Colum Graham

The Spread of Soy in South America Grasslands, savannas, and dry forests have become popular places to grow soy.

Cropland area nearly doubled in South America between 2000 and 2019 - the largest relative increase in the world. Soybean production replaced rainforests, grasslands & savannas. earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/14962... As China refuses U.S. soybeans, this puts more pressure on natural ecosystems.

The planet, and human social life, depend on peasant farmers | Aeon Essays Far from being a relic of the past, peasants are vital to feeding the world. They need to be supported, not marginalised

Without peasants, the global economy could not function, and our natural systems would collapse. Life still depends on the peasantry, and we are all affected by the fact that it is today in an acute crisis

Rural Village Study in Vietnam: Finding the Balance between Researching Specific Issues and Asking Big Questions Masayuki Yanagisawa (Environmental History in Southeast Asia, Vietnamese Studies) In the 1990s, when

Enjoyed this post by Masayuki Yanagisawa and agree with his point about asking big questions. I also like the comparative photo arrangements! newsletter.cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/nl-83/yan... @cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp

Technologies of dispossession: comparative analysis of frontier-making and state power in Indonesia This article examines land dispossession in Indonesia through a conjunctural comparison of two frontier regimes: a long-standing commodity frontier in South Sulawesi and a rapidly assembled infrast...

My first-ever, single-authored article is out in the Journal of Peasant Studies! Comparing sugar and infrastructure frontiers, it explores how technologies of dispossession shape frontier-making and state power in Indonesia across scale and time.

Read it here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

It’s August, which means a new issue of Mekong Review 🥳

In this issue: young K-pop stans in Myanmar join resistance efforts, the contestation of Indonesia’s history, an interview with Saigon Soul Revival… and more!

Order online: ko-fi.com/s/a3e8a4c60d

Has meritocracy gotten the better of our universities? Why events at ANU are grounds for hope - ABC Religion & Ethics It’s not every day that the students and staff of a university succeed in forcing a vice-chancellor from office — that’s what happened last week at ANU, but why did change take so long when it was cle...

www.abc.net.au/religion/anu...

Good piece by Nick Cheesman from my old department at ANU @ouranu.bsky.social

Historians of Southeast Asia (HiSEAs) Network seminar:
‘The Feral Territories of Eastern Bangkok’, Dr Samson Lim (Monash University)
Thu, Sep 11, 2025, 4:00 PM - 5:30pm online via zoom
Register here: www.linkedin.com/events/histo...

Literary journal Meanjin to close after 85 years of publishing Meanjin, a mainstay of Australia's cultural landscape and the nation's second-oldest literary publication, is shuttering after Melbourne University Publishing decided to cease financial support.

Sad news 😔

www.crikey.com.au/2025/09/04/m...

My first book, Socializing Land: Plantations, Dispossession, and Resistance in Laos (University of Hawai'i Press, 2025), exists in this world!

Check it out at: uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/social...

1/4

My take on the recent protests in Indonesia

www.newmandala.org/mass-protest...

Honoured to have won this award. Thanks to @edwardaspinall.bsky.social for supervising me, my committee members Ben Kerkvliet and Jim Fox for their continuous support over the years, and the ASAA award panel @asiancurrents.bsky.social

Maybe of interest: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

The Doomsday Seed Vault Plus: The economics of Alaska.

foreignpolicy.com/podcasts/one... Good episode on seed banks and the emergence of seeds as intellectual property. Very much agree on public funding, @adamtooze.bsky.social

Internet menangisi 'matinya' macan lucu Cisewu - BBC News Indonesia Sejumlah pengguna media sosial mengungkap rasa sedih setelah macan Cisewu yang menjadi meme lucu dihancurkan.

www.bbc.com/indonesia/tr... for reference... Thanks to @postcolsandwich.bsky.social for reminding me of it the other day.

Could the origins of macan cisewu's style be from this kind of promotion found in a 1918 edition of Oetoesan Hindia? Or perhaps there are earlier ones? Am I mistaken in seeing the resemblance?

