Over the past few years, large-scale land acquisitions in Africa have stoked controversy, making headlines in media reports across the world. Land that only a short time ago seemed of little outside interest is now being sought by international investors to the tune of hundreds of thousands of hectares. Private-sector expectations of higher world food and commodity prices and government concerns about longer-term national food and energy security have both made land a more attractive asset. Dubbed 'land grabs' in the media, large-scale land acquisitions have become one of the most talked about and contentious topics amongst those studying, working in or writing about Africa. Some commentators have welcomed this trend as a bearer of new livelihood opportunities. Others have countered by pointing to negative social impacts, including loss of local land rights, threats to local food security and the risk that large-scale investments may marginalize family farming. Lorenzo Cotula, a leading expert in the field, casts a critical eye over the most reliable evidence on this hotly contested topic, examining the implications of land deals in Africa both for its people and for world agriculture and food security.

Feeding Frenzy traces the history of the global food system and reveals the underlying causes of recent turmoil in food markets. Supplies are running short, prices keep spiking and the media is full of talk of a 'world food crisis'. Food-producing countries are banning exports even if this means starving their neighbours. Governments and corporations are scrambling to secure control over food supply chains. Powerful groups from the Middle East and Asia are grabbing farmland in poor countries to grow food for export. This raises some big questions. Can we feed a population that will grow to nine billion by 2050? Are we running out of land and water? Can we rely on free markets to provide? This book reveals trends that could lead to more hunger and conflict. But Paul McMahon also outlines actions that can be taken to shape a sustainable and just food system.

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.

In 1973 the Supreme Court of Canada issued a landmark decision in the Calder case, confirming that Aboriginal title constituted a right within Canadian law. Let Right Be Done examines the doctrine of Aboriginal title thirty years later and puts the Calder case in its legal, historical, and political context, both nationally and internationally. With its innovative blend of scholarly analysis and input from many of those intimately involved in the case, this book should be essential reading for anyone interested in Aboriginal law, treaty negotiations, and the history of the "BC Indian land question."

Across Africa land is being commodified: private ownership is replacing communal and customary tenure; Farms are turned into collateral for rural credit markets. Law reform is at the heart of this revolution. The Politics of Land Reform in Africa casts a critical spotlight on this profound change in African land economy. The book illuminates the key role of legislators, legal consultants and academics in tenure reform. These players exert their influence by translating the economic and regulatory interests of the World Bank, civil society groups and commercial lenders in to questions of law. Drawing on political economy and actor-network theory The Politics of Land Reform in Africa is an indispensable contribution to the study of agrarian change in developing countries.

Since 2000, black squatters have forcibly occupied white farms across Zimbabwe, reigniting questions of racialized dispossession, land rights, and legacies of liberation. Donald S. Moore probes these contentious politics by analyzing fierce disputes over territory, sovereignty, and subjection in the country's eastern highlands. He focuses on poor farmers in Kaerezi who endured colonial evictions from their ancestral land and lived as refugees in Mozambique during Zimbabwe's guerrilla war. After independence in 1980, Kaerezians returned home to a changed landscape. Postcolonial bureaucrats had converted their land from a white ranch into a state resettlement scheme. Those who defied this new spatial order were threatened with eviction. Moore shows how Kaerezians' predicaments of place pivot on memories of "suffering for territory," at once an idiom of identity and entitlement. Combining fine-grained ethnography with innovative theoretical insights, this book illuminates the complex interconnections between local practices of power and the wider forces of colonial rule, nationalist politics, and global discourses of development.Moore makes a significant contribution to postcolonial theory with his conceptualization of "entangled landscapes" by articulating racialized rule, situated sovereignties, and environmental resources. Fusing Gramscian cultural politics and Foucault's analytic of governmentality, he enlists ethnography to foreground the spatiality of power. Suffering for Territory demonstrates how emplaced micro-practices matter, how the outcomes of cultural struggles are contingent on the diverse ways land comes to be inhabited, labored upon, and suffered for.

