Available From UC Press

A Mongabay Notable Book on Conservation and the Environment
Featured in the Civil Eats Summer 2024 Food and Farming Book Guide

Two decades ago, a group of Indonesian agricultural workers began occupying the agribusiness plantation near their homes. In the years since, members of this remarkable movement have reclaimed collective control of their land and cultivated diverse agricultural forests on it, repairing the damage done over nearly a century of abuse. Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land is their story. David E. Gilbert offers an account of the ways these workers-turned-activists mobilized to move beyond industrial agriculture's exploitation of workers and the environment, illustrating how emancipatory and ecologically attuned ways of living with land are possible. At a time when capitalism has remade landscapes and reordered society, the Casiavera reclaiming movement stands as an inspiring example of what struggles for social and environmental justice can achieve.
 

David E. Gilbert is a postdoctoral researcher in society and environment at the University of California, Berkeley. He is active in protest movements across three continents.

"Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land gives us an ethnography both deeply engaging and engaged. With methods and perspectives that range from the archival to the orbital, David Gilbert explores his informants' worlds in all their complexity and contradiction. The result is a beautiful work that finds in agroecological practice a way of reclaiming not just land but also dignity and autonomy from the detritus of colonial capitalism. A fine book—one that will become part of the firmament through which Indonesian struggles teach the rest of the planet."—Raj Patel, coauthor of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

"In Indonesia and elsewhere, plantation corporations hold concessions to millions of hectares of land they do not use. Gilbert provides a fine-grained account of what happens when people mobilize to take back concession land, detailing their challenges, triumphs, and the new forms of life they create."—Tania Murray Li, coauthor of Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia's Oil Palm Zone

"A brilliant and moving ethnographic account of a land reclaiming movement. This book helps us reclaim hope—intellectually and politically—for regenerative commoning and its power to counter historical dispossessions and resist future ones."—Saturnino M. Borras Jr., coauthor of Scholar-Activism and Land Struggles

"This book brings new and critical insights to the remarkable reclaiming campaign set in motion by dispossessed peasants and petty commodity producers in western Sumatra. Focusing on iconic plantation landscapes of colonial and contemporary notoriety, Gilbert unpacks their complex and nonlinear histories, articulating the practices of the poorest actors alongside the global politics of dispossession that has plagued plantation spaces for centuries. Though the remaking of this volcanic (re)settlement demonstrates the success of only one reclaiming movement among thousands across Indonesia, Gilbert's book demonstrates convincingly that the reconstitution of a poignantly radical landscape of hope has potential to travel."—Nancy Lee Peluso, author of Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java 

"Gilbert has found gold in the sand: a peasant collective that became a self-governing community, with autonomy spread from the community council down to the individual. Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land presents many important details about smallholders' struggles, which is rarely found in the array of agrarian movement titles, especially in the case of Indonesia."—Laksmi Adriani Savitri, Indonesian editor for the Initiatives in Critical Agrarian Studies book series