians have implemented to oppose and complicate processes of land dispossession under changing political-economic circumstances. Specifically, it focuses on the period from the beginning of the 1980s until the Oslo accords, and on the post-Oslo era. Through an in-depth analysis of site-specific practices of land use and property in the villages of al-Walaja and Wadi Fukin, it argues that in the rural areas of the West Bank, from the pre- to the post-Oslo period, the core of the property strategy through which Palestinians have advanced claims over the land has evolved from a set of collective relationships into an individual, market-based relationship. Based on extensive ethnographical fieldwork carried out in 2018 and 2019, this article brings together insights from the fields of agrarian political economy, settler colonial studies, and indigenous studies to question the assumption that individual ownership of land is an effective protection against land dispossession, especially in settler-colonial contexts.

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