In September and October, Yann will be heading back to the Pilcomayo River basin in Paraguay to continue working on reconstituting the history of land use and livelihoods prior to the arrival of the cattle frontier. The area has experienced important transitions over its history, from a territory dominated by mostly nomadic Manjui and Nivaclé people before the Chaco War, to one where they cohabited with Guaraní and Argentine criollo families as well as  military posts and some large estancias after. Recently, the massive expansion of large cattle ranches has again transformed the region. With this new visit, Yann hopes to shed some light on remaining questions about that history, and on the recent land conflicts that have arisen from the expansion of the cattle frontier.

Olivia's paper 'A framework for understanding land control transfer in agricultural commodity frontiers' is out in the Journal of Agrarian Change! In that paper, Olivia In it, reviews the strategies used by different actors to secure control over land prospected for agricultural commodity production worldwide. She then presents a framework for examining the dynamics of control transfer in these often-conflictive 'frontier' moments, that builds on the analytical structure of ‘breaking down’, ‘building up’, and ‘holding on to’ control. The paper is freely accessible here.