6th International Conference of the BRICS Initiative for Critical Agrarian Studies (BICAS) ‘Development and Agrarian Transformations: BRICS, Competition and Cooperation in the Global South’

Over the past two decades, agrarian economies and food systems have been undergoing a profound restructuring in the wake of large-scale agribusiness and farmland investments, marked also by increasing financialisation and resurgent authoritarian populism. These have reinforced old and created new forms and sites of capital accumulation by local and foreign elites, advancing and transforming forms of extractivism (new extractivism and agroextractivism). This restructuring has contributed to the unsettling of global geopolitics, most notably with the emergence of the BRICS countries and the so-called Middle Income Countries (MICs). The BRICS Initiative for Critical Agrarian Studies (BICAS) emerged in 2013 to examine these transformations.

Critical theoretical and empirical questions about the origins, character and significance of complex changes underway need to be investigated more systematically, which is the main goal of the 6th BICAS International Conference on ‘Development and agrarian transformations: BRICS, competition and cooperation in the Global South’ to be held from 12 to 14 of November 2018 at the University of Brasilia, Brazil.

This conference will explore social, political, economic, ecological, and other transformations associated with agrarian dynamics involving the BRICS and MICs. Our approaches are based on critical and engaged scholarship, in alliance with social movements and popular leaders’ struggles and point of views. Interdisciplinary perspectives are welcome, including those drawing from political economy, development sociology, human geography, political ecology, and other social and human sciences that reflect critically about themes like:

• Regional influences and development: BRICS trade and investments across the Global South;
• South-South Cooperation: policy transfer and state influences among BRICS and MICs;
• New state-market relations emerging from BRICS and MICs;
• Environmental crisis and agro-ecology in Latin America and the Global South;
• Resurgent authoritarianism and populism in contemporary political and agrarian transitions;
• Agrarian transformations and socio-territorial movements: land, environment and food sovereignty.