Law and Development Implications of Transnational Land Acquisitions: Introduction

This introductory article to the 2014 Special Issue of Law and Development Review provides a brief overview of the scope, actors, discourses and impacts of the global land and resource rush, a phenomenon that has been triggered by the confluence of the financial, food and fuel crises in the late 2000s. It situates transnational land acquisitions in the law–development–ethics–politics nexus and introduces eight articles that are based on a selection of papers presented at the 2013 Law and Development Conference “Legal and Development Implications of International Land Acquisitions”, held from 30 to 31 May 2013 at Kyoto University, Japan.