ABSTRACT For over ten years, New York City’s public housing has been undergoing privatized revitalization efforts that threaten tenants’ securities while presenting a progressive vision: mixed, inclusive and tenant-centered developments. This article examines privatization and redevelopment efforts as projects of racialized dispossession and property enactment. It follows organized tenant movements that highlight the violence of these “land grabs” and articulate an embodied knowledge of precisely how the state’s possessive investment in whiteness, through property and real estate, extends into home and everyday life. These projects present visions of socially mixed “communities” that covertly forward racial capitalism’s intersecting systems of race, class and gender exploitation while overtly presenting a raceless façade. Building on Cheryl Harris’ work, this article examines the enactment of whiteness and property’s shared “right to exclude” by questioning: what conditions of racial-spatial exclusion persist through racialized dispossession, predatory commodification and performative recognition practices?

This study examines land grabbing in Turkey through the Green Road Project. Introducing the concept of "public land grabbing," it argues that Turkey’s reliance on public lands in these processes and the specific public ownership regime shape the legal, institutional, and political mechanisms of land acquisitions that are realized via megaprojects. Using legal analysis, field studies, media coverage, and archival research, the study highlights three key arguments: (1) Legal amendments facilitate the commercial repurposing of public lands in the name of "public interest"; (2) Public-private partnerships enable access of capital to public lands, fostering a crony form of capital accumulation; and (3) The discourse of “public interest” serves to delegitimize oppositional movements against land grabbing and to fragment the lines of resistance. Key words: Green road, public land, megaprojects, land grabbing, public-private partnership. JEL codes: P26, P16, O13.

Agrarian disputes remain pervasive and complex, frequently involving violations of land rights, land grabbing, and overlapping claims. Such disputes often span civil, administrative, and even criminal dimensions, resulting in fragmented litigation before the General Courts and the State Administrative Courts. This fragmented adjudication has produced inconsistent and conflicting judicial decisions, thereby undermining legal certainty and justice in the land sector. These conditions underscore the urgency of establishing a specialized agrarian court with a clear institutional and procedural framework. This study aims to formulate a conceptual model of an agrarian court and to propose its future institutional mechanism in order to ensure legal certainty in the resolution of agrarian disputes. From the perspective of Islamic law, land ownership constitutes a protected right (ḥifẓ al-māl) that necessitates an effective and just dispute-resolution mechanism. This research employs a normative legal methodology using statutory, case, comparative, and conceptual approaches, supported by primary, secondary, and non-legal materials. The findings propose the Agrarian Court Concept based on the “3Ps” framework—Position, Procedure, and Professionalism—which emphasizes institutional clarity, specialized procedural rules, and competent adjudicators. This model is designed to prevent future disputes, harmonize judicial decisions, and resolve agrarian conflicts in a manner that promotes legal certainty, justice, and the broader objectives of law, including the principle of enjoining good and preventing harm.

Abstract Urban areas are very dynamic places that are changing rapidly due to population growth and urbanization.This study aimed to assess the spatio-temporal dynamics of UGS under land use/land cover change (LULCC) from 1991 to 2024 in Gondar city. To do this, a combination of spatial and non-spatial data sources, including ArcGIS (Ver. 10.8), ERDAS Imagine 2015 and thematic analysis, were employed. A supervised image classification method was employed to create LULCC maps. The results showed that a decrease in the area of water bodies (WB) and croplands (CL) by 1 422.87 and 4,076.93 ha, respectively, while built-up areas (BUA), bare lands (BL) and UGS increased by 4,051.99, 863.66 and 584.15 ha, respectively. The findings revealed that urban expansion, rural-urban migration, population growth, land grabbing and illegal settlements were the main drivers of LULCC. Moreover the rate of UGS change increased by 17.7 ha annually, with a total gain, net change, and net persistence of 1,758.46, 584.15 and 0.82 ha, respectively. The highest area of UGS converted to CL and BUA. To enhance UGS development and a sustainable urban environment, it is crucial to implement effective land use development and management strategies, manage urban expansion and population growth and regulate illegal settlements and land grabbing. These results provide valuable insights for policymakers in the field of urban green infrastructure planning and environmental management and contribute to the existing literature while enhancing knowledge on UGS.

