Ruth Hall obtained her DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford, for her research on the politics of land redistribution in post-apartheid South Africa. A Rhodes Scholar, she has received a Distinguished Researcher Award in 2017 and served on the Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture in South Africa in 2018-19. She is currently Acting Director of the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, where she is currently Acting Director. She holds the South African Research Chair in Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, which is funded by the Department of Science and Innovation and the National Research Foundation.

Ruth’s core research over many years has been on the politics of land rights, reform and redistribution in South Africa. Rooted in political economy, her work expanded over the past 15 years to address dynamics, drivers and outcomes of agrofood system change in sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on land grabbing, land concentration and agricultural commercialisation. The research programme of her current Chair centres on four themes: the political economy of redistributive land reforms; land commodification, governance and tenure; smallholder farming, accumulation and changing agro-food systems; and agrarian politics, labour and crises of social reproduction.

Ruth is a co-founder of the Land Deal Politics Initiative, the BRICS Initiative in Critical Agrarian Studies and the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative. She is a member of several boards of trustees, including those of Ndifuna Ukwazi, an urban land justice organisation, and the Social Justice Initiative, a funding body supporting social justice activist and research organisations. She is a founding member of the Network of Excellence in Land Governance in Africa (NELGA) and under the auspices of the African Union, UN Economic Commission for Africa and African Development Bank, she co-leads a training course for policy makers and professionals on the political economy of land governance in Africa.

• Hall R. 2024. ‘The Constitution’s Mandate for Transformation: From Expropriation Without Compensation to Equitable Access to Land’ in Olaf Zenker, Cherryl Walker & Zsa-Zsa Boggenpoel (eds). Beyond Expropriation Without Compensation: Law Land Reform and Redistributive Justice in South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 143-164.
• Hall, Ruth and Farai Mtero. 2021. ‘Land and Agrarian Development in South Africa’ in Arkebe Oqubay, Fiona Tregenna, and Imraan Valodia (eds). The Oxford Handbook of the South African Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-the-south-african-economy-9780192894199
• Hall, Ruth and Thembela Kepe. 2017. ‘Elite capture and state neglect: New evidence on South Africa’s land reform’. Review of African Political Economy. 44(151): 122-130. http://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2017.1288615
• Hall, Ruth, Ian Scoones, and Dzodzi Tsikata. 2017. ‘Plantations, outgrowers and commercial farming in Africa: Agricultural commercialisation and implications for agrarian change’. Journal of Peasant Studies 44(3): 1-23. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03066150.2016.1263187
• Hall, Ruth and Ben Cousins. 2017. ‘Exporting contradictions: The expansion of South African agrarian capital within Africa’. Globalizations 15(1): 12-31. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2017.1408335
• Hall, Ruth, Ian Scoones, and Dzodzi Tsikata. 2015. Africa’s Land Rush: Rural Livelihoods and Agrarian Change. Oxford: James Currey. https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781847011305/africas-land-rush/
• Hall, Ruth. 2011. “Land Grabbing in Southern Africa: The many faces of the investor rush.” Review of African Political Economy 128: 193-214. https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2011.582753