Land Commission Research Articles

Caesar’s Offer, Cicero’s Rebuff, and the Two Land Commissions of 59 B. C.

It is commonly held that the Board of Five (Vviri) created by Caesar’s first lex agraria in 59 B. C. was a subcommission of the Board of Twenty (XXviri), and that a post on the former - which was invested with judicial powers - was offered to Cicero in c. July of that year. This is founded upon Cicero’s puzzling reference to the post as both quinquevir and vigintivir. This paper argues two connected points: a) pace Mommsen, the two land commissions were in fact separate entities; and b) Cicero received two offers (first quinquevir, then vigintivir) some six months apart in markedly different political and personal circumstances.

A influência da Comissão Pastoral da Terra (CPT) na formação do Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST): breve análise teórico-documental do papel da religião nos conflitos sociais no Brasil (1954-1984)

This article seeks to relate the influence of the Pastoral Land Commission with its ties to Liberation Theology in. organizing the Landless Rural Workers of Brazil in 1984. That ecclesial model was one of the basic variables in the constitution of said social movement and its distinctive scale of national representation and socio-political coordination, which was to influence the methodology of rural collective action in Latin America in the decades that followed. The aim of the present project is thus to situate the debate regarding the agrarian issue in Brazilia during the military dictatorship, emphasizing the role of the Catholic Church in the process.

Southeast Asia. Conflict and Conversion: Catholicism in Southeast Asia, 1500–1700 By Tara Alberts New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xviii + 242. Figures, Maps, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

Conflict and Conversion: Catholicism in Southeast Asia, 1500-1700 By TARA ALBERTS New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xviii + 242. Figures, Maps, Notes, Bibliography, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463414000411 The history of Catholic missions in Southeast Asia, unlike those in Japan, China and India, is not well-known. Focusing on the development of Roman Catholicism between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in three geographical areas--Malacca, Siam, and Vietnam (Tonkin and Cochinchina)--Alberts traces the story of how the Catholic faith was introduced, took root and developed. This is a study of the success and failure of Western missionary enterprises in Asia, describing the perceptions and presentation of evangelism from both perspectives: those of the various groups of missionaries and of their converts. Mapping collaborations and conflicts among different actors of the period, Alberts analyses the 'nature of conversion and the relationship between religious belief and practices' (p. xvii). In particular, she attempts to answer the puzzle long-posed by historians of Christian missions: Why did Christianity flourish in certain places and not in others? Which methods and strategies ensured success and which failed? The book is comprised of an introduction, nine chapters and a conclusion. The chapters are organised in three sections outlining missionary structures and networks, missionary methods, and the experience of converts. Drawing from annual reports, letters, narratives, and histories written by missionaries and also by others, including diplomats, travellers, and merchants, Alberts skilfully weaves together the complex stories of how Catholicism was propagated and received in different localities, under diverse political, social and cultural situations. Beginning in 1511, Catholicism was introduced to Southeast Asia under the Portuguese patronage system (padroado). After a century of experimenting with padroado, Rome established the Papal Congregation for Evangelisation, the Propaganda Fide (1622), to take charge of missionary activities in foreign lands. This overlay of jurisdiction created tensions between the independent-minded missionaries and their Vicars Apostolic appointed by Rome for the mission territories. Five major groups from various European countries--the Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, Jesuits, and Parisian Foreign Missionaries (MEP)--laboured side by side on mission lands, often in nationalistic and ecclesiastical competition. Each of these groups had a distinct missionary method which was sometimes at odds with the others, which often resulted in one group undermining another's mission. The reception of Catholicism depended not only on missionary methods, but on local potential for conversion. The political situation in Portuguese Malacca differed greatly from the the peaceful court of Siam or the two estranged kingdoms of Tonkin and Cochinchina. In the former case, the missionaries had full colonial support, whereas the lands of the Thai and the Vietnamese were neutral to hostile to Western influence. Church authorities agreed that to attract converts, some modification of European ecclesial customs should be made. The point of tension was the question of how much accommodation should be allowed. Missionaries differed on how to present themselves to the natives--as monks, holy men, merchants, scientists, or healers? The introduction of Catholic devotion, catechism, images, and other Catholic materials were the competitive ground for winning converts. …

