ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter to Routledge Handbook of Global Land and Resource Grabbing begins with an introduction into recent debates on the renewed global rush for land and natural resources in the 21st century. It argues that global land and resource grabbing shows no sign of abating despite receiving much less media attention than 15 years ago when the phenomenon was first making headlines. The chapter discusses various definitions of land grabbing and the relative ineffectiveness of the soft law instruments that were introduced at national and international levels to govern and control the global land rush. It then presents the range of actors driving the global land and resource rush, including national governments in both origin and host countries, transnational corporations, Sovereign Wealth Funds, international development banks and aid agencies, and internationally operating commercial banks. The chapter then presents the discourses and narratives that are being deployed to justify and legitimize land and resource grabbing. It then introduces practices of dispossession, namely eviction, enclosure, extraction, exclusion and erasure, and social impacts of land and resource grabbing, including on women’s and men’s livelihoods, lives and freedoms. Finally, the chapter introduces the 30 contributions to the handbook.
