Protecting the Property Rights of Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons: Beyond Restitution pursues a rigorous examination of the various ways in which the protection of housing and property rights can contribute to durable solutions to displacement. The focus of most of the international community's recent protection efforts has been on returning displaced persons to their homes following armed conflict. However, this focus on return has come at the expense of considering other possible durable solutions, particularly in cases of protracted displacement. In this book, Anneke Smit chronicles the failure of the international community's attempts to promote widespread return through establishing housing and property restitution mechanisms. Drawing on a variety of displacement situations, and referring throughout to international human rights and refugee law, property law and theory, and sociological and anthropological literature on displacement and the meaning of home', she argues that a housing and property policy which supports integration in the communities where refugees and internally displaced persons find themselves after conflict is likely to represent a more effective and sustainable approach than a singular focus on return. Protecting the Property Rights of Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons is based on extensive academic research, including fieldwork, as well as more than a decade of the author's practical experience working on displacement issues with government, international organisation and NGO actors. It will be of considerable interest to those with academic and policy interests in the rights of refugees and displaced persons.

This book constitutes volume one of a two volume examination of development community land issues in Southern Africa. In this volume, Ben Chigara undertakes a holistic inter-disciplinary evaluation of the legitimacy of colonial and emergent post-colonial rule property rights in affected States of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). It particularly focuses on intensifying litigation in national courts, the SADC Tribunal, and more recently the Washington based International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) regarding counter claims to title to property. The book examines cultural, economic and political drivers at the core of SADC land issues, focusing on their significance and potential to contribute to the discovery of a new, sustainable land relations policy that guarantees social justice in the distribution of all the advantages and disadvantages relating to the allocation and use of land. Chigara shows that persistent systematic administrative failures by pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial authorities have made for a very complex challenge that requires Solomonic tools that neither the Courts alone, nor human rights centric morality alone could resolutely attend. The book recommends a sophisticated systematic new approach to SADC land issues, which is developed in volume two, Re-conceiving Property Rights in the New Millennium. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of Property and Conveyancing Law, Human Rights Law and Land Law.

Who has rights to forests and forest resources? In recent years governments in the South have transferred at least 200 million hectares of forests to communities living in and around them . This book assesses the experience of what appears to be a new international trend that has substantially increased the share of the world's forests under community administration. Based on research in over 30 communities in selected countries in Asia (India, Nepal, Philippines, Laos, Indonesia), Africa (Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ghana) and Latin America (Bolivia, Brazil, Guatemala, Nicaragua), it examines the process and outcomes of granting new rights, assessing a variety of governance issues in implementation, access to forest products and markets and outcomes for people and forests . Forest tenure reforms have been highly varied, ranging from the titling of indigenous territories to the granting of small land areas for forest regeneration or the right to a share in timber revenues. While in many cases these rights have been significant, new statutory rights do not automatically result in rights in practice, and a variety of institutional weaknesses and policy distortions have limited the impacts of change. Through the comparison of selected cases, the chapters explore the nature of forest reform, the extent and meaning of rights transferred or recognized, and the role of authority and citizens' networks in forest governance. They also assess opportunities and obstacles associated with government regulations and markets for forest products and the effects across the cases on livelihoods, forest condition and equity.Published with CIFOR

