Table of Contents

1. Land Grabbing and Global Governance: Critical Perspectives Section One: Theorizing Land Grabbing, Globalization and Governance 2. Land Grabs Today: Feeding the Disassembling of National Territory 3. Land Grabbing as Security Mercantilism in International Relations 4. Governing the Global Land Grab: Multipolarity, Ideas, and Complexity in Transnational Governance Section Two: Transnational Actors and Emerging Global Land Governance 5. The Governance of Gulf Agro-Investments 6. ‘One Does Not Sell the Land Upon Which the People Walk’: Land Grabbing, Transnational Rural Social Movements, and Global Governance 7. International Human Rights and Governing Land Grabbing: A View from Global Civil Society 8. Certification Schemes and the Governance of Land: Enforcing Standards or Enabling Scrutiny? 9. The Challenge of Global Governance of Land Grabbing: Changing International Agricultural Context and Competing Political Views and Strategies Section Three: Review of Recent Global Land Governance Instruments 10. The FAO Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests 11. The Principles of Responsible Agricultural Investment 12. The Minimum Human Rights Principles Applicable to Large-Scale Land Acquisitions or Leases 13. Private Governance and Land Grabbing: The Equator Principles and the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels 14. Restrictions to Foreign Acquisitions of Agricultural Land in Argentina and Brazil

About the Author

Matias E. Margulis is Assistant Professor of International Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia. His current book project explores the global regulation of agricultural trade and food security. He is a former Canadian trade policy advisor and has worked on global food security policy at several multilateral organizations.


Nora McKeon studied history at Harvard and political science at the Sorbonne before joining the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations where she became responsible for the overall direction of FAO’s policy and programme interaction with civil society. She now divides her time between research, teaching and activism around food systems, peasant farmer movements and UN-civil society relations.


Saturnino M. Borras Jr. is Associate Professor at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, Adjunct Professor at the College of Humanities and Development Studies (COHD) of China Agricultural University in Beijing, and a Fellow of the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute (TNI) and of the California-based Food First.