Abstract The Indonesian government has alternately ignored and respected the customary land rights of local people in its land policies since colonial times. Since the start of democratisation at the end of the 1990s, the trend to uphold customary land rights has become apparent at the national level. This study examines their status in the field, using the case of land grabbing on Padang Island, Riau Province, Indonesia. The findings include the company’s continued practice of purchasing land areas from local people at a lower price, not as compensation, because the company has not yet recognised the customary land rights. However, the local people contest the negotiation for a higher price through the newly introduced transparent practice of land transactions, involving village officers. The recommendation by the Mediation team to respect customary land rights is thus still a work in progress.

This article aims to establish a theoretical framework for the concept of the right of access to agricultural land (agricultural land resources) as a mechanism for safeguarding human rights in the context of land acquisitions. According to contemporary soft law instruments, the right of access to agricultural land may be recognised as an autonomous concept. This concept is characterised by a specific dualism, encompassing both the individual and collective dimensions. The article analyses the mechanisms of human rights violations resulting from large-scale land acquisitions, paying particular attention to the right to food, property rights, and the collective rights of indigenous peoples and local communities. The right of access to agricultural land is a broader concept than the classic right of ownership. It encompasses various forms of land tenure, including customary and informal ones, and requires the application of different protection mechanisms for the individual and collective dimensions.

ABSTRACT This paper develops a novel approach to understanding capitalism in its totality in which contemporary dependency and imperialism, as neo-extractivism, occur through three mechanisms: the super-exploitation of labour-power (Surplus Extraction 1), the super-exploitation of nature (Surplus Extraction 2), and the disproportionate claim on ecological sinks (Surplus Extraction 3). SE1 comprises super-exploitation in labour-intensive industry and plantation production where capital accumulation is subsidised by remunerating labour-power below its value; SE2 occurs through clearance of peasant/Indigenous people from resource-bearing land, enabling capital-intensive enterprises to boost surplus-value through accumulated labour as ‘nature’. The implications for counter-hegemonic political agency are outlined.

ABSTRACT This study assessed urban green space (UGS) accessibility and usage in Mogadishu, Somalia, a city facing significant post-conflict challenges. Employing a quantitative survey with 138 residents and GIS analysis, the research examined UGS availability, distribution, proximity, and resident perceptions. Findings reveal a severe UGS crisis marked by widespread depletion, critical inaccessibility, and infrequent public use. Over 60,524.7 square metres of former public UGS are now inaccessible due to privatisation or occupation by Internally Displaced Persons. The city’s three paid private parks, totalling 159,788 m2, are deemed inadequate. A majority of residents expressed dissatisfaction with UGS availability and proximity, with only 14% able to reach a green space within a 15-minute walk. Visitation is low, primarily for relaxation and stress relief. A crucial finding highlights the normalisation of limited access among the 25–35 age group (born post-civil war), potentially hindering future advocacy for these resources. This crisis stems from land grabbing, privatisation, Internally Displaced Persons’ settlements, and security concerns. Urgent, multi-faceted interventions are needed, including strategic urban planning, addressing underlying challenges, and public education campaigns, to enhance well-being and support Mogadishu’s sustainable recovery.

Abstract This article expands social psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove's characterisation of US postwar urban community root shock in time and space. We explore the impacts of land dispossession and population displacement on Black farming communities and their health from colonial origins on. We review racial capitalism driving such rural root shock as a socioecological nexus, with particular focus here on its effects in little‐studied Black communities of the US Midwest. National and regional elite power repeatedly deploys novel strategies in land grabbing, labour exploitation, and counterinsurgency out of an ethos operationalised around narratives of white civilisational redemption. The dynamic, however, is perpetually interrupted. Campaigns of resistance and alternate modes of social organisation launched in opposition repatriate the locus of community control central to population health and well‐being. We postulate Black‐led struggles in reversing rural root shock in the historical present help all farmers. We further propose humanity, presently caught in a global spiral in socioenvironmental expropriation, would benefit from such examples in reconnecting local people and place.