This book describes the encounter between the common law legal system and the tribal peoples of North America and Australasia. It is a history of the role of anglophone law in managing relations between the British settlers and indigenous peoples. That history runs from the plantation of Ireland and settlement of the New World to the end of the Twentieth century. The book begins by looking at the nature of British imperialism and the position of non-Christian peoples at large in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries. It then focuses on North America and Australasia from their early national periods in the Nineteenth century to the modern era. The historical basis of relations is described through the key, enduring, but constantly shifting questions of sovereignty, status and, more latterly, self-determination. Throughout the history of engagement with common law legalism, questions surrounding the settler-state's recognition - or otherwise - of the integrity of the tribe have recurred. These issues were addressed in many and varied imperial and colonial contexts, but all jurisdictions have shared remarkable historical parallels which have been accentuated by their common legal heritage. The same questioning continues today in the renewed and controversial claims of the tribal societies to a distinct constitutional position and associated rights of self-determination. Mc Hugh examines the political resurgence of aboriginal peoples in the last quarter of the Twentieth century. A period of 'rights-recognition' was transformed into a second-generation jurisprudence of rights-management and rights-integration. From the 1990s onwards, aboriginal affairs have been driven by an increasingly rampant legalism. Throughout this history, the common law's encounter with tribal peoples not only describes its view of the aboriginal, but also reveals a considerable amount about the common law itself as a language of thought. This is a history of the voyaging common law.

What constitutes a resource, and how do people make claims on them? In the context of a burgeoning discourse of property, these are vital questions. Rationales of Ownership offers conceptual clarification in the context of material, intellectual and cultural resources in Papua New Guinea. The volume is a result of a major research project headed by Marilyn Strathern and Eric Hirsch, and brings together contributions from social anthropology and law. The approaches demonstrated, and conclusions reached, build upon recent understandings developed within Melanesian anthropology, but have far wider significance. The first publication sold out in Papua New Guinea due to the relevance of its approach and contents to lawyers and policy makers in that country. It is here made available to a wider readership, particularly those teaching courses on resource development, cultural and intellectual property, contemporary Pacific societies, environmental degradation, and property itself. ADVANCE PRAISE '...a unique contribution to the discipline's voice in contemporary global debates...this volume represents the best of the comparative, ethnographic tradition providing critical insight into difference and similarity on issues that entangle us all in various degrees of responsibility and care. It will be read by anthropologists, policy makers and all academic and non-academic students of what has come to be seen as the test area of the survival of cultural difference.' Marta Roahtynskyj, University of Guelph Lawrence Kalinoe is Professor and Executive Dean in the School of Law, University of Papua New Guinea. James Leach is Research Fellow, King's College and Associate Lecturer, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge.

The complex relationships between ethno-nationality, rights to land, and territorial sovereignty have long fed disputes over territorial control and landed rights between different nations, ethnicities, and religions. These disputes raise a number of interesting issues related to the nature of land regimes and to their economic and political implications. The studies drawn together in this key volume explore these and related issues for a broad variety of countries and times. They illuminate the diverse causes of ethno-national land disputes, and the different forms of adjustment and accommodation to the power differences between the contesting groups. This is done within a framework outlined by the editors in their analytical overview, which offers contours for comparative examinations of such disputes, past and present. Providing conceptual and factual analyses of comparative nature and wealth of empirical material (both historical and contemporary), this book will appeal to economic historians, economists, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and all scholars interested in issues concerning ethno-nationality and land rights in historical perspective.

As a young boy, Raja Shehadeh was entranced by a forbidden Israeli postage stamp in his uncle's album, intrigued by tales of a green land beyond the border.He couldn't have known then what Israel would come to mean to him, or to foresee the future occupation of his home in Palestine. Later, as a young lawyer, he worked to halt land seizures and towards peace and justice in the region. During this time, he made close friends with several young Jewish Israelis, including fellow thinker and searcher Henry. But as life became increasingly unbearable under in the Palestinian territories, it was impossible to escape politics or the past, and even the strongest friendships and hopes were put to the test.

Brave, intelligent and deeply controversial, in this book award-winning author Raja Shehadeh explores the devastating effect of occupation on even the most intimate aspects of life. Looking back over decades of political turmoil, he traces the impact on the fragile bonds of friendship across the Israel-Palestine border, and asks whether those considered bitter enemies can come together to forge a common future.

