Melacak Sejarah Pemikiran Agraria

Ahmad Nashih Luthfi’s Melacak Sejarah Pemikiran Agraria is an important and useful work. Based on a wide-ranging study of secondary sources, and also on interviews with senior agrarian scholars, the book makes two important contributions to Indonesian agrarian studies. The first part of the book traces the various traditions of agrarian research from the colonial period to the present, in the context of shifting agrarian policies. In these chapters the author has summarized many important but little-known studies from Indonesia’s late-colonial and early independence period (1920s – 1970s). The second part of the book explores the intellectual biographies of Professor Sajogyo and Dr. Gunawan Wiradi, as two exemplary leading figures in the emergence of the ‘Bogor School’ of critical agrarian studies. These two scholars, and others of the ‘Bogor School’, have consistently opposed the longstanding elitist tradition in agrarian research and policy, insisting on the need for attention to the structural problems which maintain and reinforce rural poverty, and arguing for agrarian reforms to correct the unequal agrarian structures left behind by colonialism and further distorted by developments in the neoliberal era.