Containing Queensland prickly pear: buffer zones, closer settlement, whiteness

By 1925, the introduced prickly pear (Opuntia and Nopalea spp.) covered up to 60 million acres of Queensland and New South Wales in what was perceived as prime agricultural land. After 40 years of experimentation, all Queensland Government strategies had failed. Faced with this failure and a diminishing expectation that the land would ever be conquered, buffer zones were proposed by the newly formed Queensland Prickly Pear Land Commission. A close reading of government documents, newspaper reports and local histories about these buffer zones shows how settler anxieties over who could or should occupy the land shaped the kinds of strategies recommended and adopted in relation to this alien species. Physical and cultural techniques were used to manage the uneasy coexistence between prickly pear, on the one hand, and farmers and graziers on the other. Furthermore, this environmental history challenges the notion of racially homogenous closer settlement under the White Australia Policy, showing the many different kinds of livelihood and labour in prickly pear land in the 1920s.

The Politics of Land Reform in Kenya 2012

Abstract:This article provides a critique of the final stages of Kenya’s land law reform process, which has resulted in the approval of the 2012 Land Act, Land Registration Act, and National Land Commission Act. It argues that in spite of the constitutional and political importance of the new legislation, the process was marked by haste, lack of engagement by legislators, and little participation by citizens. The new laws can be viewed as a deeply disappointing outcome of a decade’s struggle over land policy. The article explores the effects of the constitutional deadlines for new legislation; the contradictory role of civil society in relation to the new laws and the bureaucratic structures they create; and the redistributive intentions and potential of the new land legislation.

Tribe at a Crossroads: The Navajo Nation Purchases a Coal Mine

Tribe at a Crossroads: The Navajo Nation Purchases a Coal Mine

Techbits: First SPE Workshop-Webinar Held on Waterflooding

Techbits The Technical Aspects of Waterflooding workshop held 23 October in Long Beach, California, was the first SPE event to involve both live participants and members participating around the world through a real-time video feed. The workshop drew more than 70 participants from various companies and organizations, including Occidental, Signal Hill Petroleum, Berry Petroleum, Santa Maria Energy, Termo, Spec Services, the California State Lands Commission, SPE board members, and students from the University of Southern California and California State University of Long Beach. The workshop was held by the SPE Los Angeles Section and the one-day live webinar by SPE. Following are highlights from the workshop. When Water and Oil Mix byAbbas Firoozabadi Water and oil sometimes mix due to formation of certain structures known as emulsions, small droplets of water in oil or small droplets of oil in water that add surfactants. Waterflood Management and Surveillance byGanesh Thakur This presentation illustrated how practical application of surveillance and monitoring principles are key to understanding reservoir performance and identifying opportunities that can improve oil production and ultimate oil recovery. Waterflooding Process and Design by Abdus Satter Waterflooding as a process is the most widely used post-primary recovery method in the United States and contributes substantially to current production and reserves. Waterflood on a Chip byBaldev S. Gill Microfluidics are used to displace one phase with another in a water-wet prefabricated microchip and the displacement can be seen under a microscope.

Transformaciones de tenencia y uso de la tierra en zonas del ámbito rural colombiano afectadas por el conflicto armado. Aproximación desde un estudio de caso

This article describes the changes in land tenure and land use in Tibu (Norte de Santander) between 2000 and 2010. It shows that those changes were highly concentrating, massive, and successively developed in two ways: a coercive one, operated by paramilitaries, and another one, operated by entrepreneurs and other land commissioners through an abnormal and unregulated market. I argue that both ways are explicatives of land grab, conduce to accumulation forms via dispossession, and that neither can be understood without accounting for a set of public policies and institutional designs promoted by the state.

