Political contestations around land deals: insights from Peru

The assumption that land deals lead to expulsion of people from their land, and as a result people resist land deals, is too simplistic. Land deals have different impacts on communities, provoking different political reactions across space and time, along class and other social divides. I argue that dynamic shifts of opportunities and threats in the political structure within which actors are embedded shape, and are shaped by, diverse and intersecting political reactions from various social groups. In turn, these interactions influence the character and trajectory of land deals, as illustrated with two case studies in Peru.