Make live and let the land question die
Surplus population and the welfare state
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 17618685 |
|---|---|
| Authors | R C Sudheesh (0000-0001-7468-4175, National Law School of India University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-21 |
| Publication date | 2026-04-16 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Peasant Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0306-6150 • E-ISSN: 1743-9361 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/03066150.2026.2653058 |
| OpenAlex | W7154563338 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 47 |
Welfare programmes offer an essential lifeline to surplus populations struggling to survive under capitalist relations worldwide. However, such biopolitical inclusion can undermine demands for land. Through an ethnographic study of Adivasi land struggles in Kerala, India, this article explores how welfare regimes that ‘make live' through social transfers can simultaneously ‘let die’ the land question. By prioritising welfare over land, the state effectively erases demands for land as the primary resolution for the crisis of reproduction. Consequently, groups that were dispossessed from land historically are now divorced from the land question discursively.
Land grabbing · Population · State (computer science) · Welfare · Welfare state · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · New Zealand Economic and Social Studies · Social Issues and Policies
Rule By Aesthetics
Theorizing Thervoy
To Make Live or Let Die? Rural Dispossession and the Protection of Surplus Populations
Modernity of Slavery
Rethinking Capitalist Development
Land to the Tiller
Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India
Refugees as Surplus Population
Cosmopolitan imaginaries on the margins
Exclusion, Surplus Population, and the Labour Question in Postcolonial Capitalism
Women‘s land rights in Gambian irrigated rice schemes
Politicising Development
The “New” Kerala Model
Indirect British Rule, State Formation, and Welfarism in Kerala, India, 1860-1957
Religion, social space and identity
The Politics of the Evicted
Agrestic Slavery in Kerala in the Nineteenth Century
Relative surplus populations and the crises of contemporary capitalism
Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State (1977)
Is There an Agrarian Question in the 21st Century
What is land? Assembling a resource for global investment
Agrarian Question and Democratic Decentralization in Kerala
The Unfixed State of Unfixed Land
Rule by difference
After Development
Post-Agrarian Biopolitics
The cultural politics of wages
The Limits of the State
Political Economy of Development in India
Theorizing peripheral labor
Locating Ethnography
Democracy in the Globalizing Indian City
Surplus-Population and the Political Economy of Fear
Necropolitics and Surplus Life
The Agrarian Question in Neoliberal India
Without the blanket of the land
The politics of classes of labour
Changing agrarian relations after redistributive land reform in Zimbabwe
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |