 combinations of conditions that are not found in the sample.
we found that, in 63% of the cases, small-scale farming was the main system of production before the acquisition. Use of forests for timber and non-timber products and benefits from other ecosystem services were reported in 21% of the cases, and traditional pastoralist activities were indicated in 21% of the cases.1 The main users affected by the land acquisitions were described as smallholders (in 61% of the cases), indigenous people (20% of the cases), pastoralists (16%), or commercial farmers (5%). The analysis of property systems revealed that in 55% of the cases, acquisitions happened in the presence of common-property regimes; in 13% of the cases, the authors explicitly reported cases of legal pluralism (i.e., coexistence of different kinds of property regimes); the land was described in 11% of the cases as state land and in 5% as private property.
In 61% of the cases, the acquired land was designated for large-scale production of crops as food, while in 36% of the cases, the land was acquired for crops for non-food uses, such as biofuels; extensive ranching and logging were reported in 9% and 5% of the cases, respectively, while altogether, industrial and real estate development accounted for 9% of the cases. Foreign private companies were the main actors in 54% of the cases, domestic private companies in 29%, domestic-foreign joint ventures in 16%, and government-private partnerships in 13%. The acquisitions took place through different mechanisms: prevalently through government leases (54% of the cases) but also through broader government and titling policies (29%) and direct or indirect purchase (21%); other factors such as market pressures also have played a role in some land transactions (16% of the cases). In a large majority of the cases (89%), the national government favored the acquisition.
Finally, we identified different typologies of coercion, using the categories of a. coercion without manifested conflicts, b. coercion with non-violent conflict, and c. coercion with violent conflict. Coercion in this context can be understood as a system of practices and mechanisms that directly or indirectly influence through varying degrees of use of force, the possibility of the local land users to keep control of their land and natural resources. Coercion in land acquisitions can be observed both through explicit power imbalances and absence of safeguards for more vulnerable actors or by different signals such as the ones produced by conflicts with or without violence. Following this categorization, we identified coercion without manifested conflicts when the acquisition happened taking advantage of a clear power imbalance, consent by the previous users was not reported or cases of corruption were reported, but the acquisition did not lead to manifested conflicts. This was coded for 34% of the cases. Coercion with non-violent conflicts, defined as explicit confrontation between the different actors involved in the acquisition, ranging from protest to physical but not violent resistance, for 25%; and coercion with violent conflict (involving violent confrontation or oppression that resulted in violent physical actions) for 23%. In the remaining cases (18%) the articles reviewed did not report information on any coercion dynamics.
Land Use Pre-Acq.
Land Use Post-Acq.
Gov. Favoring Acq.
Figure 2. Frequency distribution of each categorical variable over the 56 case studies.
binary relationships between the different dimensions of our analysis (Figure 3) highlighted the share of cases in which a category occurred in conjunction with another category.
Focusing on the acquisition mechanisms, in 21 of the 30 cases involving a government lease (i.e., 70%), the land was in a common-property regime prior to acquisition (Figure 3A). In 27 of the 29 cases of government leases for which the land use after the acquisition was reported (i.e., 93%), the land was designated for crop production, the exceptions being 1 case each of ranching and nonagricultural use. In 7 of the 12 cases involving land purchases (i.e., 58%), the acquisition was for crop production, in 3 cases (25%) for ranching, and in 5 cases (42%) for nonagricultural use such as logging, industry, or mining (Figure 3B).
Regarding the relationship between coercion and acquisition mechanisms (Figure 3C), conflict with violence was only present in cases of government lease, occurring in 13 of 30 (43%) of such cases, while conflict without violence was mentioned in 5 of 12 (42%) cases involving purchase and 9 of 30 (39%) cases involving government leases (Figure 3C). Regarding the relationship between coercion and property regime prior to acquisition, 9 of 13 (70%) of the cases of conflict with violence and 7 of 14 (50%) of the cases of conflict without violence happened when the regime was common property (Figure 3D). Common-property regimes were also reported in 12 of 19 (63%) of the cases of coercion without manifested conflicts.
mechanism and land use after acquisition (p = 0.0006, Cramer's V = 0.38) and between acquisition mechanism and coercion (p < 10, Cramer's V =0.44). Government leases constituted the primary mechanism of land acquisition for agriculture, while government policies or titling were more prevalent for nonagricultural uses (Figure 3B). Government leases were involved in all cases for which coercion with violent conflicts were reported, whereas no overt conflicts were reported in cases where the land was acquired through government policies or titling and market pressures. Coercion without manifested conflicts, however, occurred in combination with all of the acquisition mechanisms (Figure 3C).
