1. Introduction

The multiple crises that happened in 2008 – financial, energy, water and political – as well as the food production shocks that followed, triggered the start of a new global land rush. There is broad consensus on this convergence of factors, and their timing. The extent of the phenomenon, both in terms of size and speed of transformation, attracted in the following decade the concern and research interest of scholars and practitioners (GRAIN Citation2008; Von Braun and Meinzen-Dick Citation2009), leading to a variety of academic and international organizations’ policy initiatives (Anseeuw et al. Citation2012; FAO Citation2012; Mehta, Veldwisch, and Franco Citation2012; White et al. Citation2012), as well as the production of a diverse body of scholarship and sustained media attention (e.g. Edelman, Oya, and Borras Citation2016; Dell′Angelo et al. Citation2017; Fairbairn Citation2021; Liao and Agrawal Citation2024). However, like many issues, regardless of their importance or severity, discussions on ‘land grabbing’ gradually lost visibility in media and NGO reports, giving perhaps the impression that the phenomenon was fading.

The global conference of the Land Deal Politics Initiative, held in March 2024 in Bogota, twelve years after the first one, showed a very different picture: land grabbing never went away. But what has become apparent is the extent to which it changed form, with new actors, mechanisms and logics of land dispossession and concentration unfolding. There is now renewed recognition of the scale, diversity and evolving dynamics of land grabbing – a continuous process of transformation that could justify a rephrasing of our editorial forum as ‘the return and return and return of land grabbing’.....

2. Has land grabbing ever stopped?

While global media, international organizations and some parts of the scholarly community may have reduced their attention to land grabbing, activists from around 52 countries attending the Global Land Grabbing conference at Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, in 2024, told a different story: one of constant struggles and a barrage of new deals.

Amid fluctuations in the pace of land grabs, different narratives compete to characterize land grabbing around the world. One is a ‘boom and bust’ narrative, which posits that land grabbing reached a peak in the 2010–2015 period, and thereafter waned. As Bourgoin et al. (Citation2025, this issue) show, there was indeed a slowing of the rate at which major new land deals were concluded. In some regions, crop- and economy-specific factors explain the decline in land deals, and the massive fall-off between deals announced, deals concluded, and deals implemented. For instance, the decline of the biofuels rush in sub-Saharan Africa can be considered a land grab ‘bubble’ that burst, in part due to unforeseen ecological and logistical impediments, as in the case of jatropha, a crop of Latin American origin that some hoped would be a boom crop in parts of Africa (Dietz et al. Citation2015; Sulle and Hall Citation2015).

As well as these changes over time, it is evident that land grabbing is differentiated across a spectrum from the ‘spectacular’ to the ‘pin-prick’ and from seizure and dispossession, often associated with militarization and violence, to the incremental subtle violence of concentration and inequality. In this sense, spectacular projects can be indirect forms of land grabbing, where the spectacle gives way to gains through rent extraction. Land grabs that appear to ‘fail’ on their own terms, as grand plans collapse, may in fact succeed in driving new forms of accumulation. Responding to these dynamics is even more complex than the direct struggles where communities contest their governments to reoccupy, regain land control, or overturn non-operational land deals (Dell’Angelo et al. Citation2021).

What emerges, then, is that the initial focus on agricultural land and farmland investments has given way to a far more diversified set of pressures on land. One example is the ‘spectacularization’ of land deals (Arango Citation2025), in which the hype of investment opportunities has real effects. As Arango (Citation2025) observes, even if a proposed mega-deal fails, the ‘spectacle’ is not wasted, as it may legitimise a narrative, spur investor interest, and pave the way for other deals. Such patterns are evident in the kinds of triumphalist modernism evident in the recurrent emergence of plans for ‘smart cities’ and mega-infrastructure projects (Zoomers and Otsuki Citation2025, this issue), which open up territory to diverse actors to pursue acquisition and accumulation in different ways, subject to less scrutiny. As Gutiérrez (Citation2024) framed it, spectacular land grabbing is an attention-grabbing tactic which allows governments to legitimise and mobilize public support while providing little to no details about the projects and to face little pressure for accountability.

The voices of activists at the LDPI conference in Bogotá highlighted the severity of local impacts and shared direct accounts of land dispossession. Their testimonies echoed and reinforced growing evidence of the negative, multi-dimensional consequences of large-scale land deals. Recent global assessments (e.g. Chiarelli et al. Citation2022; Davis et al. Citation2023; Müller et al. Citation2021) have quantitatively demonstrated the growing magnitude of the structural socio-environmental transformations that land grabs bring about, which are proving harmful to both communities and ecosystems.

