This book explores various approaches to reconstruct the spatial and temporal distribution of historical farmland in China. The book contains background information about political regimes, economic and social development, population changes and land resource utilization in the past 300 years in China. A literature review focuses on the assumptions, methodologies and models of reconstructing historical land-use datasets while addresses accuracy evaluation issues. Historical population size, its growth rate, and the evolution of spatial-temporal patterns of farmland in China have also been discussed. Almost all available historical data about farmland such as historical documents, archives, taxation records, statistics and research outcomes have been collected to reconstruct the amount of historical farmland. With a few principles and assumptions, a delicate Cellular Automaton (CA) and Multi-Agents (MAS) model based on bottom-up management scheme has been applied to derive the spatial-temporal distribution of farmland with the 1km*1km grid resolution for the period between 1661 and 1980 in China. Suggestions for future studies related to reconstructing historical land-use changes are then provided.

In the context of increasing privatization and land reform these case studies reveal how reforms impact on women's rights to land and how these rights are contested or upheld. This volume focuses on the impact on women's land rights from the contemporary drive towards the formulation and implementation of land tenure reforms which aim primarily at the private registration of land. It is solidly groundedin the findings from seven case studies, all based on in-depth qualitative research, from various regions of Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda. The detailed, local level research in this volume not only challenges the status quo, but demonstrates that another world is possible and documents the many ways women in Eastern Africa are finding to ensure their rights to land. BIRGIT ENGLERT is Assistant Professor in the Department of African Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria; ELIZABETH DALEY is an independent land consultant. Uganda: Fountain Publishers(PB); Kenya: EAEP(PB); Tanzania: E&D Vision Publishing(PB)

Finalist for the African Studies Association's 2021 Best Book Prize. Explores the limits of law in changing unequal land relations in Kenya. Why, despite the introduction of new land laws beginning in 2012, has there been an increase in land grabbing in Kenya? Why has legislation failed to address long standing grievances about grossly unequal land distribution? This important book suggests that questions of justice should be central to discussions of African land reform. Constitutional reformers in Kenya promised transformative changes in land relations. However, the reality has disappointed. Land law reforms since 2010 have been more concerned with the administration of land and with bureaucratic power than with the real consequences of unequal access to land for ordinary Kenyans. Manji documents this thwarted struggle and surveys the prospects for genuine change. Published in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa. Ambreena Manji is Professor of Land Law and Development at the School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University. Between 2010 and 2014, she was Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa. Her books include The Politics of Land Reform in Africa (2006). Vita Books: Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan and South Africa.

A century after the 1913 Natives' Land Act, there remains a land crisis in South Africa. How are we to understand the many dimensions of this crisis so that we can realistically move beyond the current inertia? The starting point for this book is that the current land reform policies in the country fail to take this colonial context of division and exclusion into account. As a result, there is an abiding land crisis in South Africa. The book examines the many dimensions of this crisis in urban areas, commercial farming areas and communal areas. It argues for a fundamental change in approach to move beyond the impasse in both policy and thinking about land. Of particular importance is that social movements have a critical role to play in charting a new course, both in respect of access to land and in influencing broader policy options. Struggles from below are crucial for rethinking purely statistic efforts at land reform and the book grapples with the interplay between oppositional campaigns of social movements and the state's policies and responses. Essentially, the book argues that in South Africa the 1994 transition from apartheid to democracy has not translated into a process of decolonisation. In fact, the very bases of colonialism and apartheid remain intact, since racial inequalities in both access to and ownership of land continue today. With state-driven attempts at land reform having failed to meet even their own targets, a fundamental change in approach is necessary for South Africa to move beyond the deadlock that prevails between the objectives of the policy, and the means for realising them. It is also necessary to question the targets set for land redistribution: Will these really assist in changes for the majority?

While disappointment with South Africa's land reform program is widespread, the discussions as to why and in what way tend to be too general or shallow to be either fully convincing or useful. "Land Reform and Livelihoods" seeks to sharpen our understanding of how land reform does or does not work. In doing so, it helps us appreciate to what extent land reform is contributing to poverty reduction, and to what extent it might contribute to reduce poverty even more if we approached it differently.

