My research topic is: ‘An Investigation of the De-peasantizing impacts of Transnational Land-grabbing on Agrarian Societies in Developing Countries: A focus on Tracing the causes and effects of rural to urban drift.’

 

Weak land governance systems coupled with lax tenure security for rural and indigenous people are posing serious contemporary problems to rural people. Allegations abound about investors’ preference for areas with weak governance systems prone to violating the human rights of people as hotspots for land acquisition. Land acquisitions under such circumstances have come to be generally described as land-grab.

 

Through land-grab, rural people face displacement, lose their farming land and homes, their ancestral forests and grazing fields, and are exposed to food insecurity.  Some are compelled to move to urban centers in search of employment, thereby effectively de-peasantizing them. These rural to urban migrants often wind up in slum communities, under conditions of vulnerable and informal employment.

 

Therefore, my Ph.D research investigates the political-economic and social complexities of depeasantization, by situating the practice within the current phenomenon of land-grab. The emphasis is on analyzing the specific causes and effects of rural to urban population movements and means of mitigating their impacts relative to depeasantization.

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Research Interest: Agrarian Societies, Globalization, Political Governance, Natural Resource Management.

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Baba Sillah is a PhD student in Global Studies at Sophia University from the West African nation of Liberia. BA in Political Science, African Methodist Episcopal University (AMEU); MA in Global Studies at Sophia University. He worked in the Liberian government as Assistant Minister/Special Assistant to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and prior as Director of Human Resources at the Ministry of Information, Culture Affairs and Tourism.