Preface and Acknowledgements

This anthology is the result of a three-year collaboration between the editor and the contributors located around the world. To start the ball rolling, I sent out a call for abstracts on the academic mailing lists ‘Anthropology Matters’, and ‘Crit-Geog-Forum’ in March 2019 asking for examples of contemporary ‘People without History’ in the Global South. The call also went out to colleagues, networks, affiliations, different university mailing lists, and selected presenters at the aag (American Association of Geographers) annual meeting, held in Washington DC, 3–7 April 2019. The responses to these initial calls yielded more specific requests sent to selected contributors to develop their ideas into full-length papers. The contributions were selected based on four criteria: First, the abstracts had to focus on contemporary connections between local contexts in the Global South and global political or economic forces. Second, the papers should be based predominantly on ethnographic data collection and fieldwork undertaken in the Global South. Third, was an ambition for the collection to cover as wide a geographical and empirical spread as possible across different Global South contexts and, ideally, for the chapters to have historical contexts as well. Fourth, the contributors should comprise a gender mix of both junior and senior scholars and have representation from the Global South itself. The latter aimed at providing an opportunity to develop individual research profiles as well as to inspire interdisciplinary research into processes of local–global connectivity. What you have in your hands is the product of these endeavours – a collection of explanations of interlocking and dynamic processes of differentiation, crisis, struggle, capitalist expansion, and political development across the Global South today. The anthology is produced without any specific research funding, but special thanks go to the Institute for Social Science and Business, Roskilde University, for covering the costs of participation in the aag conference, the language editing, and Open Source options. I would also like to thank Eric Komlavi Hahonou, Johan Fischer, Jacob Rasmussen, Karmen Tornius, Somdeep Sen, Lone Riisgaard, and Kirsten Mogensen, at International Development Studies, Roskilde University, for providing helpful input on an early draft of the introduction, Raramai Campbell for formatting the text, and Mike Kirkwood for the language editing. At Brill, thanks go to Stefano Bellucci for the initial encouragement to contact Brill, the review committee for approving and supporting the proposal, and Alessandra Giliberto for editorial support. All the contributors wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for providing extremely helpful and constructive comments on the first draft.