Land Reform Revisited engages with contemporary debates on land reform and agrarian transformation in South Africa. The volume offers insights into post-apartheid transformation dynamics through the lens of agency and state making. The chapters written by emerging scholars are based on extensive qualitative research and their analysis highlights the ways in which people negotiate and contest land reform realities and politics. By focusing on the diverse meanings of land and competing interpretations of what constitutes success and failure in land reform Brandt and Mkodzongi insist on looking beyond the productivity discourses guiding research and policy making in the field towards an informed view from below. Contributors are: Kezia Batisai, Femke Brandt, Sarah Bruchhausen, Nerhene Davis, Elene Cloete, Tariro Kamuti, Tarminder Kaur, Grasian Mkodzongi, Camalita Naicker, Fani Ncapayi, Mnqobi Ngubane, and Chizuko Sato.

This text provides an account of urban land reform in China, which is unique in merging the existing socialist landowner system with market mechanisms. The book starts with a historical account of the land tenure system in China followed by discussions of the reform in the frameworks of law, administration and finance. Contrasting case studies of the Shanghai land system and of Hong Kong after the end of British rule illustrate the impact of land reform in China's transition.

First published in 1969. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this highly original book, Obert Bernard Mlambo offers a comparative and critical examination of the relationship between military veterans and land expropriation in the client-army of the first-century BC Roman Republic and veterans of the Zimbabwean liberation war. The study centres on the body of the soldier, the cultural production of images and representations of gender which advance theoretical discussions around war, masculinity and violence. Mlambo employs a transcultural comparative approach based on a persistent factor found in both societies: land expropriation. Often articulated in a framework of patriarchy, land appropriation takes place in the context of war-shaped masculinities. This book fosters a deeper understanding of social processes, adding an important new perspective to the study of military violence, and paying attention to veterans' claims for rewards and compensation. These claims are developed in the context of war and its direct consequences, namely expropriation, confiscation and violence. Land Expropriation in Ancient Rome and Contemporary Zimbabwe contributes to current efforts to decolonise knowledge construction by revealing that a non-Western perspective can broaden our understanding of veterans, war, violence, land and gender in classical culture.

An original, rigorously researched volume that questions long-accepted paradigms concerning land ownership and its use in Africa. Islam, Power, and Dependency in the Gambia River Basin draws on new sources to offer an original approach to the study of land in African history. Documenting the impact of Islamization, the development of peanut production, and the institution of colonial rule on people living along the middle and lower Gambia River, the book shows how these waves of changes sweeping the region after 1850 altered local political and social arrangements, with important implications for the ability of elites to control land. Author Assan Sarr argues for a nuanced understanding of land and its historic value in Africa. Moving beyond a recognition of the material value of land, Sarr'sanalysis highlights its cultural and social worth, pointing out the spiritual associations the land generated and the ways that certain people gained privileged access to those spiritual powers. By emphasizing that the land aroundthe Gambia River both inspired and gave form to a cosmology of ritual and belief, the book points to what might be considered an indigenous tradition of ecological preservation and protection. Assan Sarr is assistant professor of history at Ohio University.

Several studies have investigated the impetus and implications behind large-scale land acquisitions/deals at the global level; however, intranational factors within communities and societies have not received much attention from researchers. The Handbook of Research on In-Country Determinants and Implications of Foreign Land Acquisitions examines the economic, sociological, and environmental issues surrounding land transactions and the impact these deals may have on local households and communities. Focusing on international issues as well as domestic concerns, this publication is a useful reference for policymakers, academics, researchers, and advanced-level students in various disciplines.

