This is the third in an essential series of Springer handbooks that explore key aspects of the nexus between demography and social science. With an inclusive international perspective, and founded on the principles of social demography, this handbook shows how the rural population, which recently dropped below 50 per cent of the world total, remains a vital segment of society living in proximity to much-needed developmental and amenity resources. The rich diversity of rural areas shapes the capacity of resident communities to address far-reaching social, environmental and economic challenges. Some will survive, become sustainable and even thrive, while others will suffer rapid depopulation. This handbook demonstrates how these future development trajectories will vary according to local characteristics including, but not limited to, population composition. The growing complexity of rural society is in part a product of significant international variations in population trends, making this comparative and comprehensive study of rural demography all the more relevant. Collating the latest research on international rural demography, the handbook will be an invaluable aid to policy makers as they try to understand how demographic dynamics depend on the economic, social and environmental characteristics of rural areas. It will also aid researchers assessing the unique factors at play in the rural context and endeavoring to produce meaningful results that will advance policy and scholarship. Finally, the handbook is an ideal text for graduate students in a spread of disciplines from sociology to international development.

In a primary commodities boom spurred on by the rise of China, countries the world over are turning to the extraction of natural resources and the export of primary commodities as an antidote to the global recession. The New Extractivism addresses a fundamental dilemma faced by these governments: to pursue, or not, a development strategy based on resource extraction in the face of immense social and environmental costs, not to mention mass resistance from the people negatively affected by it. With fresh insight and analysis from Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, this book looks at the political dynamics of capitalist development in a region where the neoliberal model is collapsing under the weight of a resistance movement lead by peasant farmers and indigenous communities. It calls for us to understand the new extractivism not as a viable development model for the post-neoliberal world, but as the dangerous emergence of a new form of imperialism.

Beyond the Megacity connects and reconnects the global debate on the contemporary urban condition to the Latin American tradition of seeing, considering, and theorizing urbanization from the margins. It develops the approach of "peripheral urbanization" as a way to integrate the theoretical agendas belonging to global suburbanisms, neo-Marxist accounts of planetary urbanization, and postcolonial urban studies, and to move urban theory closer to the complexity and diversity of urbanization in the Global South. From an interdisciplinary perspective, Beyond the Megacity investigates the natures, causes, implications, and politics of current urbanization processes in Latin America. The book draws on case studies from various countries across the region, covering theoretical and disciplinary approaches from the fields of geography, anthropology, sociology, urban studies, agrarian studies, and urban and regional planning, and is written by academics, journalists, practitioners, and scholar-activists. Beyond the Megacity unites these unique perspectives by shifting attention to the places, processes, practices, and bodies of knowledge that have often been neglected in the past.

The vision of this book is to bring together examples of grounded geographic research carried out in Latin America regarding territorial processes. These encompass a range of histories, processes, strategies and mechanisms, with case studies from ten countries and many regions: struggles to reclaim indigenous lands, conflicts over land/resource/environmental services, competing land claims, urban territorial identities, state power strategies, commercial involvements and others. The case studies included in the book represent a wide diversity of theoretical and methodological framings currently deployed in Latin America to help interpret the patterns and processes through the conceptual lenses of territory, territoriality and territorialization. Interrogating the meanings of territory introduces multiple spatial, socio-cultural and political concepts including space, place and landscape, power, control and governance, and identity and gender.

Recent changes in the global economy, which include a growing demand for energy and natural resources such as industrial minerals and agro-food products, have brought about a massive devastating pillage of resources in the developing world by multinational corporations as well as states with energy and food security concerns—and concerns about a system (global capitalism) in the throes of a global crisis. These developments have also brought about a major change in the form taken by imperialism (actions taken by the state to advance the interests of the dominant capitalist class). This book explores the changing face of US imperialism in the regional context of the Americas, a major stage in the unfolding drama of a system in crisis.