Land in World-Ecology Perspectives

Abstract

While theorists of international relations have generally understood land as a strategic resource under the purview of nation-states, a range of theories in the classical Marxist tradition have offered an increasingly sophisticated critique. World-systems theory sought to explain how enclosure turns land from commons into a fungible commodity to which labor and capital are applied across the planet. Through its analysis of the commodity frontier, world-ecology offers a way of thinking about land and the web of life of which it is part that complicates temporal, physical, and politico-legal understandings on which capital and labor operate. This chapter explores how world-ecology helps to deepen an understanding of land by posing questions about how land becomes recognized, and worked on, under capitalism. By drawing attention to the national-state and international complexes that attend the expansion of commodity frontiers, and to the dynamics of material and discursive change through such frontiers, this chapter shows how land itself becomes a site of production about which a richer series of questions might be asked.