Unsettled Explorations of Law's Archives: The Allure and Anxiety of Solomon Islands' Court Records

While there is now a rich and varied literature on the ‘archival turn’ in other disciplines, legal scholars have had relatively little to say about their own approach to archival materials, their conceptualisation of the archive, or the ethical implications of their work. This article draws on my own engagement with the records of land commissions and courts in Solomon Islands to consider the insights that might be gained from attending not only to the content of the archive nor even to its form, but to both the allure of the archive and the anxiety it induces. I suggest that paying attention to the affective dimensions of archival work casts new light on the ethical aspects of accessing, using, and interpreting court records. Furthermore, it draws attention to legal scholars' own investments in the archive, and the quiet, mundane, and epistemic violence of the law that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Koowarta: A Warrior for Justice: A Brief History of Queensland's Racially Discriminatory Legislation and the Aboriginal Litigants Who Fought It

The Koowarta case was one of several that began in the 1970s when indigenous people took action against racial discrimination and denial of rights to land by the Queensland government. The granting of mining leases over Aboriginal reserves instigated further litigation, including the Peinkinna and Wik cases. To understand the decision by the Queensland cabinet to deprive Koowarta of the land transfer of the pastoral lease purchased by the Aboriginal Land Commission, and the events that followed his case, this article details the history of ‘native’ administration in that state. Late in the history of this ‘protectorate’, the mining industry (and its generous treatment by the Queensland government) led to abuses of the Aboriginal peoples of the western region of Cape York Peninsula. The Koowarta case laid the ground for the recognition of native title in pastoral leases, a matter which John Koowarta's neighbours, the Wik, Thaayorre and Alngith peoples, pursued with the same determination.

Ecclesiastical Colony: China’s Catholic Church and the French Religious Protectorate by Ernest P. Young (review)

Overseas Chinese Christians, whether imbued with zealous evangelical passion or not, may bring in new religious ideas or introduce various resources that can change local Chinese Christianity through everyday interactions, informal contacts, or mutual engagement in other forms. Although this is sensitive in the current religious regulation system, ethnographers have reported that this kind of interaction between the overseas and the native in Chinese Christianity has proceeded significantly, maybe by using different tactful strategies to circumvent the political supervision. In sum, this carefully executed case study provides several well-stated interesting findings, which should not be missed by those who are interested in Overseas Chinese, Christianity in China, and economic behaviors related to religious values. KE-HSIEN HUANG Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen ERNEST P. YOUNG, Ecclesiastical Colony: China’s Catholic Church and the French Religious Protectorate. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xii, 383 pp. US$74 (hb). ISBN 978-0-19-992462 This excellent monograph is no cure for the summer time blues; in fact, the more the central theme of the work is developed over the eleven chapters, the more depressed this reader felt. The growth of the Catholic Church in China from the nineteenth century until the ultimate demise of foreign control in the 1940s is shown to have been the product of scandalous behavior on behalf of the predominantly French religious and bureaucratic institutions that relied so heavily on the French Religious Protectorate. Furthermore, Professor Young works his way carefully through a thicket of bilingual treaties to show that both the foundation and the maintenance of this protectorate occurred through dubious legal means. I write more on the deliberate obfuscations of the French parties below. For now, I must also state that for all the heaviness of the work—one filled with rigorously documented tales of sexual malfeasance by priests, political intrigue, property theft, and blatant racism—there are also some rays of hope. Young’s work argues that even in the midst of an oppressive colonizing regime, the members of the Chinese Catholic Church were able to exercise their own agency and eventually take significant control of their destiny. Along the way we meet famous Chinese Catholics like Ma Xiangbo 馬相伯 and Ying Lianzhi 英斂之, foreign supporters like Vincent Lebbe and Anthony Cotta, and Vatican diplomats like Celso Costantini and Mario Zanin. The aptly named Ecclesiastical Colony is also marked by extensive use of Chinese voices to flesh out the narrative. Even this feature is notable as the privileging of local actors is not routine in works about Christian history in what were once mission lands (although the more recent secondary sources Young cites by authors like Robert Tiedemann, Henrietta Harrison, and Daniel Bays, among others, do strive hard to achieve this). The development of an inculturated church was a painful, uncertain process. Furthermore, even when Chinese Catholics had finally seen off the worst of the Protectorate’s influence, they were then faced with the militantly atheist 254 BOOK REVIEWS Communist Party. Yet, even so, the church communities have survived even this challenge. Young’s work shows how these communities weathered the troubles of the Protectorate and the terrors of their subsequent persecutions. While this work does not deal with the post-1949 period, Young’s persuasive argument illustrates how the Chinese Catholic Church was able to endure the vicissitudes of its existence. This book is thus essential reading for all who wish to understand the history, presence, and vitality of Chinese Catholicism today. So what then was the French Protectorate, and why did it matter? Young quotes the words of a French diplomat, Monsieur G. Cogordon writing to a superior in 1886, after a series of treaties between 1842 and 1865: ‘‘Thanks to this ingenious scheme that gives the appearance of Chinese ownership to lands bought by the missionaries, the latter could make themselves purchasers of real estate without any difficulty’’ (p. 32). The protectorate essentially revolved around defending two supposed rights. First, missionaries travelling under a French passport could journey wherever they wished in China. Second, they could not only buy new properties but also lay claim to church buildings that had been owned in earlier...

