584 Ben Cousins © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Henry Bernstein and Terence J. Byres. Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 6 No. 4, October 2006, pp. 584– 597. Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 4 No. 1 and 2, January and April 2004, pp. 00–00. Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 6 No. 4, October 2006, pp. 584 –597. © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Henry Bernstein and Terence J. Byres. Review Essay Debating the Politics of Land Occupations BEN COUSINS Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America, edited by Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros. London and New York, Cape Town: Zed Books and David Philip. 2005. Pp. 426. £60 and US$85.00 (hb); £19.95 and US$29.95 (pb). ISBN: 1-84277-424-7 (hb); 1-84277-425-5 (pb). This essay reviews a provocative but flawed volume of case studies of land occupations in Africa, Asia and Latin America and critically examines the arguments advanced by Moyo and Yeros in their introduction and co-authored chapter on Zimbabwe. The editors’ core proposition is that the agrarian and national questions are linked in the periphery of capitalism because industrial transformation is incomplete, ‘disarticulated’ forms of accumulation predomi- nate and dependent states are unable to exercise true sovereignty. The chief agent of struggles for agrarian reform, and the social base of rural social movements that occupy land as a key tactic, is identified as ‘the semi- proletariat’. The political characteristics of these movements are discussed in the introduction, three continent-wide overviews and several case studies. Most chapters tend not to support the editors’ arguments, and sometimes contradict them. These arguments are in any case reductionist and over-schematic. The categories ‘semi-proletariat’ and ‘peasantry’ are often elided, and differences of conditions and trajectories are seldom acknowledged. A tendency to economism vitiates discussion of the politics of land. These problems are also in evidence in the chapter on Zimbabwe. Keywords: land occupations, social movements, agrarian questions, Africa, Asia, Latin America THE GLOBAL SIGNIFICANCE OF CONTEMPORARY RURAL SOCIAL MOVEMENTS This edited volume contains a number of case studies, drawn from Africa, Asia and Latin America, of contemporary rural social movements that focus on land Ben Cousins, Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), School of Government, Univer- sity of Western Cape, P. Bag X17, Bellville 7535, RSA. e-mail: bcousins@uwc.ac.za