This book explores tribal land alienation problems in India and tribal agitation against land encroachment and alienation. It discusses India's tribal land problem and explains how despite legislation to protect tribal lands, the problem has not been resolved since neither the letter nor the spirit of the law has been implemented. Due to continuous land encroachment and alienation by outsiders, the negligence of the revenue administration and the apathy of the central and state government, the situation concerning tribal land in the country have became precarious. In this context, the book highlights the process of land estrangement among the tribes and the related movements, focusing on the Narayanpatna land movement in the Koraput district of Odisha. It argues that land remains a central issue that is extremely important for tribes as it directly affects their life, livelihood, freedom and development, and that the cultural attachment of tribes and their views regarding the idea of 'place' (land) furnishes crucial perspectives in understanding the politics of collective resistance. It also discusses the politicization of group identity and material interest against the outside authority as the basis of the unrest among the tribes, and when the grudges of the people are hardened due to insensitivity and tyranny, the extent of tribal resistance escalates, leading to conflict between the state and its own people. Given its scope, this book is a valuable resource for students and research scholars, as well as for policymakers and anyone interested in Indian democracy and development in general, and tribal problems, issues and politics in particular.

In this book, Martin Bunton focuses on the way in which the Palestine Mandate was part of a broader British imperial administration - a fact often masked by Jewish immigration and land purchase in Palestine. His meticulous research reveals clear links to colonial practice in India, Sudan, and Cyprus amongst other places. He argues that land officials' views on sound land management were derived from their own experiences of rural England, and that this was far more influential on the shaping of land policies than the promise of a Jewish National Home.
Bunton reveals how the British were intent on preserving the status quo of Ottoman land law, which (when few Britons could read Ottoman or were well grounded in its legal codes) led to a series of translations, interpretations, and hence new applications of land law. The sense of importance the British attributed to their work surveying and registering properties and transactions, is captured in the efforts of British officials to microfilm all of their records at the height of the Second World War. Despite this however, land policies remained in flux.

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.

This study investigates how and why group ranch members in Kajiado District, Kenya, supported the subdivision of their collective landholdings into individual, titled units, and what outcomes resulted from this transition to individual rights. Viewed over a longer time scale, the author finds that politics is at the core of institutional change: land-owners increasingly seek exclusive rights in an effort to defend their land claims against threats of appropriation by the state, by Maasai elite, and by non-Maasai.

In the last two hundred years, the earth has increasingly become the private property of a few classes, races, transnational corporations, and nations. Repeated claims about the "tragedy of the commons" and the "crisis of capitalism" have done little to explain this concentration of land, encourage solution-building to solve resource depletion, or address our current socio-ecological crisis. The Commons in an Age of Uncertainty presents a new explanation, vision, and action plan based on the idea of commoning the land. The book argues that by commoning the land, rather than privatising it, we can develop the foundation for prosperity without destructive growth and address both local and global challenges. Making the land the most fundamental priority of all commons does not only give hope, it also opens the doors to a new world in which economy, environment, and society are decolonised and liberated.

This book is an examination of post-colonial land reforms across various African states. One of the decisive contradictions of colonialism in Africa was the distortion of use, access to and ownership of land. Land related issues and the need for land reform have consistently occupied a unique position in public discourse in Africa. The post-colonial African states have had to embark on concerted efforts at redressing historical grounded land policies and addressing the growing needs of land by the poor. However, agitations for land continue, while evidence of policy gaps abound. In many cases, policy change in terms of land use, distribution and ownership has reinforced inequalities and affected power and social relations in respective post-colonial African countries. Land has assumed major causes of structural violence and impediments to human and rural development in Africa; hence the need for holistic assessment of land reforms in post-colonial African states. The central objective of the text is to identify post-independence and current trends in land reform and to address the grievances in relation to land use, ownership and distribution. The book suggests practicable policy options towards addressing the land hunger and conflict, which could derail the 'moderate' socio-economic achievements and political stability recorded by post-colonial African nation-states. The book draws its strength and uniqueness from its adoption of country-specific case studies, which places the book in context, and utilizes field studies methodology which generate new knowledge on the continental land question. Taking a holistic approach to understanding Africa's land question, this book will be attractive to academicians and students interested in policy and development, African politics, post-colonial development and policy, and conflict studies as well as policy-makers working in relevant areas.

