Dispersed Dispossession - (Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation) by Alexander Vorbrugg

About the Book

"This book provides a nuanced analysis of rural change in Russia during the 2010s, a crucial and formative phase marked by the consolidation of giant agricultural companies, large land deals, soaring exports, and spectacular failures of investment projects. It contextualizes complex and often ambivalent empirical realities within historical and political-economic frameworks. Through extensive fieldwork, Alexander Vorbrugg gives rare insights into the operations of large agricultural companies and reveals how the deterioration of material infrastructures, social arrangements, government and local supports, and collective goods erode the conditions of rural inhabitants' well-being and agency. Vorbrugg introduces "dispersed dispossession," a concept that helps to relate gradual degradation to appropriation and agency. The concept captures losses that have been accumulated across Soviet, reform, and state-capitalist phases and stick to places, persons and potentialities. These losses are perpetuated and exploited by businesses and politicians and have profound implications for the conditions for resistance, shaping the range of conceivable alternatives. They are part of a history that is not fully past"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

This book provides a nuanced analysis of rural change in Russia during the 2010s, a crucial and formative phase marked by the consolidation of giant agricultural companies, large land deals, soaring exports, and spectacular failures of investment projects. It contextualizes complex and often ambivalent empirical realities within historical and political-economic frameworks.

Through extensive fieldwork, Alexander Vorbrugg gives rare insights into the operations of large agricultural companies and reveals how the deterioration of material infrastructures, social arrangements, government and local supports, and collective goods erode the conditions of rural inhabitants' well-being and agency. Vorbrugg introduces "dispersed dispossession," a concept that helps to relate gradual degradation to appropriation and agency. The concept captures losses that have been accumulated across Soviet, reform, and state-capitalist phases and stick to places, persons and potentialities. These losses are perpetuated and exploited by businesses and politicians and have profound implications for the conditions for resistance, shaping the range of conceivable alternatives. They are part of a history that is not fully past.

Review Quotes

Following in the footsteps of the great Russian theorists of the Soviet agrarian question, Alexander Vorbrugg's outstanding book brings the story of Russian agriculture into the Putin Period. Based on rich ethnographic fieldwork, Dispersed Dispossession is an original and compelling contribution to our understanding of both post-socialist transitions and the contemporary agrarian question.--Michael Watts "Class of '63 Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley"

Dispersed Dispossession is an insightful and ambitious study that documents the dramatic transformation in post-Soviet Russia. The book is deeply sensitive to local specificities of rural change but does not shy away from broader claims about forms of land dispossession that enrich broader theoretical debates on rural change in Russia and beyond. Indeed, few studies accomplish this dual feat.--Susanne Wengle "author of Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food"

About the Author

ALEXANDER VORBRUGG is a senior researcher at the Institute of Geography at the University of Bern. His main research and teaching expertise is in Political Ecology, Rural Studies, Resource Geographies, Economic Geography, and East European Studies.