Please contact me at matthew.schnurr@dal.ca for copies of any articles that you are unable to access through the links provided.
This article is based on a chapter of my Ph. D. dissertation which investigated the boom and bust of the largest cotton surge in South African history. I argue that cotton figured as a preferred crop within emerging national agricultural policy because it accorded with the political and ideological priorities of the new white settler …
This introductory paper reviews a series of papers that represent a first step towards articulating a critical analysis of environmental security, one that dislodges the state as the preferred level of analysis, seeks to understand threats to security in terms of rights, access and justice, and questions key assumptions that underlie much of the …
This article recounts the efforts of Natal’s first Secretary for Native Affairs, Theophilus Shepstone, to introduce cotton as a commodity crop among the colony’s Zulu population. I argue that this push for cotton was fuelled by motivations that were political more than agricultural; that cotton was first and foremost about delineating African and settler space …
This article emerged out of a collaboration with Dr. Harald Witt and Dr. Raj Patel, funded by the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. Our project investigated the adoption of Genetically Modified (GM) cotton in South Africa’s Makhathini Flats, which was heralded as a case in which agricultural biotechnology could benefit …