With a special emphasis on the exchange of land between medieval servile tenants--especially from the 13th century onward--this scholarly examination of the peasant land market of the Middle Ages explores the identification of peasant families with particular lands to which they had a hereditary right. Using this theme to explore village life and showing how peasants were affected by the changes over time and place, this study employs primary source material from the Winchester estates. Analyzing thousands of land exchanges and interactions from more than 50 different manors on Winchester, this volume reveals unparalleled opportunities for comparing regional and local differences of experience.

This book presents current research in the political ecology of indigenous revival and its role in nature conservation in critical areas in the Americas. An important contribution to evolving studies on conservation of sacred natural sites (SNS), the book elucidates the complexity of development scenarios within cultural landscapes related to the appropriation of religion, environmental change in indigenous territories, and new conservation management approaches. Indigeneity and the Sacred explores how these struggles for land, rights, and political power are embedded within physical landscapes, and how indigenous identity is reconstituted as globalizing forces simultaneously threaten and promote the notion of indigeneity.

Histories of rights have too often marginalized Native Americans and African Americans. Correcting this lacuna, Native Land Talk expands our understanding of freedom by examining rights theories that indigenous and African-descended people(s) articulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As settlers began to distrust the entitlements that the English used to justify their rule, the colonized and the enslaved formulated coherent logical narratives of freedom and belonging. By anchoring rights in nativity, they countered settlers' attempts to confine Indian rights to the past and reduce slaves born in America to property. Drawing on a plethora of texts, including petitions, letters, newspapers, and official records, Yael Ben-zvi analyzes nativity's unsettling potential and its discursive and geopolitical implications.

The military coup that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power as Pakistan's tenth president resulted in the abolition of a century-old sharecropping system that was rife with corruption. In its place the military regime implemented a market reform policy of cash contract farming. Ostensibly meant to improve living conditions for tenant farmers, the new system, instead, mobilized one of the largest, most successful land rights movements in South Asia—still active today. In The Ethics of Staying, Mubbashir A. Rizvi presents an original framework for understanding this major social movement, called the Anjuman Mazarin Punjab (AMP). This group of Christian and Muslim tenant sharecroppers, against all odds, successfully resisted Pakistan military's bid to monetize state-owned land, making a powerful moral case for land rights by invoking local claims to land and a broader vision for subsistence rights. The case of AMP provides a unique lens through which to examine state and society relations in Pakistan, one that bridges literatures from subaltern studies, military and colonial power, and the language of claim-making. Rizvi also offers a glimpse of Pakistan that challenges its standard framing as a hub of radical militancy, by opening a window into to the everyday struggles that are often obscured in the West's terror discourse.

This volume addresses the marked influence that African borders and boundaries, whether real or imaginary, have on the lives of those inhabiting the borderland. How do political and symbolic borders take concrete shape, and how do they bear on daily life? Conversely, how does life in the borderland shape the borders that characterize it? The book recognizes borderlands as shifting places, times, or domains where competing discourses and regimes of power overlap. Characterized by overt contradiction and paradox, they are often imagined at the outside. Yet, they pertain to and define the center. The collected case studies challenge the assumption that states and anonymized institutions are the principal actors in border-making. Instead, they argue for an actor-oriented perspective, while drawing attention to the "physicality" of the borderscape. (Series: African Studies / Afrikanische Studien - Vol. 40)

Many outside South Africa imagine that after Mandela was freed and the ANC won free elections all was well. But the last two decades have led to increased poverty and inequality. Although a few black South Africans have become wealthy, for many the struggle against apartheid never ended because the ethos of apartheid continues to live. Early in 2007 hundreds of families living in shacks in Cape Town were moved into houses they had been waiting for since the end of apartheid. But soon they were told that the move had been illegal and they were kicked out of their new homes. They built shacks next to the road opposite the housing project and hundreds organised themselves into the Symphony Way Anti-Eviction Campaign, vowing to stay on the road until the government gave them permanent housing. This anthology is both testimony and poetry. There are stories of justice miscarried, of violence domestic and public, of bigotry and xenophobia. But amid the horror there is beauty: relationships between aunties, husbands, wives and children; daughters named Hope and Symphony. This book is a means to dignity, a way for the poor to reflect and be reflected. It is testimony that there's thinking in the shacks, that there are humans who dialogue, theorise and fight to bring about change.