3. An evolving conversation sparked in Colombia

Several key messages emerged from the Global Land Grabbing conference in Bogotá, where the papers and discussions in this forum were originally presented. Building on the Wolford et al. (Citation2025, this issue) paper, which provided a review of the land grabbing literature ‘state of the art’ and a theoretical starting point for the conference, we collected and present in this forum a number of selected contributions that characterized the land rush discussion around three core emerging and critical issues: climate, financialization, and geopolitics.

On geopolitics: Shifting global tensions and competition for territories and domains of influence have long featured among the factors shaping land grabs. The initial observation of a spike in transnational land deals (GRAIN Citation2008; Von Braun and Meinzen-Dick Citation2009) conveyed a distinction between ‘investor states’ and ‘target states’, which showed how Western interests in the Global South were being joined, and challenged, by new actors from the Middle East and Far East. Land grabbing was quickly understood as not merely a pragmatic response to uncertainties in food, fuel and financial markets, but as being driven by geopolitical quests for zones of influence – as Gulf States deployed sovereign wealth funds to annex territory abroad for offshore production (GRAIN Citation2008), and as East Asian states sought entry into regions previously dominated by European and North American investors – especially in Africa (Lavers Citation2012). Clearly, this was not all about production per se, but about an interlocking set of realignments and adjustments in the global order, also expressed in the following years in the rise of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) group of countries (McKay, Hall, and Liu Citation2018). But the geopolitics of land grabbing has evolved over the past 15 years, and more evidence now shows its nuanced character at local levels. For instance, coining the term ‘upland geopolitics’, Dwyer (Citation2022) has shown how, in Laos, land grabbing was far more layered than merely the expression of commercial cost–benefit calculations, but rather embedded in profoundly historical and political relationships between foreign country investors and local communities. More recently Jurkevics (Citation2022) has shown how strategic location is often a determining factor shaping land investments, arguing that in cases like Saudi Star in Ethiopia, companies have been able to entrench themselves in sites where they mimic state behaviour, exerting claims to territorial sovereignty. And alongside these local encounters of state, quasi-state institutions, and communities, the past decade has witnessed the rise of right-wing, authoritarian politics building on nationalist and xenophobic movements in many parts of the world (Scoones et al. Citation2017). With the spectre of trade wars and a retreat from globalist policies that have dominated since the end of the Cold War, the land rush is being influenced by a political calculus and implications of recent military escalations, alongside that of commerce and capitalist accumulation. Hall (Citation2022), for instance, has argued that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine since 2022 – and its seizure of Ukrainian farmland – should be understood as a ‘land and resource grab’, pointing out the limitations of ‘farm-level’ understandings of ‘land grabs’. Clapp (Citation2022) characterizes Russia’s war in Ukraine as precipitating a global food crisis which presented unprecedented opportunities for speculation by a small number of grain-trading firms on commodity markets – both the outcome of, and condition for, ‘multi-level concentration’. The food shock produced by the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 also raised predictions of a new wave of global land grabbing emerging as a systemic response (Dell’Angelo, Rulli, and D’Odorico Citation2023). Since then, geopolitical transformations have been unfolding rapidly, even in the last year, as the Trump administration has moved swiftly in 2025 to dismantle key elements of the multilateral framework built over decades. In this shifting context, state and non-state actors are combining in new ways to bring territories under the control and influence of major powers, often subordinating local interests to hegemonic agendas amidst tectonic shifts in the global order.

On financialization: The growing significance of farmland as a financial asset is well recognized, as are the intersections between financialization and land grabbing (Clapp, Isakson, and Visser Citation2017). As Ouma aptly observed, ‘Finance has gone farming’ (Citation2020). In one of the definitive studies of financialization of land to date, Fairbairn (Citation2021) shows how in the past two decades, farmland has become a global asset class, with farmland funds enabling institutional investors many avenues through which to secure land, which is perceived as a secure investment that combines appreciation and revenue – that is, in her words, ‘like gold with yield’ (Fairbairn Citation2014). Yet the extent to which financial sector actors are obscured from view has limited empirical investigation of the mechanisms, interests and capital accumulation associated with farmland financialization (Dwyer and Lu Citation2025, this issue; Sosa Varrotti and Gras Citation2020). Even identifying the source, and destination, of capital accrued through land-based speculation, has confounded most investigations. But new research methods have enabled a fuller picture to emerge. As Bourgoin et al. (Citation2025, this issue) report, among those transactions that are recorded in the Land Matrix that involve financial capital companies, 40% are linked to entities registered in tax havens, accounting for a total of 12.3 million hectares of land globally. Novel methodologies such as they deployed signal new avenues forward for investigations of how financial capital is implicated in land grabbing, and challenge those in the agrarian studies community to forge new partnerships, and learn new skills, to comprehend the ever-expanding diversity of means of accumulation via land appropriation.

