My book with University of California Press has been published April 2024.
Its called: Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement Ethnography
Starting two decades ago, a group of Indonesian agricultural workers began occupying the agribusiness plantation near their homes. In the years since, members of this remarkable movement have reclaimed collective control of their land and cultivated diverse agricultural forests on it, repairing the damage done over nearly a century of abuse. Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land is their story. I offer an account of the ways these workers-turned-activists mobilized to move beyond industrial agriculture's exploitation of workers and the environment, illustrating how emancipatory and ecologically attuned ways of living with land are possible. At a time when capitalism has remade landscapes and reordered society, the Casiavera reclaiming movement stands as an inspiring example of what struggles for social and environmental justice can achieve.
Praise for Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land
"Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land is a beautiful work that finds a way of reclaiming not just land but also dignity and autonomy from the detritus of colonial capitalism." —Raj Patel, coauthor of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
"A brilliant and moving book that helps us reclaim hope—intellectually and politically—for regenerative commoning and its power to counter historical dispossessions and resist future ones."—Saturnino M. Borras Jr., coauthor of Scholar-Activism and Land Struggles
“David’s book demonstrates convincingly that poignantly radical landscapes of hope have potential to travel." —Nancy Lee Peluso, author of Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java
"In Indonesia and elsewhere, plantation corporations hold concessions to millions of hectares of land they do not use. Gilbert provides a fine-grained account of what happens when people mobilize to take back concession land, detailing their challenges, triumphs, and the new forms of life they create." —Tania Murray Li, coauthor of Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia's Oil Palm Zone
"Gilbert has found gold in the sand: a peasant collective that became a self-governing community, with autonomy spread from the community council down to the individual. Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land presents many important details about smallholders' struggles, which is rarely found in the array of agrarian movement titles, especially in the case of Indonesia." —Laksmi Adriani Savitri, Indonesian editor for the Initiatives in Critical Agrarian Studies book series