A Report of an Inquiry into an Injustice chronicles Peter Kulchyski's experiences with the Begade Shuhtagot'ine, a small community of a few hundred people living in and around Tulita (formerly Fort Norman), on the Mackenzie River in the heart of Canada's Northwest Territories. Despite their formal objections and boycott of the agreement, the band and their lands were included in the Sahtu treaty, a modern comprehensive land claims agreement negotiated between the Government of Canada and the Sahtu Tribal Council, representing Dene and Metis peoples of the region. While both Treaty Eleven (1921) and the Sahtu Treaty (1994) purport to extinguish Begade Shuhtagot'ine Aboriginal title, oral history and documented attempts to exclude themselves from treaty strongly challenge the validity of that extinguishment. Structured as a series of briefs to an inquiry into the Begade Shutagot'ine's claim, this manuscript documents the negotiation and implementation of the Sahtu treaty and amasses evidence of historical and continued presence and land use to make eminently clear that the Begade Shuhtagot'ine are the continued owners of the land by law: they have not extinguished title to their traditional territories; they continue to exercise their customs, practices, and traditions on those territories; and they have a fundamental right to be consulted on, and refuse or be compensated for, development projects on those territories. Kulchyski bears eloquent witness to the Begade Shuhtagot'ine people's two-decade struggle for land rights, which have been blatantly ignored by federal and territorial authorities for too long.

Women's property and inheritance rights are recognised in international law and in a growing number of countries worldwide, yet women in many developing countries do not have the right to own or inherit property. At the same time, women are increasingly heading up households and are in critical need of land and property for economic security, particularly in the context of the AIDS epidemic - in fact, secure property rights are believed to be a factor in reducing women's risk of contracting HIV and in protecting them from domestic violence. To better understand the role of tenure security in protecting against, and mitigating the effects of, HIV and violence, this title explores these linkages in Amajuba, South Africa and Iganga, Uganda. Results from the qualitative study revealed that property ownership, while not easily linked to women's ability to prevent HIV infection, can nonetheless mitigate the impact of AIDS, and enhance a woman's ability to leave a violent situation. A resource for policy-makers, donors, NGO workers and academics, these findings will inform the current land reform efforts, as well as HIV/AIDS and domestic violence policy in both countries, in Africa more generally and beyond.

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER! "Secrets of the Sprakkar is a fascinating window into what a more gender-equal world could look like, and why it's worth striving for. Iceland is doing a lot to level the playing field: paid parental leave, affordable childcare, and broad support for gender equality as a core value. Reid takes us on an exploration not only around this fascinating island, but also through the triumphs and stumbles of a country as it journeys towards gender equality." -Hillary Rodham Clinton Iceland is the best place on earth to be a woman-but why? For the past twelve years, the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report has ranked Iceland number one on its list of countries closing the gap in equality between men and women. What is it about Iceland that makes many women's experience there so positive? Why has their society made such meaningful progress in this ongoing battle, from electing the world's first female president to passing legislation specifically designed to help even the playing field at work and at home? And how can we learn from what Icelanders have already discovered about women's powerful place in society and how increased fairness benefits everyone? Eliza Reid, the First Lady of Iceland, examines her adopted homeland's attitude toward women-the deep-seated cultural sense of fairness, the influence of current and historical role models, and, crucially, the areas where Iceland still has room for improvement. Reid's own experience as an immigrant from small-town Canada who never expected to become a first lady is expertly interwoven with interviews with dozens of sprakkar ("extraordinary women") to form the backbone of an illuminating discussion of what it means to move through the world as a woman, and how the rules of society play more of a role in who we view as "equal" than we may understand. Secrets of the Sprakkar is a powerful and atmospheric portrait of a tiny country that could lead the way forward for us all.

