In post-Independence South Asia, the spotlight often fell on land reform, such as the zamindari abolition that took place in parts of India after 1947. In Pakistan, the issue of land redistribution also surfaced periodically in the decades following independence. But, as the case of Sindh in the late 1940 and early 1950s reveals, the focus was on how to ‘modernize’ tenancy arrangements rather than achieving more equitable land reallocation, since—for some contemporaries—left unchanged these represented a major impediment to increasing agricultural productivity, and hence Pakistan’s overall development. This article explores the context in which Sindh’s 1947-48 Hari Committee of Enquiry was set up and its various recommendations that proved controversial, together with responses to the legislation (1950 Sind Tenancy Act) that followed, highlighting the role of officials and peasant representatives, and shedding light on this important but largely overlooked episode of development-related policy-making in Pakistan’s early years.

This article examines the migration and expropriation policies of Guatemala's revolutionary governments toward Germans present in the country during the postwar years and the start of the Cold War. It reconstructs the challenges around the domestic and international articulations of their strategy. Revolutionary governments’ concerted efforts to confiscate valuable land and condition the return of German-Guatemalans classified as ‘dangerous’ can be interpreted as part of a cohesive plan to regain control of strategic domestic resources for future redistribution. It also reflects financial policies that have both electoral and financial purposes. The article is built around newly available judicial, legislative, and consular (France) Guatemalan sources, along with personal letters from Guatemala's top politicians, and complemented by Mexican, Chilean, Argentine, British, and US diplomatic documents. In methodological terms, this article shows the importance of articulating long-term processes, here the nineteenth-century German presence in Guatemala, in the context of historical junctures such as the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. It also draws attention to the importance of analyzing events on domestic, regional and global scales to understand foreign policy-making. This article enriches an already complex set of global, regional, and domestic interactions of the postwar period, as well as the role of Guatemala during that time.

What motivated right-wing and conservative parties to endorse a policy of land expropriation and redistribution in Brazil? I argue that urban-dominated right-wing parties endorsed agrarian reform in order to: (i) reduce crime in wealthier metropolises by reversing rural–urban migration; and (ii) gain competitive advantage against left-wing challengers. To test this argument I conduct process tracing, analysing over 500 elite statements about agrarian reform, drawn from archival, interview and survey data. In addition, I model land expropriations at the municipal level and show how right-wing administrations disproportionately expropriated land in the states of origin of migrants and, within those, in localities where the Left was more competitive. My results portray how two externalities of inequality – crime and competition with the Left – motivated conservative support for agrarian reform in Brazil.

During the 1980s, more than 20,000 Salvadorans fleeing the violence of the Salvadoran Civil War entered the neighboring country of Nicaragua. Their flight was part of a larger multidirectional migration out of El Salvador in which Salvadorans sought refuge across Central and North America. In response to this unprecedented influx of Salvadoran refugee men, women, and children, the Nicaraguan government—newly under the control of the revolutionary Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)—declared that all refugees would be permitted “the opportunity to survive and produce.” This article argues that the timing of the refugees’ arrival proved mutually beneficial for both the Salvadorans and the FSLN by illustrating how Sandinista officials sought to further agrarian reform projects via refugee integration into agricultural cooperatives. As such, Nicaraguan refugee policy functioned as an integral part of Sandinista statecraft. Through an analysis of refugee-produced sources, government and UNHCR documents, and news reports, this article sheds new light on the entwined histories of Salvadoran refugees and the Sandinista state in the transnational context of the late Cold War period in Central America.

The article argues that property redistribution was a major tool of democratization and nationalization in Poland and the Baltics. It provided governments with a means to give peasants a stake in the new democratic states, thus empower the new titular nations and at the same time marginalize former elites, who became national minorities. The most significant acts of property redistribution were the land reforms passed between 1919 and 1925, which achieved the status of founding charters of the new states. Activists of the disenfranchised minorities conceptualized minority protection as the “Magna Carta” of the international order, which should contain the principle of national self-determination and thus safeguard private property, the protection of which was not clearly regulated by international law. By examining the contingencies of the aftermath of the war in East Central Europe as well as discussions about changing conceptions of property ownership in both East Central and Western Europe, the article shows that land reform was meant to counter Bolshevism, but, at the same time, created the impression abroad that the new states themselves displayed revolutionary tendencies and did not respect private property — an image that became a significant argument of interwar territorial revisionists.

The article analyses social and political conflict in Chile during the agrarian reform period of the 1960s and 1970s through a case study of the province of Cautín, in the indigenous heartlands of the south. Using a combination of written and oral sources, it analyses the responses and strategies of landowners descended from nineteenth-century settlers to the emancipatory projects carried out during the presidencies of Eduardo Frei and Salvador Allende. In the context of an increasingly radicalised agrarian reform programme and a growing number of territorial conflicts with the Mapuche communities, this little-studied political actor developed a collective identity, an ideological discourse and a readiness to use violence which provides important insights into the causes of the military coup carried out in 1973.

The agrarian body of law created by government legislators and jurists in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), sought to restore pueblos’ juridical standing by allowing communities to hold land collectively in the form of ejidos. Yet, state efforts to restructure property relations in the countryside often articulated with local alternative territorial projects that challenged the implementation of these redistributive legal measures. During the course of 50 years, cattle ranchers from the community of El Huanal in Nautla, Veracruz, defended private property, resisted land expropriation, and prevented the establishment of an ejido in the community. How did rancheros achieve this? How did they respond to the pressures of ‘peasant’ mobilisation? How did post-revolutionary legal discourse come to frame this struggle over land? What changes did this failed attempt to implement land reform trigger in the region? Looking closely at the conflicts, interactions, negotiations, and everyday practices that unfolded among a variety of actors around the interpretation and the applicability of ‘the law’, this article demonstrates how the agrarian reform, despite never having been implemented, altered both the material landscape and the social configuration of this community of coastal Veracruz.

Latin American military dictatorships of the twentieth century were often right-wing, elitist and violent. A marked exception was the left-wing Peruvian military government of Juan Velasco Alvarado. More exceptional still was the government's use of visual media. Between 1968 and 1970 it produced approximately 20 posters, printed in editions of 50,000 to 200,000, to promote the radical Agrarian Reform Law. These posters provide vibrant representations of the agrarian reform's ideological aspects, which have been under-studied. A detailed exploration of visual communication shows that the government deployed aesthetically sophisticated propaganda and symbols to encourage social participation in the reform.

During the mid- to late 1930s, rural activism surged in the coffee-growing region of southern Chiapas and north-western Guatemala. This article examines the causes and impacts of sustained campesino protests at the grassroots level on the Mexican side of the border. The porous border between the two nations hindered the development of centralised power networks that prevailed in other parts of Chiapas. Campesinos and reformist federal government officials such as teachers and agrarian engineers built alliances that challenged the power of the coffee growers. This article explores the process of negotiation that occurred among campesinos, federal bureaucrats, regional authorities and elite coffee planters in order both to implement and to challenge agrarian reform.