On climate policies: The problematic, often perverse, relationship between climate change, climate change action, and land grabbing received close attention in the years preceding the conference – from understanding the consequences of the energy transitions on the global land rush (Scheidel and Sorman Citation2012), to the rise of grabbing through renewables (e.g. Dunlap Citation2018), and mitigation policies (Corbera, Hunsberger, and Vaddhanaphuti Citation2017). Twelve years after the publication in this journal of the special issue ‘Green Grabbing: a new appropriation of nature?’ (see Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones Citation2012), which provided a variety of empirical cases and typologies of climate- and conservation-driven dispossession mechanisms, numerous papers at the conference demonstrated (again) how green grabbing under neoliberal conservation is a political process, not only because it excludes local users through fortress conservation models, now regaining currency as carbon targets must be met, but also as ‘technologies of dispossession’ like digitalization and financialization spur the expansion of big corporations into natural environments that present the possibility of profits from carbon trade (Stock and Gardezi Citation2022). This pincer of climate policies and digitalization underscore the well-established argument that climate mitigation policies are a major driver of land grabbing in the world today. There is now extensive evidence about the ‘supply side’ of carbon markets, but extremely limited interrogation or understanding of the ‘demand side’, and the mechanisms by which actors in the energy transition pursue their quest to sequester carbon. Understanding capital in the energy transition remains under-explored in our field. This adds to the paradoxical understanding that land grabbing, especially in the form of large-scale agricultural production, is itself causing increased CO2 emissions through increased fossil fuel consumption (Rosa et al. Citation2021) and through land-use change and deforestation (Liao et al. Citation2021).

A core message emerging from the conference and this forum is the recognition of the limitations of the many ‘governance fix’ initiatives undertaken over the past 10–15 years. Despite the milestone represented by the FAO’s Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure, efforts to promote fair governance of land transactions and leases have largely failed to curb land grabbing and land concentration or to ensure more equitable distribution of land and its benefits. Civil society organizations, human rights defenders, and social movements have emphasized the need to address this regulatory gap from a human rights perspective – both in global forums such as multilateral institutions and in regional and national bodies, including human rights courts. While some legal cases have been adjudicated in favour of communities affected by land grabbing, overall progress in national and international regulation to operationalize and enforce governance frameworks remains limited. An often-overlooked dimension in governance responses has been the appropriation of blue freshwater resources through land grabs. In many cases, agribusiness developments are driven as much by access to water as by land. The issue of ‘water grabbing’ has received growing scholarly attention in recent years, starting from the seminal special issue ‘Water Grabbing?’ Focus on the (re)appropriation of finite water resources (Mehta, Veldwisch, and Franco Citation2012); critical scholarship has ranged from defining the diversity of localized mechanisms through which water is grabbed (i.e. infrastructure, hydro-power, tenure, FDIs, etc.) to seeing it as a global syndrome directly associated with large-scale agricultural land investments (Dell'Angelo, Rulli, and D'Odorico Citation2018). While the issue was prominently discussed at the conference (D’Odorico, Dell′Angelo and Rulli Citation2024a, Citation2024b) – it is clear that outside of the academic discussion it remains largely neglected in policy, juridical and legislative frameworks. This reveals the need to move beyond technical and fragmented policy solutions, or the modernist visions of water control implicit in ‘hydraulic-bureaucratic’ forms of governance (Boelens et al. Citation2022), and towards more integrated and justice-oriented approaches that recognize land and water as deeply interconnected, politically contested, and essential to the realization of human rights. Such a challenge needs the collaboration and coordination between global south and global north water justice movements and coalitions, involving academics, activists, practitioners, policy makers and social leaders (Boelens et al. Citation2022).

