The Bernstein and Byres Prize in Agrarian Change

Abstract

The Journal of Agrarian Change has established a prize named after the founding editors of the Journal, the ‘Bernstein & Byres Prize’. The aim is to celebrate the outstanding contributions that we receive by awarding a prize of £500 donated by our publisher,Wiley-Blackwell, to the best article of the year.Through this, we also hope to reinforce the remit of the Journal in the field of agrarian political economy and to encourage scholarly work within this tradition._JOAC 299 The articles are judged on: (a) their quality as works of political economy; (b) their analytical power; (c) their originality; and (d) the quality of evidence presented and its deployment. The winner of the 2008 prize has been selected by a jury consisting of Terence Byres, Henry Bernstein and three members of the International Advisory Board of the Journal, based on a shortlist of articles selected by the JAC editors. All evaluators found the task extremely difficult because of the high quality of each of the shortlisted articles. We are pleased to announce that the winners of the Bernstein & Byres Prize for the best article published in JAC in 2008 are J.P. Chauveau and P. Richards, for ‘West African Insurgencies in Agrarian Perspective: Cote d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone Compared’ [ JAC, 8 (4): 515–52]. This article is an intellectually and empirically impressive, very ambitious and scholarly comparative analysis of two insurgencies in West Africa, examined through the lens of the agrarian roots of violence. The article lucidly explores ‘different trajectories of agrarian social change’ (p. 515) as the matrix within which the West African insurgencies in question are to be analyzed. The insurgencies, resulting in civil wars in Sierra Leone (1991–2002) and the Cote d’Ivoire (2002–7), were rooted in ‘serious (and still unresolved) social tensions of an agrarian character’ (p. 537); an issue about which the literature on these countries and on conflicts has generally been silent.The level of empirical detail of the article is matched by an impressive effort to propose variants of an analytical tool rooted in agrarian political economy: the ‘lineage mode of production’ developed by French Marxist anthropologists such as Meillassoux. The authors fill an important gap in the literature on conflict, a literature that has tended to focus on ‘culture’ or ethnicity as identities, by offering ‘an analysis linking organizational rivalries to the material struggles in which competing agrarian organizations engage’ (p. 547). We, the editors, would like to congratulate J.P. Chauveau and P. Richards as the worthy winners of the 2008 Bernstein & Byres Prize.