The Management of Water Points in Niger under the Communalization

This paper seeks to analyze the management of water points in Niger according to the communalization process. It explains how the new reform of management in the supply of water, as a government policy, in the local areas raises new issues in Sahel and Niger countries. It looks into the issue of water supply which is at the heart of public policy to the countryside. It analyzes not only the importance of water points in Niger but also some sources of concern in the use according to the different logics involved. The paper further relates the role of media in social change according to the using of water in order to protect climate change. The paper concludes that, if, the aim for central and local authorities is to achieve local development, the confrontation between these two approaches must contribute to achieve the desired effect. The paper recommends that in order to solve this social problem, the mayors and central authorities must take into consideration the reaction of the different actors and should install in all the country the Land Commission under the Rural Safety Program.

Reinventing the Lefts in Latin America

The Venezuelan popular educator and activist Joel Linares tells us, in Pablo Navarrete’s 2009 film Inside the Revolution, that “one morning in Guarenas, behind the mountains [on the outskirts of Caracas], at 5 a.m. on February 27, 1989, a woman tried to get on the bus. When she refused to pay the new bus fare, the driver pushed her. When the driver pushed her, that was the beginning of everything. . . . The other passengers . . . got up from their seats and attacked the bus with sticks and then turned it upside down and burned it.” The popular uprising known as the Caracazo that emerged from this event turned isolated acts of resistance into mass rebellion and challenged “normal” politics. Those who had been silenced by the elite pact of developmentalism and its descent into neoliberalism began to speak as political subjects. The Caracazo marked the beginning of a new era of popular struggle in Venezuela and, arguably, across Latin America. As Mendieta (2008: xii) argues, the ideological prophets and political architects of neoliberalism sought to create an age of “the abolition of politics.” This “antipolitics” was primarily an effort to disarticulate, delegitimize, and criminalize popular-class political horizons and imaginaries, projects, subjectivities, moral economies,1 and ways of life. The embodied and visceral rupture of the Caracazo signaled the emergence of cracks in neoliberal elites’ ability to speak for Latin America’s popular classes. The fault lines in this project of antipolitics deepened in the following decade and eventually resulted in the election to power of various governments falling under the broad rubric of the “pink tide,” including those of Luiz Ignacio (Lula) da Silva of the Workers’ Party in Brazil, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and Evo Morales in Bolivia, and the development of social-movement and community struggles—the recovered-factories movement in Argentina, the Movimento Sem Terra (Landless Rural Workers’ Movement—MST) in Brazil, the water movements in Uruguay, the indigenous movements in Ecuador and Bolivia, the urban land committees in Venezuela, 489665LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X13489665LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVESMotta 2013

Role of the Land Valuation Division in Property Rating by District Assemblies in Ghana's Upper East Region

District Assemblies in Ghana are charged with the responsibility of developing their areas of jurisdiction mainly through internally mobilised revenue. As a consequence, the assemblies are empowered by various pieces of legislation to impose local taxes within their jurisdiction. The local taxes include property rates which are a form of tax that only the District Assemblies may levy. The study therefore looked at the levying of property rates in the Upper East Region and assessed the role and institutional capacity of the Land Valuation Division of the Lands Commission in the tax administration. Findings included limited coverage of the tax, use of flat rates due to absence of up-to-date property values, inadequate technical personnel and logistics for the Land Valuation Division (LVD) and lack of political will to levy the rates fully. Relevant suggestions are made, such as the need to introduce mass valuation, widen the tax coverage, establish a fund for revaluation and revive the Valuation Training School, as well as provide requisite logistics for efficient performance of the LVD.

