The Land Question / Die Bodenfrage

Five hundred years since the German Peasants War, the land question has returned with force. Amid rising land prices, resurgent farmer protests, conflicts over ecological transformation, and deepening struggles over housing, agriculture, and energy, land has reemerged as a central object of political and theoretical debate. This conference invites critical engagement with the structures, histories, and contradictions of agrarian land ownership and land use in contemporary capitalist societies. Land remains at once a condition of life and a site of accumulation; it is essential to any project of democratic transformation and yet persistently enclosed, commodified and financialized. This conference asks what it would mean to socialize land today, that is, to democratize land ownership and reorient land-use to fulfill social needs and ecological demands. Can land be reclaimed as a collective good? On what grounds—political, moral, ecological—can the socialization of land be justified? And what historical, legal, and ideological obstacles stand in its way?

This conference brings together a range of scholars to analyze the land question from political, social, theoretical, legal and historical perspectives. What are the theoretical and practical challenges of socializing land under conditions of financialization and ecological crisis? What lessons can be drawn from past and present experiments with land reform, common ownership, or public planning—particularly in Germany, where the socialization of land has a long and contested history?

Panels include: Land Conflicts in Green Capitalism; Labor, Class and Global Agriculture; Decommodification, Expropriation, Socialization; German Land Politics: Problems and Alternatives; Epistemology of Land; The Value of Land; Decolonizing Land; Land and Political Theory. Keynotes by Omar Dahbour and Isabel Feichtner.

The conference will take place in the auditorium of the Grimm Zentrum, Humboldt University Berlin all day on October 30 and 31, from 9:00 to 19:00. This conference is organized by Rabea Berfelde and Jacob Blumenfeld as part of the research project Socialization in Theory and Practice: Democratizing Access to Land and Energy, based at the Centre for Social Critique, Humboldt University Berlin. This project is funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung. No registration required.

Thursday, October 30, 2025

8:45 Doors Open

9:00 — 9:15 Welcome and Introduction by the Organizers

Rabea Berfelde & Jacob Blumenfeld (Centre for Social Critique, HU Berlin)

9:15 — 09:45  The Land Question: An Overview

Haroon Akram-Lodhi (Trent University, Canada)

10:00 — 11:30 Labour, Class and Global Agriculture

Matan Kaminer (London) The Thai-Israeli “Frontier Settlement Project” and the Global Land Question

Aimé Paris (Nanterre), Tanguy Martin (Reprise de terre) Lost in Agrarian Transition

Elisa Greco (Frankfurt) Financialisation, land grabs and forms of resistance: a case from Tanzania and reflections on class across North and South

11:30 — 11:45 Break

11:45 — 13:15 Land Conflicts in Green Capitalism

Kristina Dietz (Kassel), Bettina Engels (Berlin), Facundo Martín (Conicet, Argentina) Agrarian and land transformation how and where to? Strategies and visions of agrarian movements 

Maria Pfeiffer (Jena), Robert Wade (Eindhoven) The Land Question in the Energy Transition: On the Role of Landownership in Germany’s Wind Energy Expansion

Carla Noever Castelos (Kassel) Land Concentration and Subjectivities of Resistance in Europe’s Internal Peripheries: The Case of Anti-Lithium Struggles in Extremadura

13:15 – 14:15 Lunch

14:15 — 15:45 Decommodification, Expropriation, Socialisation

Miranda Strominger (New York) Shelter from the Market: Limits to Decommodification

Philipp Stehr (München) Expropriating Agricultural Land

Noaman G Ali (Bath) Contingent solidarities and failing successfully at land reforms: Lessons from South Asia

15:45 — 16:00 Break

16:00 — 17:45 Land Politics in Germany: Problems and Alternatives

Anne Neuber (Netzwerk Flächensicherung), Manuel Wagner (AbL) Shaping the ongoing transformation of ownership in agricultural land markets: Practical insights into obstacles and ideas on the path towards use-oriented agriculture

Lester Malte Pott (Weimar) Limits and potentials of public land leasing for the decommodification of agricultural land: A comparative policy analysis in the context of eastern Germany

Jan Lucas Geilen (Frankfurt) Beyond the Market: Ulm’s Municipal Land Policy as Decommodification Practice

17:45 — 18:00 Break

18:00 — 19:15 Keynote    

Isabel Feichtner (Universität Würzburg) Land, Sea, Moon: From territoriality to becoming terrestrial

Friday, October 31, 2025

09:00- Doors Open

9:15-9:30 Welcome and Introduction by the Organizers

Rabea Berfelde & Jacob Blumenfeld (Centre for Social Critique, HU Berlin)

9:30 — 11:00 Decolonizing Land

Kanishka Goonewardena (Toronto) On the Global Actuality of the Oeuvre of Ginige Vernon Stanley de Silva

Rodrigo Maruy (Berlin) Should the Land Belong to Those Who Work it? On the Decolonisation of Land Ownership in Latin America

Isadora Dutra Badra Bellati (London) The Field of Senses and the Senses over the Field: Rethinking Landscapes for Constitutional Land Disputes in Brazil

11:00 — 11:30 Break

11:30 — 13:00 Epistemologies of Land

Michael Schwind (Erkner/Berlin) and Varun Patil (Erfurt) Possibilities and tensions of a hegemony approach to land: The cases of land struggles in India and Germany

Anna Henkel (Passau) Terra. Epistemological, historical and material transformations

Alexander Dobeson (Copenhagen) Land, values, and valuation work: moral imaginaries of land market in England and Germany

13:00 — 14:00 Lunch

14:00 — 15:30 The Value of Land

Stefan Ouma (Bayreuth) Questioning the Asset Form – A Synthesis

Edward Shepherd (Cardiff) Tim White (London School of Economics) Towards a Political Economy of Complexity: How Occulted Expertise Sustains Landed Power Relations

Felix Anderl (Marburg), Christin Stühlen (Frankfurt) Seeing Land like International Organizations: Strategies of Making Land Legible for the International

15:30 — 16:00 Break

16:00 — 17:30 Land and Political Theory

Kendall Gardner (Oxford) Liberalism and the Production of Settler Stability

Nicole Whalen (Newfoundland) Land Financialization and Property-Owning Democracy: Rematerializing Property in Contemporary Approaches to Justice

Juliette Monvoisin (Siegen) Vanishing Lands, Persistent Worlds: Rethinking Territorial Sovereignty beyond Property

17:30 — 18:00 Break

18:00 — 19:15 Keynote      

Omar Dahbour (City University of New York) An Ecosocialist Concept of Land Ownership and Territorial Rights

Omar Dahbour is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and Graduate School, City University of New York, and author of Illusion of the Peoples (2003), Self-Determination without Nationalism (2013), and other writings on global ethics, environmental philosophy, and critical theory. His most recent book is Ecosovereignty: A Political Principle for the Environmental Crisis (2025).

Isabel Feichtner is Professor of Public Law and International Economic Law at the University of Würzburg. From 2023 to 2024, she led the research program “Reclaiming Common Wealth: Towards a Law and Political Economy of Land Commons” at The New Institute in Hamburg. Her most recent books are Bodenschätze: Über Verwertung und Vergesellschaftung (2025) and, as co-editor, Stadt – Land – Boden: Verbindende Bodenpolitik zwischen Stadt und Land (2025).