A small, poverty-stricken California Indian Tribe, the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, successfully fought a long legal battle for the right to operate the business of their choice on their barren reservation--a gambling casino. This is their story, the authorized history of their epic struggle, climaxing with their victory in a 1987 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, the now-famous Cabazon Decision. Their defeated opponents included California's City of Indio and County of Riverside (called one of the most racist in the U.S. by a non-Indian resident) as well as California and 29 other states that joined California's appeal.

This is also the fascinating story of the role played by a white family and its radical, socialist patriarch that helped create one of the world's most capital-intensive industries and triggered today's Indian Gaming Explosion throughout America. Hundreds of hours of taped interviews and years of documents, meeting records, and official correspondence are analyzed to give the reader a clear picture of the impact of this new massive capital on tribal life and the development of a possible future without gambling--as officials in league with Nevada and Atlantic City gambling interests continue their efforts to destroy Indian gaming. The Buffalo, literal and symbolic figure of earlier Indian financial independence, has returned in a new form--cash cow casinos.

In The Mountain People, Colin M. Turnbull describes the dehumanization of the Ik, African tribesmen who in less than three generations have deteriorated from being once-prosperous hunters to scattered bands of hostile, starving people whose only goal is individual survival. Sad, disturbing, and eloquently written, The Mountain People is a moving meditation on human nature, our capacity for goodness, and the fragility of human society.

Land is one of the world's most emotionally resonant resources, and control over it is fundamental to almost all human activity. From the local level to the global, we are often in conflict over the ground beneath our feet. But because human relationships to land are so complex, it can be difficult to think them through in a unified way. This path-breaking book aims to change that by combining insights from multiple disciplines to develop a framework for understanding the geopolitics of land today.Struggles over land, argues Derek Hall, relate to three basic principles: its role as territory, its status as property, and the ways in which its use is regulated. This timely introduction explores key dimensions of these themes, including inter-state wars over territory, the efforts of non-governmental organizations to protect property rights and environments in the global South, and the 'land grabs' attempted by contemporary corporations and governments. Drawing on a wide range of cases and examples - from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to the Canadian Arctic, China's urban fringe to rural Honduras - the book provides new ways of thinking about the political dynamics of land in the 21st century.This richly detailed and authoritative guide will be of interest to students across the social sciences, as well as anyone interested in current affairs and contemporary geopolitics.

Blood Will Tell reveals the underlying centrality of blood in shaping official ideas about who was eligible to be defined as Indian by the General Allotment Act in the United States. Katherine Ellinghaus traces the idea of blood quantum and how the concept came to dominate Native identity and national status between 1887 and 1934 and how related exclusionary policies functioned to dispossess Native people of their land. The U.S. government's unspoken assumption at the time was that Natives of mixed descent were undeserving of tribal status and benefits, notwithstanding that these people played crucial roles in the national implementation of allotment policy. Ellinghaus explores on-the-ground case studies of Anishinaabeg, Arapahos, Cherokees, Eastern Cherokees, Cheyennes, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, Lakotas, Lumbees, Ojibwes, Seminoles, and Virginia tribes. Documented in these cases, the history of blood quantum as a policy reveals assimilation's implications and legacy. The role of blood quantum is integral to understanding how Native Americans came to be one of the most disadvantaged groups in the United States, and it remains a significant part of present-day debates about Indian identity and tribal membership. Blood Will Tell is an important and timely contribution to current political and scholarly debates.