This study investigates the mandate and operational effectiveness of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) in managing land resources in Nasarawa State, Nigeria. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, data were collected from 384 respondents across key stakeholder groups, including NSCDC officers, community members, and land management officials. The NSCDC’s broad statutory mandate under the NSCDC Act (2003, amended 2007) has expanded through specialized units such as the Agro-Rangers (2016) and Mining Marshals (2024), created to address land insecurity and illegal mining. Survey results indicate high public recognition of NSCDC's roles in preventing illegal land grabbing (87.5%) and protecting agricultural land (83.3%), while lower confidence was observed in mediation functions (51.0%) and in the newer Mining Marshals unit (69.8%). Qualitative findings affirm the Corps’ role in securing farms and escorting land surveys but also highlight operational constraints like inadequate logistics and unclear legal authority for mediation. These findings underscore the need for strengthened legal frameworks, better resource allocation, and enhanced community engagement to improve NSCDC’s effectiveness in land resource governance in Nasarawa State.

This study investigates the mandate and operational effectiveness of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) in managing land resources in Nasarawa State, Nigeria. Nasarawa occupies approximately 27,117 km², with diverse land uses: agriculture dominates at 45.3%, followed by residential settlements (19.8%), mining and quarrying (15.1%), forestry (12.0%), and commercial/industrial land (7.8%). Agriculture, comprising crop farming (54.0%), livestock grazing (32.2%), and irrigation farming (13.8%), sustains most livelihoods but generates conflicts, particularly farmer-herder disputes. Mining activities, concentrated in mineral-rich LGAs such as Nasarawa and Awe, contribute significantly to the economy but cause environmental challenges like soil erosion and deforestation. The NSCDC’s specialized units, Agro-Rangers and Mining Marshals, have been instrumental in providing security and regulating these land uses, though operational constraints and community skepticism remain. Using a mixed-methods approach with 384 respondents and qualitative interviews, the study reveals that NSCDC’s mandate is well-recognized, particularly in preventing illegal land grabbing (87.5%) and protecting agricultural land (83.3%), with lower confidence in dispute mediation (51.0%). The findings highlight the need for clearer legal frameworks, increased resources, and enhanced community engagement to improve land governance and sustainable resource management in Nasarawa State, Nigeria.

The consolidation of livestock farming in the Amazon constitutes one of the main drivers of Brazil's neo-extractivist development model, marked by the intensive exploitation of natural resources and the export of commodities. In Rondônia, this process is clearly expressed in the conversion of extensive forest areas into pastureland, resulting in accelerated deforestation, ecosystem degradation, and direct threats to biodiversity and traditional populations. The Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau Indigenous Territory, located in one of the regions most under pressure for land tenure in the state, is a prime example of the effects of this expansion: invasions, land grabbing, illegal deforestation, and territorial conflicts have compromised both the environmental integrity and the sociocultural reproduction of indigenous peoples. This article aims to analyze the impacts of the expansion of livestock farming in Rondônia, focusing on the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau Indigenous Territory, discussing how the neo-extractivist model, government incentives, and historically implemented public policies have contributed to the intensification of pressures on indigenous territories and the vulnerability of their ways of life.