“We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For”

An autonomist Marxist feminist analysis of the narratives of three women participants in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution—women linked by their participation in the urban land committees of La Vega, a Caracas shantytown—stresses the fundamental significance of women’s struggles in this revolutionary process. By focusing on the realities of women in movement we can begin to grasp the complexity of the feminized political subjectivities being formed and the contradictions and tensions in this process. This reading seeks to rewrite, in solidarity with women in movement, the dominant patriarchal script of politics by placing their agency and rationality at the center of Venezuela’s revolution. There is an urgent need to recognize a feminization of resistance that is historically distinctive and challenges masculinist conceptualizations of political and social transformation. Un análisis marxista feminista autonomista de los relatos de tres mujeres que participaron en la Revolución Bolivariana de Venezuela—las mujeres unidas por su participación en los comités de tierras urbanas de La Vega, un rancho de Caracas—destaca la importancia fundamental de las luchas de las mujeres en este proceso revolucionario. Al centrarse en las realidades de las mujeres en movimiento, podemos empezar a comprender la complejidad de las subjetividades políticas feminizadas que se están formando y las contradicciones y tensiones en este proceso. Esta lectura pretende reescribir, en solidaridad con las mujeres en el movimiento, el texto patriarcal dominante de la política mediante la colocación de su agencia y racionalidad en el centro de la revolución de Venezuela. Hay una necesidad urgente de reconocer una feminización de la resistencia que es históricamente distintivo y desafía conceptualizaciones masculinistas de transformación política y social.

Imperial Relations: Histories of family in the British Empire

In early 1860, Mary Moody gave birth to a daughter, Susan, at the Royal Engineers camp in New Westminster, British Columbia, where her husband was stationed as detachment commander, chief commissioner of lands and works and lieutenant governor of the colony. Writing to her Newcastle family, she longed for the emotional and practical support that her sister Emily could have offered in person in the immediate post-partum period, concluding that “[o]ne really needs relations in a Colony.” While rooted in her own concerns and experiences in New Westminster, Moody’s sentiment resonates more widely: family connections were often critical to securing a new immigrant’s position in an unfamiliar context, and more generally to navigating colonial configurations of power, identity and everyday life for men, women and children across the British imperial world...

Power, politics and poor relief during the Irish Land War, 1879–82

Between 1879 and 1882, large amounts of relief were dispensed in Ireland by a range of state, private, clerical and political organisations and agencies. According to Cormac Ó Gráda, £800,000 in private charity and up to £2.4 million in government aid was expended in an attempt to alleviate the extreme distress of the period. That expenditure was greater than the £1.2 million in rent reductions secured by the 275,525 tenants who entered the courts of the Land Commission in 1881, factors that are seen as central to the deflation of the Land War. In the historiography of the period, the distribution of this relief is usually only mentioned in passing: R. V. Comerford and R. F. Foster have outlined the high politics of private charities such as the Duchess of Marlborough and Mansion House Funds. The administration of relief at local level has also received limited attention, and much of this scholarship concentrates on structural causes of poverty and the effectiveness of various measures adopted.

American Crusade: Catholic Youth in the World Mission Movement from World War I through Vatican II (review)

