Abstract
Existing work on state building focuses on the creation of modern bureaucracies and institutions for education and taxation but generally neglects to point to communal property regimes as tools of statecraft. Political science scholars who focus on ethnic communal lands in the Americas emphasize the rise of formal multicultural institutions, including Indigenous land rights, but are skeptical about governments’ willingness to title large extensions of land to Indigenous or other ethnic groups because of opposing economic interests. Focusing on the titling of 12 percent of Honduras’s territory between 2012 and 2016, this article uses semi-structured elite interviews, land titling data, field notes from three months in rural and urban sites in Honduras, and drug-trafficking reports to examine the motivation of officials in the central government. Evidence suggests that the central government views and uses ethnic land titling as a strategy to reclaim territorial dominance in contested locations that lack state presence.
Highlights
Why, and how, do states title large swaths of communal lands to Indigenous and ethnic groups? Building on and expanding existing work on state building, this theory-building study proposes that high-ranking government officials title ethnic communal lands to extend the power of the state in contested peripheral localities
Previous studies have emphasized international norms and social movements as factors shaping ethnic land titling, this study focuses on the security interests of high-ranking government officials as an additional but crucial motivator
The main purpose of this article has been to show that the security interests of high-ranking government officials is a major motivation behind ethnic land titling in weak institutional environments
Summary
How, do states title large swaths of communal lands to Indigenous and ethnic groups? Building on and expanding existing work on state building, this theory-building study proposes that high-ranking government officials title ethnic communal lands to extend the power of the state in contested peripheral localities. My study provides insight about state building by focusing on the motivations of political elites in the central government for titling communal lands to Indigenous and other ethnic groups. Mosquitia has three important features: (1) high levels of in-migration by ethnic outsiders from the hegemonic population (mestizos) demanding secure private-property rights in land, (2) abundant land and natural resources ripe for economic exploitation, and (3) active claims to ancestral territory by local ethnic elites (Herrera and Edouard 2013; Mollett 2011; Pacheco 2009). Titling ethnic lands in the east created new governing institutions to control the underpopulated, remote, and geographically extensive eastern territory through local political intermediaries that state elites can co-opt and manipulate. The government uses ethnic land titling to win the war on drugs
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