ABSTRACT Cherie Dimaline’s (Métis) Empire of Wild (2019) and Jessica Johns’s (Cree) Bad Cree (2023) refuse to frame the violent events at their centre as isolated or incidental. Instead, authors situate crises within the long historical continuum of settler-colonialism and its impact on Indigenous communities in Canada. Catriona Mackenzie et al.’s expansive intersectional taxonomy of vulnerability defines its pathogenic variant as emerging from entrenched ‘sociopolitical oppression or injustice.’ Pathogenic vulnerability demonstrates how specific groups can experience conditions that render them more vulnerable to violence. In this article, I argue Dimaline and Johns utilise speculative tropes to interrogate widespread decontextualised state narratives of individual vulnerability. Violent events are alternatively narrated as products of their specific context – the conditions of pathogenic vulnerability conferred upon Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial nations. A central protagonist’s individual search for truth foregrounds narrative engagement with contemporary issues facing communities – Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirit People (MMIWG2s) statistics, land grabs, state-sponsored industrialism and environmental and psychological devastation within post-extraction communities. Yet authors resist reasserting victim paradigms or employing a reconciliatory politics. Speculative tropes instead encourage what Jo-Ann Archibald (Stó:lō) calls storywork. Such tropes, which denaturalise violent encounters, encourage lateral thinking via nested narratives/metanarratives and embed both traditional monsters and alternative worlds, instigate storywork through inciting deeper reader engagement while foregrounding Indigenous agency, knowledge and resistance.

ABSTRACT The spectacular land rush is over, but land grabbing continues. It is likely to gain greater momentum in the near future. In this paper, we caution against conflating several key terms associated with the global land rush (especially land rush and land grabbing), stress the importance of clarifying what is meant by operational and failed land deals, and highlight the need to differentiate between land deals based on the status of the enterprises as well as the scale of land grabs. Together, these measures have enabled us to conclude that land grabbing is a persistent social reality despite the waning media interest. We argue not only that the scope of land rush is different from that of land grabs, but also that the scope of both is far wider, and their impact on people, ecology and societies much more far-reaching, than previously estimated and understood. This has implications for how we study land politics, and how we view political and practical policy work related to land more generally.

ABSTRACT This paper demonstrates how the global land rush simultaneously produces operational land deals and non-operational/‘failed’ land deals. We argue that it is important to study both types, and the logic that produces them, because both can fundamentally alter social relations and the wider landscapes in which they are embedded. Furthermore, non-operational land deals, sometimes lumped together with similar cases under the label of ‘failed land deals’ could in fact be successful land grabs. Differentiating the land rush and land grabbing, including their different scopes, allow us to see better the extent of the global land rush and land grabbing, and the long-term impacts they have on broad social life.

ABSTRACT This short introduction situates the contributions to this collection in the broader academic literature and public debates on the land rush and land grabbing. It outlines the highlights of the original contributions of the articles, individually and collectively, including on (i) the role of spectacularization in the global land rush, (ii) operational corporate land deals, (iii) non-operational/failed land deals, (iv) pin-prick and medium-scale land deals, and (v) resistance. While its argument encompasses a global perspective, the special empirical materials used are those from Colombia, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania and Cambodia. It aims to contribute to a better understanding of global land rush theoretically, methodologically and politically.

Communal Landholders’ Contestations Over Urban Expansion Induced Land Grabbing in Zimbabwe: A Social Justice Approach

Land and agrarian conflicts have intensified Colombia’s internal war, particularly through land grabbing and dispossession, victimizing rural communities. National policies have favored industrial agriculture while marginalizing traditional smallholder practices. In the Colombian Caribbean region, this has hindered campesino livelihoods and biocultural memory. This research examines how agrarian conflicts have influenced agricultural practices and local crop diversity at the scale of a campesino community. It offers insights into the links between agrarian conflicts, transformations in local food systems, and the erosion of biocultural memory. Drawing on concepts from agrobiodiversity, biocultural memory, and political ecology, this study uses social mapping and historical analysis to assess how people experience spatiotemporal changes in land use and crop diversity. The findings show that people connect the decrease in crop diversity to wider changes in the food system, the effects of the violent agrarian conflict, and the expansion of industrial agriculture supported by the State.