As China is transformed, relations between society, the state, and the city have become central. The Great Urban Transformation investigates what is happening in cities, the urban edges, and the rural fringe in order to explain these relations. In the inner city of major metropolitan centers, municipal governments battle high-ranking state agencies to secure land rents from redevelopment projects, while residents mobilize to assert property and residential rights. At the urban edge, as metropolitan governments seek to extend control over their rural hinterland through massive-scale development projects, villagers strategize to profit from the encroaching property market. At the rural fringe, township leaders become brokers of power and property between the state bureaucracy and villages, while large numbers of peasants are dispossessed, dispersed, and deterritorialized, and their mobilizational capacity is consequently undermined.
The Great Urban Transformation explores these issues, and provides an integrated analysis of the city and the countryside, elite politics and grassroots activism, legal-economic and socio-political issues of property rights, and the role of the state and the market in the property market.

In the late nineteenth century Britain was one of the most urbanised societies in the world, yet land reform remained an important element in its politics. This book explores this paradox through an examination of the Liberal Party's increasing interest in the English dimension of the land question. Most historians have dismissed this phenomenon as a product of romantic views about the English countryside and Liberalism's failure to engage with the problems of urban society. In contrast, the author argues that English land reform was important to Liberals because it both expressed their deeply-held hostility to landowners and functioned as a variety of strategies to win electoral support and deal with pressing political issues. Moreover, while Liberals did not always benefit from their association with the land question, it became a matter of crucial significance in 1909-14, when Lloyd George unlocked its potential as an election-winning asset and used it to form a bridge between traditional radicalism and the New Liberalism.Dr IAN PACKER teaches in the School of Modern History at the Queen's University, Belfast.

This book provides a socio-historical analysis of the 2002 massacre at Bellavista-Bojaya-Choco, Colombia. The author examines how the concepts of forced displacement and migration could be formulas for historical erasure. These concepts are used to name populations, such as the survivors of this massacre, and are limited in their ability to contribute to the demands for reparation of the affected populations. Instead, based on an ethnographic study of the pain and suffering generated in the survivors, the book proposes the concept of deracination as a tool to study land dispossession. It captures both the complex local specificities, the global linkages of this phenomenon and the strategies of resistance used by the people of this community to channel what seems as an impossible mourning.

Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in the north-eastern borderlands of Bangladesh, this book focuses on the everyday struggles of indigenous farmers threatened with losing their land due to such state programmes as the realignment of the national border, ecotourism, social forestry and the establishment of a military cantonment. In implementing these programmes, state actors challenge farmers' right to land, instituting spaces of violence in which multiple forms of marginalisation overlap and are reinforced. Mapping how farmers react to these challenges emotionally and practically, the book argues that these land conflicts serve as a starting point for existentially charged disputes in which the survival efforts of farmers clash with the political imaginations and practices of the nation-state. The analysis shows that losing land represents more than being deprived of a material asset: it is nothing less than the extinction of ways of life.

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.

Much controversy has existed over the claims of Native Americans and other indigenous peoples that they have a right--based on original occupancy of land, historical transfers of sovereignty, and principles of self-determination--to a political status separate from the states in which they now find themselves embedded. How valid are these claims on moral grounds?

Burke Hendrix tackles these thorny questions in this book. Rather than focusing on the legal and constitutional status of indigenous nations within the states now ruling them, he starts at a more basic level, interrogating fundamental justifications for political authority itself. He shows that historical claims of land ownership and prior sovereignty cannot provide a sufficient basis for challenging the authority of existing states, but that our natural moral duties to aid other persons in danger can justify rights to political separation from states that fail to protect their citizens as they should.

Actual attempts at political separation must be carefully managed through well-defined procedural mechanisms, however, to foster extensive democratic deliberation about the nature of the political changes at stake. Using such procedures, Hendrix argues, indigenous peoples should be able to withdraw politically from the states currently ruling them, even to the point of choosing full independence.