The Institute of Social Studies is Europe's longest-established centre of higher education and research in development studies. Postgraduate teaching programmes range from six-week diploma courses to the PhD programme. Research at ISS is fundamental in the sense of laying a scientific basis for the formulation of appropriate development policies. The academic work of ISS is disseminated in the ...

This paper addresses questions of ethnography in geographic fieldwork through research conducted on globalisation and work in Tiruppur, an industrial boomtown in South India. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Tiruppur town in western Tamilnad State became India’s centrepiece in the export of garments made of knitted cloth. This industrial boom has been organised through netw...

Our current knowledge on climate-mediated effects on human population dynamics is based on preindustrial agrarian societies where climate-induced crop failures had a major impact on fertility and mortality rates. However, because most of the human evolutionary history has been shaped by hunter-gatherer lifestyle relying on diverse plant and animal food sources, it is also important to understan...

Czech agrarian sector has undergone significant changes during last ten years. Since the Czech Republic has entered the European Union in 2004, agrarian sector has had to adapt to conditions of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). This policy is taken as a crucial within the EU policies as it includes orientation of food production as well as a broader sense of sustainable development and empl...

In the past decade, a new project of agrarian capitalism has emerged in the Colombian countryside driven by the expansion of commercial agribusinesses, particularly in palm oil. This process is often referred to as an emergent form of agrarian extractivism or land-grabbing. While for the Colombian government, this agro-extractivist project represents one of the main locomotives driving the econ...