The issue of private property and the rights it confers remain almost undiscussed in critiques of globalization and free market economics. Yet property lies at the heart of an economic system geared to profit maximization. The authors describe the historically specific and self-consciously explicit manner in which it emerged. They trace this history from earliest historical times and show how, in the hands of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke in particular, the notion of private property took on its absolutist nature and most extreme form--a form which neoliberal economics is now imposing on humanity worldwide through the pressures of globalization. They argue that avoiding the destruction of people's ways of living and of nature requires reshaping our notions of private property. It also examines the practical ways for social and ecumenical movements to press for alternatives.

The struggle for land has been a key element of the conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine thoughout the past hundred years, and remains intense to this day. While international attention focuses on Israeli settlements that have encroached on to hitherto Arab land in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which lie legally outside Israel's boundaries, there is another dimension to the land question, as this book makes clear. Nearly one-fifth of Israel's population is Palestinian. This book examines the extent and means by which Israeli land policy today restricts access to land for these citizens within the 1948 boundaries of the State of Israel. Its authors - one a Palestinian lawyer and Israeli citizen practising in Israel, the other a British international human rights lawyer who worked in Israel for many years - examine the system of land ownership, the acquisition and administration of public land, and the control of land use through planning and housing regulations. What emerges is the extent to which the law is being used to restrict access to land by Israeli Palestinians and the discrimination that this entails for those citizens who are not of Jewish origin. The book argues that domestic and international law, which should operate to protect Palestinian land rights, have failed to do so, and that Israeli land policies breach international legal standards, including human rights norms.

This elegantly written and insightful book provides a geographical history of the Indian reserve in British Columbia. Cole Harris analyzes the impact of reserves on Native lives and livelihoods and considers how, in light of this, the Native land question might begin to be resolved. The account begins in the early nineteenth-century British Empire and then follows Native land policy – and Native resistance to it – in British Columbia from the Douglas treaties in the early 1850s to the formal transfer of reserves to the Dominion in 1938.

Sponsored jointly by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis "It's much too late but this is the book we should have had in Paris during the five years effort to get a political settlement of the Vietnam War. . . . Thought provoking." --Indochina Chronology "An important contribution to a better understanding of international relations . . . with reflective discussions as well as thorough case studies." --Indian Express Culture--along with many other variables--often impacts international negotiations. Culture and Negotiation offers a unique contribution by focusing on the distinctive impact of culture, both in creating unexpected opportunities for dispute settlement and in imposing obstacles to agreement. Separated into three sections, part I presents expert views on the nature and limits of culture's influence on negotiation. Part II comprises the core of the book, and contains a wealth of case studies and analyses of international disputes regarding water resources. Each case asks the following key questions: What are the different cultural components that made a difference in the outcome? How did culture play a role in the negotiation process? What are some specific illustrations of culture's contributing role, both to the dispute and to the ways in which it was handled? Part III includes implications for practitioners and policymakers, along with new directions for future studies. Culture and Negotiation is an essential resource for international relations practitioners in both the private and public sectors, as well as scholars and researchers interested in either culture or the theory and practice of negotiation and dispute resolution.

Exacerbated by the Gulf War, the plight of the Kurds is one of the most urgent problems facing the international community. This authoritative study of the Kurdish people provides a deep and varied insight into one of the largest primarily tribal communities in the world. It covers the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the great Kurdish revolt against republican Turkey, the birth of Kurdish nationalism and the situation of the Kurdish people in Iraq, Turkey and Iran today. Van Bruinessen's work is already recognized as a key contribution to this subject. Tribe by tribe, he accounts for the evolution of power within Kurdish religious and other lineages, and shows how relations with the state have played a key constitutive role in the development of tribal structures. This is illustrated from contemporary Kurdish life, highlighting the complex interplay between traditional clan loyalties and their modern national equivalents. This book is essential to any Middle East collection. It has serious implications for the study of tribal life elsewhere, and it documents the history of what has until recently been a forgotten people.