Reviewed by: American Crusade: Catholic Youth in the World Mission Movement from World War I through Vatican II Paul Kollman CSC , Susan Fitzpatrick Behrens, and Michael Carter David J. Endres, American Crusade: Catholic Youth in the World Mission Movement from World War I through Vatican II (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2010) Summary Review Unless unusually devout, university-age U.S. Catholics today dislike considering themselves missionaries. In fact the dichotomy between their keen interest in international service, often with the church—some programs offering such opportunities have many applicants—and their aversion to self-description as missionaries is striking. This study of the Catholic Students’ Mission Crusade (CSMC, or Crusade), which counted a million members in 1969, thus feels like a window on a lost world. Yet as David Endres shows, the movement faced transformations between its 1918 founding and its dissolution in 1970 that were also wrenching. By making his theme those changing circumstances and the CSMC’s corresponding adaptations, Endres connects its story to U.S. Catholic history more generally. As Endres recounts the rise and decline of the CSMC, each chapter condenses different themes as the Crusade faced new realities: World War I, the 1920s boom followed by the Great Depression, World War II, anti-communism as a staple of Catholic public life, and the upheavals of the 1960s. Endres notes changes in the Crusade’s style and important figures in the movement, connecting its unfolding to ecclesial and other contexts. In his introduction he rightly calls the CSMC a “passkey to multiple worlds” (x). Chapter 1 describes American Catholic missionary consciousness arising in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Early impulses were imbued with both typical national self-understandings—as a country with distinct global destiny—and a wariness of identifying with extant and similar U.S. Protestant missionary orientations. Like Protestants, U.S. Catholics oriented toward mission touted instinctive American pragmatism as a gift to the world. They also linked the missionary impulse to monetary collections for “pagan babies.” The huge Student Volunteer Movement (SVM), founded by evangelical Protestants in the 1880s, inspired the eventual CSMC. Yet Protestants were also competitors and some Catholics saw in incipient Protestant decline Catholic missionary opportunities. [End Page 25] The book’s heart lies in chapters 2 through 5, each organized around one of four generations Endres discerns in CSMC history. The founders, described in chapter two, acted in the wake of World War I, seeking to cooperate with the church’s response to upheavals in mission lands where missionaries from warring countries endured unrest and occasional expulsion. The post-war period saw the formation of many U.S. Catholic organizations, and several prominent priests established student groups, notably Daniel Lord, S.J., who founded the sodality movement among students at Jesuit schools. A group of university students gathered in 1917 to encourage foreign missions interest and the next year Clifford King, a Divine Word seminarian at Techny, Illinois, conceived a Catholic counterpart to the SVM. Members of the CSMC pledged to commit themselves to prayer, education, and service on behalf of Catholic foreign missions. Most of the movement’s early chapters existed at Catholic seminaries, but the crusader ideal motivated every participant, all of whom were encouraged to consider a formal missionary vocation. Though King and other inaugural leaders soon went abroad as missionaries, the movement began briskly. Notably, an early effort to have separate chapters for men and women was rebuffed. Chapter 3 recounts the years up to World War II, during which CSMC headquarters moved to Cincinnati, home of “Crusade Castle.” Various clergy and onetime seminarians provided leadership as the movement grew to include a majority of non-seminarians as well as students in primary and secondary schools. The Crusade notably developed a neo-medieval culture linked to a broader neo-scholastic Catholic revival. Endres describes in detail two elaborate “mission pageants” prepared by Father Lord, both performed in St. Louis and attended by thousands. Eventually Lord, loyal to the sodality movement, moved away from the CSMC, but not before developing an anthem and creating an initiation ritual, modeled on supposed medieval oaths of fealty. In this period the Crusade overcame the Holy See’s...

Caenum aut caelum: M. Livius Drusus and the Land

AbstractThis article explores the legislative programme of M. Livius Drusus in 91 BC with particular attention to his plans for land distribution. This aspect of his legislation is often overlooked. I will argue that it was central to his plans for the year and that it was of the greatest importance in determining the response of the Italian allies to his programme. Land had been a friction point in Rome’s relations with the allied communities since the activities of the Gracchan land commission and Drusus’ proposals to distribute land alarmed them. It was this, rather than his citizenship bill, that drew the protests of the Etruscans and Umbrians reported by Appian. Appreciating the diversity of interest groups affected by Drusus’ legislation allows for a much better understanding of his tribunate and its aftermath.

Populism’s Achilles’ Heel

Minimalist definitions of populism, which are dominant in “Western” analysis, conceptualize Chavismo as a form of illiberal populism A methodological, theoretical, and empirical critique of the applicability of the term “populism” to contemporary Venezuelan politics, focused on the lived experiences of the popular classes in communal councils and urban land committees, reveals that its use masks an innovative and contradictory political process aimed at creating popular democratic subjects and a popular democracy beyond the liberal state and the market economy.