This paper explores the drivers of land grabbing in pastoral areas. We present a series of cases from across Eastern Africa to illustrate the dynamics through which long-ignored drylands are reimagined by governments and investors as sites of great value, setting the stage for alienation of rangelands at the expense of the pastoral populations who depend on them. Contextualized against the backdrop of colonial and post-colonial development policies, and the ideologies that underpin them, we discuss four resource complexes driving large-scale acquisitions of pastoral lands in East Africa in recent decades: 1) land grabbed via land markets through privatization and subdivision, 2) land acquired for resource extraction, carbon offsetting, and renewable energy production, 3) large-scale alienation of land for commercial agriculture, and 4) land set aside for wildlife conservation (i.e., “green grabbing”). We explore overlapping themes between these four processes that have resulted in the appropriation of pastoral lands, undermined local tenure security, and fragmented landscapes. We highlight in particular bureaucratic dimensions of privatization and land subdivision, reductionist cost-benefit assessments of resource exploitation projects shaped by capitalist logics, the pervasive influence of classical development theory and the associated prioritization of intensified production systems in rural land use policies, and a dualistic Euro-American ideology of nature and society underlying attempts to grab and reclassify pastoral areas for other purposes. Based on these insights, we offer recommendations for ways to mitigate the risks of future land grabs including strengthening pastoral land rights, creating more equitable community-led conservation initiatives, prioritizing participation in development negotiations, and establishing regional policies that support pastoralist livelihoods and maintain rangeland connectivity.

What if the next constitutional crisis is not declared from a presidential podium but tyranny forged into a deed? Not a contested election. Not a rogue legislature. Not even a runaway court. This time, it is quieter—with a deed signed and title passed, a new sovereign is crowned in private ink. Across the country, billionaire land grabs are redrawing the map of municipal governance itself. As wealthy elites and corporate oligarchs carve out private enclaves—from the privatized contract city of Sandy Springs, Georgia, to the unsettling governance of The Woodlands, Texas—we bear witness to public sovereignty giving way to oligarchic rule. Slowly. Quietly. Deed by silent deed. These private states are not simply gated communities policed by overzealous HOA boards. They are full-fledged jurisdictions ruled by those whose power derives not from public consent but from private wealth. Billionaires and corporate oligarchs impose their own rule of law—zoning, taxing, regulating, and even policing—without bearing the constitutional obligations and accountability that once constrained public power. Due process becomes optional, and equal protection descends to little more than a fluid formality. In these private states, ownership no longer secures liberty; it demands allegiance to oligarchic power. As billionaires and corporate elites advance their march against public governance, the judiciary and legislatures continue to turn a blind eye. The public function doctrine lies in tatters, and the nondelegation doctrine is but a whisper of days gone by. Courts and lawmakers, charmed by promises of “efficiency” and “innovation,” have willingly ceded traditional safeguards, allowing constitutional protections to decay under the weight of privatized rule. In the meantime, the American vision of common governance—once indivisible, public, and accountable—is being parceled out, one sovereign acre at a time. The largest billionaire land grab since the Great Depression adds urgency to this conversation. The acquisition of entire towns and vast rural tracts by the likes of Elon Musk and Marc Cuban makes clear that private sovereignty is no longer a theoretical risk but a reality to be enjoyed by the highest bidder. Let us not be naïve—these projects are not mere anomalies of eccentric titans of industry; they are blueprints for a dystopian future where public governance retreats, constitutional obligations unravel, and democracy survives only beyond the gates of billionaire control. This Article introduces the concept of deed-based sovereignty, defined here as privatized governance constructed not through elections or public charters, but through property law’s oldest devices—restrictive covenants, easements, and development agreements. Situating these micro-sovereignties within the longer arc of American land power—from feudal manors to company towns—this Article asks what happens when ownership, not citizenship, becomes the defining metric of lawful authority. It argues that legislatures and the judiciary must end the indulgence that wealthy elites and corporate oligarchs are merely private actors engaged in private conduct. Where private hands govern as the state, constitutional limits must follow. Reforging sovereignty in property law demands both a revival of the public function doctrine and a renewed commitment to enforcing nondelegation principles, actions that are necessary to prevent the covert transfer of public power beyond the reach of constitutional accountability. Only by restoring these safeguards can courts fulfill their duty to ensure the principles of public sovereignty—and the democratic principles anchored to it—are not surrendered to the silent ledgers of private deeds.