prof.dr. (Jun) SM Borras

Profile

Saturnino ('Jun') M. Borras Jr. is a Professor of Agrarian Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague an Editor of the Journal of Peasant Studies. He is a recipient of the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant for his ongoing research project, "Commodity & land rushes: reshaping five spheres of global social life - food, climate change politics, labour/migration, state/citizenship, and geopolitics" in Africa, Asia and Latin America. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the College of Humanities and Development Studies ([COHD] in China Agricultural University, Beijing, Fellow of the Netherlands-based Transnational Institute (TNI).

He has several academic and non-academic publications: books, journal special issues, and articles. His Open Access books include Political Dynamics of Transnational Agrarian Movements (with Marc Edelman) and Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World (co-edited).

His research interests include: land politics/land rush, (trans)national agrarian movements (TAMs); migrant farmworkers, climate change politics; food politics/food sovereignty; BRICS and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and global agrarian transformations. His geographic areas of research interest are: Southeast Asia, China, Africa, and South America. He also studies international institutional 'spaces' of state- society interactions, including the role of global governance institutions.

He works within the tradition of, and at the same time studies and writes about, scholar-activism. This has been influenced by his background: He has been deeply involved in rural social movements since the early 1980s in the Philippines, and later, internationally. He was a founding member of the international peasant and farmer's movement La Via Campesina (LVC), and was a member of LVC's International Coordinating Committee (ICC) in 1993-1996. He has engaged, selectively, with international inter-governmental institutions on specific issues. 

He was on the Web of Science Highly Cited Researchers List: 2018, 2019, 2020 & 2021. He has received the Ester Boserup Prize for Research on Development (2020), and a recipient of the National Book Award 2009 (Philippines). He is a co-editor of the ICAS small book series in critical agrarian studies, all of the available titles in it are now Open Access. He collaborates with the Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Scholar-Activists in the South (CASAS) on a number of training initiatives.