Events

CALL FOR PAPERS DEADLINE: 1 DECEMBER 2026

In 1989, Turton, Hart and White (THW) published an influential edited volume on agrarian transformations, local processes, and the state in Southeast Asia. For anthropologists to foreground the importance of the state was pathbreaking. Sufficient time has elapsed that it is opportune to update THW’s insights. This workshop proposes doing so in three crucial ways.

First, the field has evolved to encompass a domain of food politics to include but also extend beyond questions that bear directly on agriculture and rural change. Food politics also pertains to national elite level contestation, urban-based processes, and urban-rural interactions. Second, given the richness of research on food politics, there are fewer reasons to restrict our purview to Southeast Asia; Asia should be included in our empirical explorations. On the frontlines of climate change, rapid urbanization, growing inequality, fluctuating state capacity, and incessant struggles over civil liberties and civil society, Asia promises to be a fruitful site of investigation. Lastly, since as anthropologists THW were limited in their understanding of the multifaceted functions and components of the state, this workshop endorses efforts to unpack the state and its institutions into its constituent parts—inter-ministerial cooperation and competition, political party dynamics, the role electoral systems play, conflicting laws and regulations that result from either multi-layered governance or from different sources of patronage pressures. We must consider how structural features of different states—from weak to strong, rich to poor, decentralized to centralized, authoritarian to democratic, small to large, densely populated to sparsely populated—vary across time and space to impact food politics.

Not only does this workshop propose to unpack national institutions as arenas of contestation that permeate beyond a tightly bounded “policy arena”; it also seeks to spotlight the struggles over material and symbolic resources across the different realms of subnational units of the state, and how they interact with other local units or with higher-level agencies and administrations amid varying climatic and agrarian conditions. Understanding the state as a variegated set of authoritative yet conflicting practices bounded by space is a key conceptual step that this workshop is advancing.

This workshop invites scholars working across a range of methods to interrogate the following questions, including but not limited to:

• What kinds of relationships do traders’ associations, political parties, religious organizations, non-governmental organizations, business groups, security forces and others have with different state organs and how do they influence the realm of food politics?
• How do state-devised histories and ideologies of agrarian pasts—infused with religious, ethnic or class-based themes—affect major food policies? What mechanisms link these lineages to today’s outcomes?
• What role does patronage, corruption, and rent-seeking play in determining food politics and undermining food security? Under what conditions do considerations of equity and justice gain footing in government decision-making?
• Which crops are more politicized than others and why, and in what ways does this dynamic help shed light on persistent regional inequities?
• How does the organization of trade—for example, degrees of protectionism or openness—reflect larger arenas of contestation?
• How do officials—at various levels of administration—use food (its production, distribution, consumption) to build, maintain or enhance power?

SUBMISSION OF PROPOSALS

Paper proposals should include a title, an abstract (maximum 300 words), and a brief personal biography (about 150 words) for submission by 1 December 2026. Additionally, please include a statement confirming that your proposed paper has not been published or committed elsewhere, and that you are willing to revise the version of your paper presented at the workshop for potential inclusion in an edited volume. Please submit your proposal using the form available on the website.

Authors of selected proposals will be notified in early January 2027. Presenters will be required to submit a draft of their papers (4,000-6,000 words) by 16 April 2027. These papers will be distributed to fellow speakers and chairpersons prior to the workshop and do not need to be fully polished.

This workshop will be held in person. Full or partial airfare funding will be offered to overseas participants, as well as three nights of accommodation in Singapore. Please indicate your need for funding support in the proposal form.

WORKSHOP CONVENOR

Assoc Prof Jamie S. DAVIDSON
Asia Research Institute & Department of Political Science, National University of Singapore