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| 1 |
ID:
123502
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2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The currently intense debate about 'land grabs' or 'land investment' in Africa has reinforced the significance of relations around land on the continent. This article argues that holders of land under customary tenure face increasing threat and that the role of foreign investors must not obscure the centrality of national agents - governments, political authorities and private actors - in land deals. The article first outlines the historical heritage of the colonial construction and post-colonial reproduction of customary tenure and its denial of full property to customary land-holders. The second part considers the escalating competition and conflict centered on land; the increase in land transfers implicated in the pervasive social conflict focused on land; and the associated rise in social inequality and contestation over belonging and citizenship. All these processes intensify the vulnerability of customarily held land in face of an escalation in efforts to acquire landed resources. The third and final part discusses 'land grabs', the most recent surge of international interest in African land, and the equally significant appropriation of land by national agents. The article concludes that the land question in contemporary Africa has to be linked to the dynamics of social transformation and inequality at multiple levels - global, regional, national, sub-national - that are reshaping not merely access to landed resources but the very bases of authority, livelihood, ownership and citizenship.
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| 2 |
ID:
174556
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In Cambodia, rural citizens embroiled in protracted land grabbing cases with the state and private companies are turning increasingly to international accountability mechanisms for resolution. This article applies the interlinked concepts of hybrid governance and legal pluralism to understand the prospects and limitations of ‘forum-shopping’ through appeals to international mechanisms for rural communities affected by land grabs. Drawing on interviews and using process tracing, it examines the outcomes of a mediation case filed with the International Finance Corporation’s Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman (CAO) involving indigenous groups and a Vietnamese rubber company in north-east Cambodia. It argues that while international accountability mechanisms yield platforms for dispossessed groups to assert claims, they also reify choices between entitlements and attainability without circumventing the problems associated with justice delivery under Cambodia’s authoritarian regime. Overall, this study highlights the interaction, competition and collaboration between distinct forms of regulatory authority exercised by national and transnational actors involved in land grabbing cases in Cambodia, demonstrating their role in ‘negotiating statehood’ by governing local claims to land.
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| 3 |
ID:
124944
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The lack of historical perspective in many studies of land grabbing leads researchers to ignore or underestimate the extent to which pre-existing social relations shape rural spaces in which contemporary land deals occur. Bringing history back in to land grabbing research is essential for understanding antecedents, establishing baselines to measure impacts and restoring the agency of contending agrarian social classes. In Central America each of several cycles of land grabbing-liberal reforms, banana concessions and agrarian counter-reform-has profoundly shaped the period that succeeded it. In the Bajo Aguán region of Honduras-a centre of agrarian reform and then counter-reform-violent conflicts over land have been materially shaped by both peasant, landowner and state repertoires of contention and repression, as well as by peasants' memories of dispossession.
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| 4 |
ID:
175416
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article investigates how appropriation of land for flower farm developments in Walmara district and Holeta town in Ethiopia’s Oromia region affected smallholders’ livelihoods. Between 1996 and 2018, the state expropriated 1487 hectares from Oromo farming communities for the flower industry with little or no compensation through the ‘eminent domain’ principle. This article demonstrates the effects of these actions on the rural poor in Oromia including threats to common property resources and farming plots, which constitute their basic livelihood units and intergenerational assets. By focusing on cases of land expropriation in the central highlands of Ethiopia, it challenges a common misconception that land grabs are occurring only on the periphery of the state. In this case, the entanglements of the export-oriented flower industry in global capitalism and the centralized state administration have led to destitution for most smallholders within 100 kilometres of the capital city. The study shows how policies associated with the Ethiopian developmental state accord priority to investors and state interests over local concerns, reinforcing wider concerns with dominant models of development.
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| 5 |
ID:
124931
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article approaches the debate on 'contemporary land grabbing' from a human rights perspective, focusing on one right that is particularly threatened: the right to food. It sketches an analytical framework grounded in international human rights law and the contribution such a framework can bring to the land-grabbing debate. Following a brief historical background on the right to food and its articulation in international human rights law, the paper expands on this by focusing on what can be called human rights responses to land grabbing from a right to food standpoint. The analysis considers the contributions of different actors in the human rights sphere and examines the role of the UN Committee on World Food Security and its recently adopted Voluntary Guidelines on the responsible governance of tenure of land, fisheries and forests. It also investigates how the phenomenon has been addressed by the UN human rights mechanisms, drawing on relevant practice of the UN treaty bodies and the Human Rights Council, with a focus on the Special Rapporteur on the right to food and the Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Cambodia. The engagement of regional human rights system with the issue of large-scale land transactions is also analysed.
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| 6 |
ID:
174552
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This study explores the emergence of the Afro-Indigenous food sovereignty movement in the context of a captured Honduran state and unequal political economy. In contrast with national-level research that has advocated a policy of food security in the context of non-indigenous campesino movements, this work explains how food sovereignty is more appropriate regarding Garifuna Hondurans. In a political economy that has precluded other options, and given the deep cultural relation that Garifuna activists have to land and autonomy, food sovereignty provides a possibility around which Indigenous development can be animated. It encapsulates a local ‘fight’ response to repression as an alternative to northern ‘flight’, often via migrant caravans, that many Garifuna have undertaken. This study shows how food sovereignty, more than being a technical policy set, is a discursive and material node through which dispossessed and especially indigenous populations can enhance decolonial power in the contestation of entrenched hegemonic and institutionalised power in a corrupt, unequal and colonised political economy.
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| 7 |
ID:
124911
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper has two main objectives. First, to address the problematic of the socioeconomic impact of land deals in sub-Saharan Africa by looking at what we know from the available literature so far, namely what has been claimed and how much research has been done, as well as why we do not know very much despite the quantity of material published. This is done via a systematic scoping review, which aims to avoid some of the biases inherent in conventional literature reviews and to provide evidence for some basic features of the emerging research on land grabs in Africa, with specific reference to their contribution to the understanding of livelihood impacts. Second, the article links empirical questions about the impact and implications of land grabs with a discussion of alternative (neglected) research questions, notably the implications of the current land rush phenomenon for the classic agrarian questions of capital and labour, as understood in agrarian political economy. Thus the paper proposes a re-engagement with debates on the classic agrarian questions in a Marxist political economy tradition in order to move the land grab research agenda towards more conceptually and empirically challenging research questions.
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| 8 |
ID:
137729
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Key trends link a globally connected urban archipelago and its hinterlands, warranting new studies of power in its most contemporary forms. This article locates land power and where that power is exercised – looking at the burgeoning global land rush from the perspective of cities. Urbanisation continues to drive vast political transitions, uprooting longstanding agrarian modes of living while creating myriad inequalities within cities. Are the world’s most powerful agglomerations active agents in this transformation? Answering affirmatively, the article reframes urbanisation as a vast, global geopolitical transfer of power from rural to urban. Leading global cities like New York, London, Hong Kong, Chicago and Singapore are not merely impressive collections of factor endowments. They are also sites of concentrated power with coercive influences beyond municipal boundaries. The article asks how cities project power in the contemporary global system. Juxtaposing data on global connectivity with the location strategies of private firms, we learn that the world’s most successful global cities are also sources of exploitative accumulations of land.
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