Since the above results highlight the existence of a significant relationship between post-acquisition land use, acquisition mechanism, and coercion, we performed a QCA to determine the specific conditions that, according to our data -set, lead to manifested conflictual outcomes. All categories of post-acquisition land use and acquisition mechanism were used as conditions, whereas a binary outcome variable was defined as the presence of conflict by aggregating the "conflict with violence" and ''conflict without violence" categories (27 out of the 56 cases). The QCA truth table (Table 1) includes 19 distinct combinations of conditions from the case studies and their associated outcomes.
were associated which each category and each pair of categories, respectively.
market pressure (9 cases, 31% of no-conflict cases), or a combination of government lease and purchase (4 cases, 14% of no-conflict cases). The complex solution includes additional terms that enumerate the types of post-acquisition land use associated with each of the acquisition mechanisms in our set of cases.
The parsimonious QCA solutions, both affirmative and negative, correctly describe the outcome in all but 3 of the 56 cases, for total inclusion and coverage scores ranging from 93% to 100%. For this collection of case studies, the occurrence of conflict (violent or not) can thus be determined almost exclusively based on the acquisition mechanism and, to a lesser extent, the post-acquisition land use.
Conditions: all types of Land Use post-acquisition and all types of acquisition mechanisms. OUT = Outcome (1 = Conflict, 0 = No conflict, C = Contradiction). N = number of cases.
Incl = sufficiency inclusion score (threshold set at 0.95).
Uppercase names denote the presence of a category and lowercase names denote its absence; ''*" represents a logical "AND". The inclusion ("incl.") and coverage ("cov.") scores are defined in the Methods. Outcome: Conflict (broadly, includes "Conflict with violence" and "Conflict without violence" codes). Conditions: categories of Land Use Post, Acquisition Mechanism.
Borras, Hall, Scoones, & Wolford, 2012; Wily, 2013). The first known, and most extensively studied, such privatization was the enclosure movement that began in England in the 15th century alongside an increase in sheep ranching and commercial farming, which required the enclosure of open fields (Curtler, 1920). By the 17th century, enclosure was a large-scale operation almost invariably undertaken pursuant to acts of Parliament. Those acts were always promoted by large landholders, and operated to the detriment of commoners, turning many users of the commons into trespassers and, ultimately, criminals. The enclosure movement in England has often been cited as an example of a large-scale institutional change that made possible higher levels of economic growth because of the superior incentives to production and conservation provided by private and individual ownership of land (Cole, 2001; North & Weingast, 1989), though this economic efficiency hypothesis has been challenged (Allen, 1994). The legal reforms associated with the enclosure movement directly contributed to the commodification of land (Polanyi, 1944), a process that subordinated social relations and the natural environment to the economic system (Cotula, 2013). Putting the current global land rush in a historical perspective shows continuities and contrasts with past land rushes such as those associated with the colonial experience, and the historic trend in dispossession of native populations across the world and across centuries (White et al., 2012; Wily, 2012).
1.	The ongoing LSLAs are associated with a change in production system, from subsistence and smallholding to commercial farming, that entails fundamental social transformations.
2.	LSLAs preferentially target common land and land with multiple access and use claims and turn that land into private property or concessions for the exclusive use of the investors.
to the literature, commons grabbing is a constitutive part of the global agrarian transformation associated with expansion of LSLAs. The majority of the land acquisitions considered in this study (44 of 56) could be considered cases of commons grabbing. Moreover, most of the cases of conflict (including violent and non-violent conflict) emerged when the land was acquired through government lease, and such