Hugo Blanc is Peru's best-known revolutionary. A leader of the indigenous people of the Andes, he was born in 1934 in Cusco, the former Inca capital. He is a lifelong environmental campaigner in defence of the natural riches of the Andean region and beyond. In the 1960s he led a successful armed peasant uprising demanding land rights. He was placed on death row and released only after a huge international campaign supported by Jean Paul Sartre. In exile in Chile he was lucky to escape death after the 1973 coup. More recently Hugo Blanco was a Presidential candidate and was elected as a Senator in Peru. He was exiled to Mexico, where he was influenced by the Zapatistas. Still politically active today, he publishes the newspaper Lucha Indigena (Indigenous Struggle). This engaging political biography will survey the life of this unassuming but compelling activist - a guerrilla fighter praised by Che Guevara, one- time member of the Fourth International - from the 1960s to the present. It is a story of ideas and activism: surveying Hugo Blanco's views on defence of the environment, social and political movements, indigenous peoples, left governments and political strategy. Hugo Blanco is one of the most significant activists and ecosocialist thinkers in the world today.

Co-management boards, established under comprehensive land claims agreements, have become key players in land-use planning, wildlife management, and environmental regulation across Canada's North. This book provides a detailed account of the operation and effectiveness of these boards while addressing a central question: Have they been successful in ensuring substantial Indigenous involvement in policies affecting the land and wildlife in their traditional territories? While identifying constraints on the role Northern Indigenous peoples play in board processes, Graham White finds that overall they exercise extensive decision-making influence. These findings are provocative and offer valuable insights into our understanding of the importance of land claims boards and the role they play in the evolution of treaty federalism in Canada.

'A hero of mine, a moral as well as literary giant' Simon Schama Amos Oz, the internationally acclaimed author of A Tale of Love and Darkness and Judas, grew up in war-torn Jerusalem, where as a boy he witnessed first-hand the poisonous consequences of fanaticism. In How To Cure a Fanatic Amos Oz analyses the historical roots of violence and confronts truths about the extremism nurtured throughout society. By bringing us face to face with fanaticism he suggests ways in which we can all respond. From the author of A Tale of Love and Darkness and Man Booker International Prize shortlisted Judas. 'He was the conscience of Israel' Roger Cohen, New York Times

The politics of domination with which the United States oppresses and exploits the Native Nations, is a violation of the intentions of the framers of the Constitution, and the meaning of the text itself. The arguments of the advocates of the genocide of the 1830s and their appeasers have come to determine the law, policy, and conduct of the United States, while the arguments of the opponents of what came to be known as the Trail of Tears have largely been forgotten, at least among non-Native people. By recovering these arguments, and allowing readers to explore large questions of law, justice, genocide, and politics in a context closely tethered to empirical evidence and careful argument, this book should facilitate more widespread understanding of the Native Nations' rights to their treaty-guaranteed dominion over their own lands and perhaps help open communication between the American people and the peoples of the Native Nations; communication on which the emergence of what Martin Luther King, Jr. called "the beloved community" depends. Arguments over Genocide aims to reach a broad audience of college students, in courses on American History, Indigenous Studies, and the United States and the World, as well as in more specialized upper division courses on constitutional law, American/European imperialism, and resistance, independence, and decolonization movements. Individuals interested in the founding of the United States, in the Trail of Tears, and in 19th century American history should find the work compelling, as should legal practitioners in the field.

Land has been a dominant theme in modern Irish history, extending to political and cultural issues as well as permeating social and economic ones.

The military coup that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power as Pakistan's tenth president resulted in the abolition of a century-old sharecropping system that was rife with corruption. In its place the military regime implemented a market reform policy of cash contract farming. Ostensibly meant to improve living conditions for tenant farmers, the new system, instead, mobilized one of the largest, most successful land rights movements in South Asia-still active today. In The Ethics of Staying, Mubbashir A. Rizvi presents an original framework for understanding this major social movement, called the Anjuman Mazarin Punjab (AMP). This group of Christian and Muslim tenant sharecroppers, against all odds, successfully resisted Pakistan military's bid to monetize state-owned land, making a powerful moral case for land rights by invoking local claims to land and a broader vision for subsistence rights. The case of AMP provides a unique lens through which to examine state and society relations in Pakistan, one that bridges literatures from subaltern studies, military and colonial power, and the language of claim-making. Rizvi also offers a glimpse of Pakistan that challenges its standard framing as a hub of radical militancy, by opening a window into to the everyday struggles that are often obscured in the West's terror discourse.