The Journal of Peasant Studies is one of the leading journals in the field of rural development. It was founded on the initiative of Terence J. Byres and its first editors were Byres, Charles Curwen and Teodor Shanin. It provokes and promotes critical thinking about social structures, institutions, actors and processes of change in and in relation to the rural world. It encourages inquiry into how agrarian power relations between classes and other social groups are created, understood, contested and transformed. The Journal pays special attention to questions of ‘agency’ of marginalized groups in agrarian societies, particularly their autonomy and capacity to interpret – and change – their conditions.
The Journal promotes contributions that question mainstream prescriptions or interrogate orthodoxies in radical thinking. It welcomes contributions that explore theoretical, policy and political alternatives. The Journal encourages contributions about a wide range of contemporary and historical questions and perspectives related to rural development. These are issues that confront peasants, farmers, rural labourers, migrant workers, indigenous peoples, forest dwellers, pastoralists, fisherfolk and rural youth – both female and male – in different parts of the world.
The editor welcomes contributions from scholars in the fields of political science, development studies, anthropology, sociology, geography, history, economics, law, cultural studies, gender studies, environmental studies, and interdisciplinary fields.
There are three sections in the Journal : Articles, Grassroots Voices, and Reviews Section. Survey articles are encouraged and special issues are published occasionally. Thematic cluster of articles and a debate subsection will be published from time to time.The Grassroots Voices section encourages views that are written and presented in non-academic style but provide important insights and information relevant to critical rural development studies and is guest edited. Essays in this section, which are generally shorter (at about 3,000 words) include: commentaries, interviews, field mission reports, event analyses, and movement profiles. The Reviews section publishes reviews of important theoretical or policy-oriented books or films written for diverse audiences.
The Krishna Bharadwaj Prize and the Eric Wolf Prize
From 2009 the Krishna Bharadwaj & Eric Wolf prize will be awarded once every two years for an outstanding article published in The Journal of Peasant Studies ( JPS ) by a ‘young scholar’. A young scholar is someone who is either a graduate student or a scholar who has held a PhD degree for no longer than four years when the article was first submitted to the journal. An article jointly authored by a young and a senior scholar qualifies.
The award commemorates two long-standing and distinguished members of the Editorial Advisory Board of JPS : the political economist Krishna Bharadwaj (1935-92) and the anthropologist Eric Wolf (1923-99). All articles, except for Notes and Communications, published in the relevant volumes are eligible. Analytical creativity and originality is the basis for the awards.