The barista says it is me. But I have no reason to be smug... 🤔

Front page of Oetoesan Hindia

In a day interrupted with meetings it is great to briefly escape to microfilm. Wonder if the Gothic typeface for Oetoesan Hindia's masthead points to organicist influences?

Instagramming colonialism in Surabaya - New Mandala On what’s lost when the Dutch East Indies is recalled as a time of picturesque sophistication

Interesting post on @newmandala.bsky.social www.newmandala.org/instagrammin...

Elite land reform in Nepal For the past few months I have been busy so I did not post much. Sunset in Tarai, 2018. Photo taken by Lakhindra (CC BY-SA 4.0) In aid of getting back into writing for this blog, I thought I may as…

peasant.blog/2025/07/17/e... A brief post about a new paper, “Failed” Not Futile: Reassessing Nepal’s 1964 Land Reform', by Jacob Rinck in Studies in Nepalese History and Society

Tony and Yohanni Johns Lecture 2025 Get tickets on Humanitix - Tony and Yohanni Johns Lecture 2025 hosted by ANU Indonesia Institute. Lecture Theatre 1 (HB1), Hedley Bull Building, 130 Garran Rd, Acton ACT 2601, Australia. Tuesday 12th ...

Join our ANU Indonesia Institute for the 2025 Tony and Yohanni Johns Lecture. 🇮🇩

This annual lecture honours the legacies of Tony and Yohanni Johns, who pioneered Indonesian language learning in Australia.

Find out more and register via this link: quicklink.anu.edu.au/708x

Horrible typo correction: binnenlands bestuur should read inlands bestuur, or pangreh praja.

New working paper from me & some colleagues on East Africa's maize markets from c. 1900 to today, based on a major data collection effort to fill in the long-run history of food prices in one of the world's poorest regions: www.aehnetwork.org/working-pape...

Happy to share this new piece in Food Policy documenting the wide policy uptake of the 6 dimensions of food security framework (incl. agency and sustainability).

co-authored with colleagues @williamgmoseley.bsky.social, Paola Termine, & Barbara Burlingame
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Socializing Land: Plantations, Dispossession, and Resistance in Laos Since 2008, there has been tremendous public interest in the social and ecological ramifications of the global land rush, a rapid increase of capital investment into land, especially for the establ…

@mklaz.bsky.social Miles Kenney-Lazar's book is out!! 👏🏼
I have to say the cover is one of the coolest I've seen in awhile...

uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/social...

What Does It Take to Topple a Dam? - Boston Review A new politics of rivers is emerging.

In Praise of Floods by James C. Scott was featured in a new review essay from @bostonreview.bsky.social.

New article, with Ibrahim Suffian and Ted Lee: "Malaysia’s Democratic Deficit: Why Youth May Not Be the Answer." (Abbreviated abstract: not all youth are politically "progressive.") This piece was looong in coming – so all the happier to see it finally in print!
www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10....

The Enduring Fantasy of “Feeding the World” – Spectre Journal Members of the Agroecology Research-Action Collective argue against the productivist logic underlying the "feed-the-world" approaches to feed security.

This week we have members of the Agroecology Research-Action Collective ( @adamcalo.bsky.social , Maywa Montenegro de Wit , @beniuliano.bsky.social , @alastairiles.bsky.social ) taking on the productivist roots of the "feed-the-world" approach to food security.

spectrejournal.com/the-enduring...

Three years and a movement: how farmers defeated the land grab by India’s Karnataka state peoplesdispatch.org/2025/07/19/t...

Distributive Politics and Class Dynamics in Rural Java Based on fieldwork in a village I call Lone Teak in East Java, Indonesia, this paper examines emerging patterns of class differentiation and distributive politics. The history of Lone Teak's landhold....

An open access paper I wrote on differentiated Suharto nostalgia in rural Java for a Journal of Agrarian Change special issue on land and labour in Indonesia: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Hard to say what the best is and for what timeframe but I suspect Hagen Koo's work, or ones by Meredith Woo-Cummuings, or Bruce Cummings, or John Oh... Or the debate among Kohli, Haggard, Kang and Moon in World Development in the mid-1990s, might make people's recommended lists.