(See Spanish version in PDF attached)
Vol. 10, Nº 2 (2019). Call for papers, essays and reviews:
Gender, Property and Participation in Latin American Agrarian Reforms: Revisiting the 50th anniversary of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform
June 24th, 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the Peruvian agrarian reform enacted by the military regime of Juan Velasco Alvarado. This reform aimed to modernize Peru’s rural regions while developing a national industry. Despite its debatable effects in the economic realm, the reform’s radical spirit has impinged its long-lasting mark in the country’s political, social, economic and cultural order. It did not only imply the elimination of regional economic enclaves based on the exploitation of peasants and indigenous peoples, but also it did promote a message of social justice among them –whom eventually felt empowered to claim their most basic citizen rights. The implications of this process continue to generate spirited debates among diverse representatives of the Peruvian political spectrum.
Yet the Peruvian agrarian reform was not an isolated event, it was part of grander democratizing processes that have mobilized Latin America –and continue to do so– in most of the 20th century. In practice, most of Latin America’s agrarian reforms were a response to fierce debates concerning land concentration, peasant mobilizations, demographic growth and industrial policies. In this spectrum, at least three different groups of countries with peculiar political profiles and reform outcomes can be identified. The first group is composed by countries where agrarian reforms were promoted through popular uprising such as the cases of Mexico, Bolivia and Cuba. A second group of countries is composed by Colombia, Ecuador and Brazil, which pursued less radical and moderate reforms. Finally, a third group of countries were characterized by their radical nature such as Chile and Peru. Although these processes questioned the dominant Latin American social class, (in some cases) democratized peasants’ access to land ownership, as well as prompted their participation in politics, peasants’ current situation is still precarious.
We believe that the 50th anniversary of the Peruvian agrarian reform provides an excellent opportunity to revisit the basis of this important political process, yet this time under new lenses. Among the topics of our interest are: (1) gender and (2) its implications to agrarian reforms, such as peasant land ownership and women’s political participation. We are interested in how gender relationships might help to explain a) the uneven effect that agrarian reforms have had in men and women, b) how it affected Latin America redistributive politics, such as access to land property, c) the social construction of masculinity and femininity in the rural area and, d) to which extend it explains the renewed role of women in politics in the region. The role of women participation –as peasants, social leaders, bureaucrats or revolutionary movements’ militants– remains an understudied area of research. We believe it requires urgent academic attention, most importantly amid the changing conditions of land re-accumulation, rural poverty and exploitation of natural resources led by large national and international agro-business firms. In this context, this journal number seeks to answer, with a special emphasis given to the gender approach, to the following questions: in the wake of Latin American agrarian reforms a) what are the current problems that peasant and indigenous populations and their institutions face?, b) how has the role of the State and peasant movements been reshaped since the agrarian reform?, c) what is the state of today’s peasant economies in Latin America?
This number of the Revista Andina de Estudios Políticos searches for contributions which emphasize the connections between gender, property and participation, and a general attention to the relations between the State, land access, actions, discourses, and roles of the main actors involved in Latin American agrarian reforms.
This number welcomes contributions with a variety of methodological approaches, yet special consideration will be given to papers employing subnational and cross-country comparative analysis. Also, we welcome papers that link agrarian reforms to memory politics, their impacts in the daily life of multiple actors, how they have provoked resistance movements or regional perceptions of it, as well as gender, race and ethnic issues.
Contributions will be received until July 15th, 2019 and should be sent to the following email: raep@iepa.org.pe