That this global conversation about the evolving forms and understandings of land grabbing was sparked by a conference in Colombia was no accident. The 2016 Peace Agreement with the FARC, which brought an end to five decades of violent armed conflict – fundamentally rooted in struggles over land and agrarian power – paved the way for a progressive government committed to challenging the entrenched control of land by militias, narco-syndicates, and elites. In many respects, a government embarking on redistributive land reforms today swims against the global tide, as the land rush intensifies. Yet even Colombia is not immune, as peasant movements and Indigenous leaders from the Amazon region made clear. Agrarian dualism in Colombia persists: reforms have yet to dismantle the sharp divide between agribusiness and peasant economies. Even as the Society for Special Assets – the state institution tasked with seizing narco-haciendas for redistribution to demobilized guerrillas and displaced peasants – undertakes its mandate, new global pressures impinge unevenly across rural domains. As one panellist put it at the conference, ‘The Green Economy has suppressed the peasant economy.’ This reflects a global trend, which plays out in diverse ways that are rooted in local histories and agrarian structures across different contexts, as the contributions to this forum illustrate.

4. Building the debate: new contributions to the study of land grabbing

Against this backdrop of major global trends reshaping land grabbing today, we now turn to the contributions in this forum, which push forward the academic debates that have evolved over the past eighteen years, since the food-fuel-financial crisis of 2007–2008. The papers in this forum chart the evolution of land grabbing debates, focusing on the state of knowledge, key actors, mechanisms, and governance structures. They highlight how land grabbing continues to transform, and in various ways urge scholars to expand analytical frameworks and adapt to its changing dynamics. Indeed, the field is advancing so quickly that other contributions in this collection are already addressing some future research agendas outlined here – despite being written in parallel. This collection is not comprehensive, however, and clear gaps are evident, for instance in the absence of attention to the way in which labour is implicated in land grabbing, class formation, and care work and social reproduction – among other dimensions identified as priorities for future work (Li Citation2011; Shattuck et al. Citation2023). Notwithstanding these limitations, we set out here how these papers push the boundaries of existing debates, introducing new questions and offering fresh perspectives on the many re-turns of land grabbing.

Over the past eighteen years of debate, in the land rush of the twenty-first century, scholars have developed increasingly nuanced understandings of land grabbing and its research limitations. Early discussions (2008–2011) emphasized conceptualization, linking contemporary land deals to the 2007–2008 financial crisis and the longer history of colonial enclosures (Peluso and Lund Citation2011). Much research at the time focused on how a phenomenon that was not new had been newly energized – by the speed, scale, neoliberal context, and global value chains characterizing this new land rush (White et al. Citation2012).

Building on these foundations, Borras and Franco (Citation2025b, this issue) introduce ‘land rush’ as a unit of analysis, distinct from land grabbing. A broader concept, ‘land rush’ calls attention to often-overlooked dynamics, beyond finalized, large-scale deals. They point to the ‘invisibilization’ of land grabs, including fragmented and failed land deals, and ‘pin prick’ grabs which have under-recognized and, cumulatively, profound structural effects. Indeed, the decline in media attention to land grabbing we observed earlier reflects precisely such an ‘invisibilization’. Borras and Franco’s (Citation2025b, this issue) wider conceptualization of a ‘land rush’ has political, theoretical and methodological implications, drawing attention to the ‘rush’ itself rather than its manifestations in specific land deals (for more on such keywords, see also their A to Z guide to essential concepts of land politics in Borras and Franco Citation2025a). Their work underscores a key throughline: land grabbing is less a rupture than a reconfiguration of longstanding patterns of dispossession, demanding frameworks capable of capturing both its volatility and its durable effects. By framing the concept ‘land rush’, they draw attention to the phenomenon of compounding perceptions and forecasts of future profitability, and considerations beyond the individual land deal. The land rush also represents a counter-reform in countries that previously redistributed land to address inequalities and injustices, particularly in post-colonial and post-conflict transitions. Sommerville et al. (Citation2025, this issue) illustrate these dynamics by exploring how various mechanisms – such as land rental markets, sales, partnerships, contracts, and repossessions – are reversing the gains made by previous agrarian reforms and land restitution policies. This reversal is often fuelled by the limited capital available to land recipients, coupled with neoliberal policies that encourage market-driven agriculture while reducing state support. While coercion remains a factor, the role of consent, shaped by limited options, is also central to understanding this process of land reconcentration.

