by Fouad Makki and Charles Geisler Dept. of Development Sociology, Cornell University

The confluence of the world economic crisis with the global food and energy crises has set off a frenzy of land grabbing in Africa, accelerating trends of de-peasantization, large- scale commercial farming and tenure re-arrangements favoring international agribusiness. This process raises a host of issues concerning the socio-spatial dynamics of the contemporary restructuring of agrarian relations and the recurring ways in which states use cosmographies of power and terra nullius narratives to remake places identified as empty, underutilized or underproductive. In this paper we propose to examine the dynamics of large-scale land alienations in Ethiopia through the lens of enclosures and state projects of developmentalism. We conclude by suggesting that the spatial turn in the social sciences needs to pay more attention to the emptying out of space as a corollary to its social production, and to the various cosmographies of power that imaginatively constitute and reconstitute them in the form of ‘fictitious commodities’.