Introduction: Toward a Political Sociology of Land

The politics of land are vital. In North America, they stretch from fights over fracking, pipelines, public land, and indigenous rights to dynamics of residential segregation, gentrification, and neighborhood succession. In Europe, secessionist movements have gained new ground (in Catalonia and, perhaps, Scotland), while the constructed polity of the European Union faces a shrinking of its territory. In parts of Asia, Africa, and South America, “land grabs,” rural dispossession, and transformations of agriculture have put land at the center of contentious politics. And in the Middle East, land remains embroiled in conflicts involving Israel, Palestine, Turkey, and Syria.

Political sociologists, though, rarely analyze land explicitly. We are more likely to recognize a political sociology of the welfare state, of neoliberalism, and of the entrenching of categorical inequalities than a political sociology of land. Yet as we will see, the study of land necessarily leads to considerations of power, governance, mobilization, institutions, and the state – the central stuff of political sociology.