A world-systems frontier perspective to land. Unravelling the uneven trajectory of land rights standardization" (forthcoming

This paper proposes a world-systems frontier perspective that both departs from and supplements World-Systems Analysis. It approaches frontiers and frontier zones as conceptual tools in indicating and understanding the uneven local-global interactions underlying incorporation processes. The notion of frontier highlights the role of ‘peripheral agency ’ in local-global interactions, revealing incorporation as a deviating process of negotiation. The paper applies the proposed conceptual framework to the analysis of historical transitions in land rights regimes, in particular the implementation and contestation of a privatizing land reform in Andean peasant communities. The analysis of Bolivia’s nineteenth century land reform demonstrates how the interplay of the modernizing aspirations of a liberal government and strong communal land claims forced local communities, rural elites and government actors into a complex negotiation. The repercussions of the conflicts and alliances developing on the Bolivian highlands undercut the universality and uniformity of the global trajectory of land dispossession and concentration. The frontier perspective elaborated in this paper is instructive to the analysis of peripheral agency in the context of incorporative processes in other temporal an spatial settings, in order to give more texture to our understanding of an ever more globalizing world.