'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

Life in rural Britain has changed beyond recognition since the beginning of the twentieth century. Through dramatic events, such as the ban on hunting and the outbreak of mad cow disease, and through the growth of the organic movement, changes in farming practices and increasing rural poverty have all had an effect on how we view the countryside and the people who live there. Through an examination of the historical background to some of the main controversies, the authors explore the key elements of rural life, including the varying responses to animal disease during Biblical times to the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, the relationship between farming methods and landscape preservation, as well as organic farming, the role of the European Union and the truth about the Countryside Alliance. Throughout, they address the thorny question of whether the countryside can still support a rural population. This is essential reading for anyone with an interest in contemporary and historical rural life in Britain.

Land reforms have been critical to the development of Chinese capitalism over the last several decades, yet land in China remains publicly owned. This book explores the political logic of reforms to land ownership and control, accounting for how land development and real estate have become synonymous with economic growth and prosperity in China. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival research, the book tracks land reforms and urban development at the national level and in three cities in a single Chinese region. The study reveals that the initial liberalization of land was reversed after China's first contemporary real estate bubble in the early 1990s and that property rights arrangements at the local level varied widely according to different local strategies for economic prosperity and political stability. In particular, the author links fiscal relations and economic bases to property rights regimes, finding that more 'open' cities are subject to greater state control over land.

This vivid behind-the-scenes account of Israeli rule in Jerusalem details for the first time the Jewish state's attempt to lay claim to all of Jerusalem, even when that meant implementing harsh policies toward the city's Arab population.

The authors, Jerusalemites from the spheres of politics, journalism, and the military, have themselves been players in the drama that has unfolded in east Jerusalem in recent years and appears now to be at a climax. They have also had access to a wide range of official documents that reveal the making and implementation of Israeli policy toward Jerusalem. Their book discloses the details of Israel's discriminatory policies toward Jerusalem Arabs and shows how Israeli leaders mishandled everything from security and housing to schools and sanitation services, to the detriment of not only the Palestinian residents but also Israel's own agenda. "Separate and Unequal" is a history of lost opportunities to unite the peoples of Jerusalem.

A central focus of the book is Teddy Kollek, the city's outspoken mayor for nearly three decades, whose failures have gone largely unreported until now. But Kollek is only one character in a cast that includes prime ministers, generals, terrorists, European and American leaders, Arab shopkeepers, Israeli policemen, and Palestinian schoolchildren. The story the authors tell is as dramatic and poignant as the mosaic of religious and ethnic groups that call Jerusalem home. And coming at a time of renewed crisis, it offers a startling perspective on past mistakes that can point the way toward more equitable treatment of all Jerusalemites.

Property is a common denominator in human conflict as well as a useful tool for international studies. In order to apply property theory as a key to the analysis of human struggle, a broad definition of the term has to be accepted. Property is more than the things people own; it is the mass of rights and duties that associate persons with things, especially land. Arrogation of property is usually the precursor to the violation of human rights, but Geoff Demarest argues that the crusade for human rights has become a chase after symptoms that ignores the calculus of violated property rights underlying most murder and theft. A better understanding of property dynamics can help us achieve strategic designs, pacific or not. He seeks to restart international studies at the point of property, and in so doing, to find a mechanism for interpreting property changes, including those brought about by new technologies.

Longtime fly fisherman Quinn Grover had contemplated the "why" of his fishing identity before more recently becoming focused on the "how" of it. He realized he was a dedicated fly fisherman in large part because public lands and public waterways in the West made it possible. In Wilderness of Hope Grover recounts his fly-fishing experiences with a strong evocation of place, connecting those experiences to the ongoing national debate over public lands. Because so much of America's public lands are in the Intermountain West, this is where arguments about the use and limits of those lands rage the loudest. And those loudest in the debate often become caricatures: rural ranchers who hate the government; West Coast elites who don't know the West outside Vail, Colorado; and energy and mining companies who extract from once-protected areas. These caricatures obscure the complexity of those who use public lands and what those lands mean to a wider population. Although for Grover fishing is often an "escape" back to wildness, it is also a way to find a home in nature and recalibrate his interactions with other parts of his life as a father, son, husband, and citizen. Grover sees fly fishing on public waterways as a vehicle for interacting with nature that allows humans to inhabit nature rather than destroy or "preserve" it by keeping it entirely separate from human contact. These essays reflect on personal fishing experiences with a strong evocation of place and an attempt to understand humans' relationship with water and public land in the American West.