Contributors to this anthology give us a close look at how Mexico's rural reforms of the early 1990s have operated, and how the approximately 25 million Mexicans still living in the countryside are responding to the ending of Mexico's 50-year experiment with communal land.

"One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades."--John Gray, New York Times Book Review Hailed as "a magisterial critique of top-down social planning" by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail--sometimes catastrophically--in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters. "Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit."--New Yorker "A tour de force."-- Charles Tilly, Columbia University

The rural reforms in many post-soviet countries produced a number of unintended consequences. The reforms were guided by ideals of romanticized society of family farmers; they were to be the basis of the rural middle-class, together with owners of non-agricultural SME’s, acting as guardians of democracy and common good. The guidelines were set by advisers from World Bank and IMF, who preferred family farms or individual farms over the collective enterprises. In most countries the result was nothing like those envisaged by reformers. Instead of efficient and productive family farms, the result was almost complete de-capitalization of agriculture and collapse of production. The reform was destructive not only as far as production is concerned, but more importantly to rural communities. Social ties, which were based on the collective farm as the main economic and social resource for local community, were eroded. Only from the turn of this decade some early stages have been visible of new developments in economic and social life in post-socialist rural areas. The result is that now, more than fifteen years since the beginning of agricultural reforms, the key agricultural producers in Russia, Baltic countries and elsewhere are very large capitalist farms or large agricultural holding companies. This anthology is based on the presentations given at the 5th Aleksanteri Conference 10 – 11 November 2005 in Helsinki, Finland, and it is devoted to the analysis of some of these issues. The volume is divided into two parts, in the first part the focus is on the patterns and problems of transformation of post-socialist agriculture and agricultural policies while the second part is focuses mainly on efforts to revitalize rural communities and issues of local development.

Illuminating the dark side of economic globalization, this book gives an insider's view of the migrant farmworkers' binational circuit that stretches from the west central Mexico countryside to central California. Useful for all Americans, "The Farmworkers' Journey" traces the human consequences of our policy decisions.

What makes an elite? This authoritative new volume examines elite groups in power across Europe, North America, Mexico, Peru, Indonesia and Africa to answer this question fully at a time of their increasing dominance.