Peasant frontiers as a research strategy: Peasant resilience and the reproduction of common land rights

Abstract

Common land rights are nowadays identified as a pivotal action terrain for building sustainable development and climate resilience. This often leads to an idealisation of these common land systems and the people that manage them. This article presents a research strategy that elaborates on the notion of frontiers to unpack peasant resilience and common land rights as the outcome of a long history of peasant adaptation, resistance and self-reinvention within a globalising world. It presents an empirical comparative analysis of common land rights in European and Andean peasant communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.