8th Conference of the International Association of Strikes and Social Conflicts (Web), Commodity Frontiers Initiative and Amsab-Institute of Social History and Ghent Univ.

Time: 11.-12.06.2027
Venue: Ghent
Proposals by: 31.10.2026

Throughout the last six centuries, worldwide capitalist expansion has been driven not in the least by advancing vast rural and agrarian frontiers of labour, food, energy, and raw materials. Up to now, capitalism has overcome problems of declining resilience of its production system by the progressive incorporation and appropriation of natural resources and labour through the successive opening of new, not yet fully commodified, zones. Our central argument is that capitalism as a historical system has been growing through the socio-ecological crises it encountered. In fact, crises are inherent and systemic to capitalism, as are movements of resistance and the counter-narratives that they generate.
Since the 1980s, a new wave of expansion and crises has accelerated the transformation of the global countryside. Agro-industrial production chains destroy local food markets, endangering the food supplies of households and communities, vulnerable to the vicissitudes of global food and agricultural markets. Dispossession in the global countryside and concentration of the governance of commodity chains in the hands of a limited number of powerful transnational corporations are two sides of the same coin.
In this conference we explore and discuss the dialectical relationship between dispossession and resistance along two interrelated lines. First, we study countrysides as contested frontier zones in a comparative and long-term perspective. Frontiers are envisioned as historical and dynamic processes of both incorporation and differentiation, through which we can grasp the imbalances of incorporation processes, emphasising the role of the margins and friction zones and integrating nature and ecology as a defining part of the global economy. Building on this general thematic line, further suggested themes:

• What are old and new forms of conflict and resistance, ranging from anti-slavery rebellions to modern peasant movements?
• How did workers’ resistance attain a transnational character?
• How do local and indigenous communities organise their struggles against the incursions of transnational capital into agrarian spaces and practices?
• What specific types of dispossessions can be observed, and how did workers perceive and resist them? Read more … (Web) 

Source: Rural History Newsletter 69/2026-82/2026 (Web)