July and August Article of the Month

The 2023 Nevile-Plowman prize has been awarded to Brian Garvey, Maria Luisa Mendonça, Maurício Torres, Daniela Stefano and Fábio Pitta for their article ‘Cultivating space for contemporary resistance in Brazil’s Amazon and Cerrado’. The article, according to Editor in Chief, Di Kelly, exemplifies the key things that we value at the journal in terms of good and rigorous research: “the innovative use of theory, the robust application of data and, finally, producing research that is highly readable and useful to raise [social justice] issues.” The paper examines the ways in which land-grabbing in Brazil at the frontiers of the Amazon is facilitated not only by the state, but also by practices of financialisation, which integrate these newly minted economic assets into the realms of circulation and speculation. The authors track the fascinating and often contradictory and confounding modes by which this capital expansion occurs – Dr Garvey notes that often speculators prove that a given parcel of land is theirs by showing that it was illegally cleared… by them. Importantly, the authors pay close attention to processes of resistance in their study. On top of placing it centrally in the theoretical framework, the paper stands on a foundation of the authors engaging with and enhancing the already existing voices of the people situated in the conflicts. Dr Daniela Stefano explains that, having started working with the community in 2017, the researchers are now producing their 4th series of podcasts co-created with the local communities. These can be found at www.social.org.br. She says that “much more than giving a voice, we know that they have voices, and they have very important things to say to us.” This is a remarkably rich article. It is built on data born of engaging in the lived experience of the combatants, considers a conflict that spans industrial and ecological conflicts that have global ramifications, and turns on the careful and precise positionality of the researchers in relation to their subjects and the phenomena they are explaining.