Commodity Frontiers, Land, and Global Production

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 minute)

Description

This panel brings together papers selected through the conference open call. It examines how contemporary capitalism expands through land dispossession, commodity frontiers, and transnational economic networks across the world system. Drawing on cases from West Africa, South Asia, Latin America, and U.S.–China connections, the papers analyze how states, corporations, and elites reshape access to land, labor, and natural resources while reorganizing commodity production, circulation, and financial networks in response to shifting patterns of global accumulation. The panel highlights how plantation expansion, militarized land regimes, global meat and soy chains, and elite-mediated transnational brokerage collectively reveal the mechanisms through which contemporary capitalism manages crisis, competition, and inequality across local and global scales.

Sub Unit

• Political Economy of the World-System Section / Political Economy of the World-System Section Open Call Paper Session

Presider

• Maria Jose Haro Sly, Johns Hopkins University

Individual Presentations

• Accumulation by Militarization: Land Grabs and the Politics of Dispossession in Pakistan - Muhammad Adil Zahoor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

• A Valuable Commodity with Global Reach: Meat production in the World Economy, 1960-2020 - Bill Winders, Georgia Institute of Technology; Elizabeth Ransom, Pennsylvania State University

• Contemporary Plantation Capitalism and the Contested Legacy of an Oil Palm Land Grab in Sierra Leone - Joshua Lew McDermott, Southeastern Louisiana University; Fassie Manju, Njala University

• Flexible Collaboration: State‑Embedded Brokerage by Chinese Transnational Elites in the China–U.S. Nexus - Pengfei Liu, University of California-Davis

• Green Gold: Labor, Nature, and Power in the Brazil-China Soy-Meat Complex - Adam Joseph Benjamin, University of Tennessee-Knoxville

Session Organizer

• Cinzia D. Solari, University of Massachusetts Boston