In parallel, debates about how to understand and measure land grabbing have also evolved beyond early efforts to map deals and actors (Anseeuw et al. Citation2012; Cotula Citation2012). Contributions to this forum advance these discussions by offering more grounded, sector-specific analyses. Bourgoin et al. (Citation2025, this issue) show how the sectoral and financial composition of land deals has shifted since 2005–2008, with financial firms – often linked to tax havens like the British Virgin Islands – playing an increasingly central role, particularly in agriculture and forestry. Madgulkar and Dell’Angelo (Citation2025, this issue), from a different angle, reorient the debate by exposing a gap between the actual geography of actors in land deals and dominant scholarly narratives which focussed on land grabbing as primarily a transnational phenomenon involving companies from distant countries. Through cross-analysis of Land Matrix data and a metastudy of the literature, they propose a new typology of actors, highlighting intricate alliances between domestic elites, agribusiness corporations, and financial intermediaries. Their work calls on scholars to update both empirical data and conceptual frameworks to more accurately reflect the roles played by domestic actors. Also addressing why land grabbing remains so difficult to measure, Dwyer and Lu (Citation2025, this issue) weave together case studies, land-deal quantification, and policy analyses to show how shifting state-market relations and growing financial opacity simultaneously drive and obscure land grabs. Their findings, alongside others in this forum, reinforce the analytical strength of multiscalar approaches – a point that Borras and Franco (Citation2025b, this issue) also emphasize as essential for grasping contemporary land grabbing complexity.

After the initial wave of studies, particularly post-2012, scholarly focus shifted beyond mapping land deals towards unpacking the mechanisms, motivations, and geopolitical processes driving them. One major area of evolving debate, reflected prominently in this issue, concerns the role of geopolitics in shaping land grabbing. While earlier studies recognized the role of states and international treaties (Margulis, McKeon, and Borras Jr Citation2013), recent work probes how land grabs operate across and through multiple geopolitical scales. An overview paper on land grabbing in Colombia (Arango et al. Citation2025, this issue) takes up these challenges by analysing the country’s mix of corporate power, narco-capital, and displacement, while global trends like financialization and labour fragmentation help contextualize these dynamics. Esteve-Jordà and Scheidel (Citation2025, this issue) examine green grabbing, showing how international, national, and local legal frameworks provide tools for resistance against land grabbing and, paradoxically, enable dispossession. Expanding the geopolitical frame, Tramel (Citation2025, this issue) analyses land grabs linked to interstate military occupation, using Israel’s occupation of Palestine to show how land seizure is not merely a consequence but a driver of war, territorial reorganization, and political subjugation. These contributions deepen our understanding of land grabbing as part of broader global reordering processes, emphasizing the need for politically attuned, multiscalar analysis.

A distinctive evolution in the field – further developed by the papers in this forum – is the view of land grabbing not as a standalone phenomenon but as entangled with broader webs of power, policy, and financialization. Research has increasingly exposed how financial mechanisms tied to farmland and agricultural commodities continue to shape dispossession, often persisting beyond boom-and-bust cycles of speculation (Clapp, Isakson, and Visser Citation2017). The Bogotá conference underscored the growing significance of the nexus between green grabbing and finance (Heffron Citation2024).

Beyond green grabbing, the Bogotá discussions and this forum's papers trace the increasingly blurred lines between ecological and social extraction. Bruna (Citation2024) expands the field by examining dispossession through the lens of carbon markets. Her work, rooted in environmental and climate justice, reveals through the case of Mozambique how carbon trading schemes – despite their climate mitigation goals – often marginalize communities who rely on traditional practices and contribute little to carbon emissions. Building on this, Tilzey (Citation2024) conceptualizes land grabbing as the entwined exploitation of nature and labour, driven largely by Global North actors. Together, these contributions show how land grabbing research has moved from a focus on territorial enclosures to encompass diffuse, transnational forms of appropriation – requiring new analytical tools attuned to evolving logics and geographies.

In this spirit, Zoomers and Otsuki (Citation2025, this issue) call for a fundamental rethinking of land governance. They argue that traditional policies aimed at regulating transactions have proven inadequate. In light of ongoing landscape transformations, they propose governance frameworks centred on strengthening community climate resilience, embedding climate justice, and preventing further marginalization. They warn that climate mitigation initiatives – if not radically reimagined – risk deepening the commodification and ‘foreignization’ of rural spaces. Their call is for investment models that address historical injustices, foster global equity, and protect biodiversity without fuelling new waves of green extractivism.

The papers gathered here not only revisit core questions about land grabbing but also highlight emerging issues that demand urgent scholarly and political attention. Wolford et al. (Citation2025, this issue) offer a critical stocktaking of the field, advocating for a re-politicization of land grabbing research and a deeper focus on resistance and political agency. They argue that land grabbing is not disappearing, but mutating – becoming more complex, diffuse, and embedded in global processes since 2008. This forum captures and advances that shift, offering refined conceptual tools, sharper analyses of actors and sectors, and a critical reassessment of the governance architectures surrounding land grabbing today.

5. Scholar-activist perspectives and dialogue with grassroots voices