Struggle For Land Rights Research Articles

Claiming Democracy and Environmental Justice at the Margins: Land Rights and Urban Informality as Sites of Mobilization in Morocco

Since 2011, Morocco has been experiencing major political upheavals. From the February 20th movement to the birth of the Hirak Al-Rif in 2017, numerous mobilizations broke out all over the country. Each of these mobilizations has its own specificities, both in terms of the forms of demands and the contexts in which they took place. This article aims to make a productive contribution to this global reflection by offering an innovative rereading of the dynamics of social and political transformation in North Africa, more specifically in Morocco. It does so by analyzing the increasing social conflicts between the State’s efforts to privatize land and natural resources to revitalize the economy, and marginalized populations who resist their dispossession. It will examine how 2011’s revolutionary movements opened new opportunities for marginalized communities to claim their rights. As a result of the destabilization of existing power structures, power relations between marginalized groups and the State have become increasingly radicalized: from the struggle for housing and access to public services—primarily water and electricity—in informal urban areas to the struggle for land rights and access to resources in rural areas. Throughout the article, it will be shown that these mobilizations have challenged, in their own way, the methods by which the Moroccan state appropriated and managed its territory.

Gerakan Agraria di Tapanuli Utara Awal Orde Baru (1971–1979)

Under the New Order government, the control of agrarian resources by the state was a way to ensure development programs that increased the country's economic income. This control is legitimized by agrarian political policies, including management through Law no. 5 of 1967 concerning the Basic Provisions of Forestry. In North Tapanuli, expanding the state forest area as mandated by the Forestry Law is a new chapter in the struggle for land rights, and triggers the emergence of community resistance movements. This article will discuss the history of the agrarian movement in North Tapanuli in 1971-1979. People's resistance signifies the inaccuracy of rural communities in the development of the country.

Between militants and “mafia”: Interrupting dispossession in rural Pakistan

In 2000, one of Pakistan’s largest social movements began: a tenant struggle for land rights on the country’s military farms. Though the military tried to subdue the movement, it eventually succeeded insofar as many tenants stopped paying rent. As a result, villagers experienced a generalized (albeit uneven) prosperity. Certain movement leaders, in particular, became especially wealthy, relocating from their mud houses to big bungalows, replacing their motorbikes with SUVs, and transitioning from tenant farming to lucrative businesses in nearby cities. They also started moving around with armed security, allying with urban elites, and entering Pakistan’s major political parties. Rumors also began spreading that some leaders were using violence or intimidation to accumulate this political-economic power. In the movement’s afterlife, ordinary villagers began to wonder: were their leaders still committed to militantly pursuing villagers’ collective interests? Or were they now using the movement for their own private, even criminal, ambitions?

The struggles for land rights by rural women in sub-Saharan Africa

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide examples of how rural women in Tanzania have addressed land rights challenges, showcasing three interventions implemented by Tanzanian Civil Society Organizations. It demonstrates that women have used both legal and traditional systems to negotiate and mediate their claims to land. Although the interventions featured have been greatly shaped by the work of civil society organizations, they have equally been influenced by rural women movements and individual rural women. The cases selected provide understanding of women’s land rights issues in both privately and communally held property/land. Design/methodology/approach This paper presents literature review of the existing secondary data on the subject coupled with the interviews. Findings Informal and formal approaches have been used by rural women to negotiate their claims on both communal and private lands. CSOs have equally shaped the approaches employed by rural women. Research limitations/implications This research was mainly based on the secondary data and few key interviews. There is a need to conduct further analysis of the issues. Practical implications This paper highlights the role of CSOs in improving the participation of women in decision-making bodies. The wave of large-scale land-based investments has caused insecurity of land tenure for women. The paper shows some ways to address the problem in communal lands. Social implications Socially, the papers shows the power relations involved in the struggles over land, as well as the role of traditional systems and bylaws in protecting the rights of women. Originality/value The paper provides dynamics of gendered approach used by women to negotiate their claims in communally held lands. It also highlights the role and space of local and international CSOs in shaping the local context of resistance on land rights. It is a very useful paper for academics and practitioners working on land rights.

Recognising Indigenous Land: Analysing the Success of Native Title and Land Rights Campaigns

Historically, the Indigenous struggle for land rights has been contingent upon the interventions and negotiations of the government. However, the past displacement engendered by colonisation has made proving continuous connection to land difficult, thus rendering native title a frequently problematic avenue towards recognition. This essay argues that grassroots land rights campaigns have had more tangible successes, visible through the physical acquisition of land rather than symbolic ‘recognition’. KeywordsMabo decision; native title; land rights; activism

Women’s struggle for land rights in the former homelands: Aninka Claassens speaks to Tsholofelo Sepotokele

abstractAninka Claassens has been engaged in the struggle for land rights in South Africa since the early 1980s. As a member of the Black Sash, she worked with communities who resisted forced removals during the apartheid era. She was also a senior researcher for the Land Rights Project at Wits University. She has done extensive work in the Rural Women’s Action Research Programme (RWAR) which seeks to enable people living in the rural areas to assert their rights and hold authorities accountable. Today, as the Director of the Land and Accountability Research Centre (LARC) at the University of Cape Town, she continues to strive for the recognition and protection of land rights in the former homelands. She is in conversation with Tsholofelo Sepotokele.

Land Rights at the Time of Global Production: Leveraging Multi-Spatiality and ‘Legal Chokeholds’

AbstractThis article utilizes the struggles for land rights associated to two sugar cane investments in Cambodia to reflect on the interactions between the multi-territoriality of supply chain capitalism and the multiplication of local spaces of legal intervention. With a combination of legal institutionalism, critical geography and value chains analysis, the article engages with value chains as the new space and form of the global system of production and looks at the theoretical and practical implications that derive from delocalization, outsourcing and the establishment of transnational networks that cut across boundaries and jurisdictions. After discussing the human rights impact of large-scale sugar production in the Koh-Kong region, the article introduces a critical legal chain approach to unpack and make visible the material and legal threads that connect Cambodia with multiple geographies around the world. In its last part, it utilizes the multi-territorial character of production to map its complexity and introduce the notion of ‘legal chokeholds’. These are legal structures and spaces of intervention that can be leveraged by human rights scholars, activists and other actors interested in re-defining the way in which rights, bargaining power and value are distributed through the chain of production. The violations and possible defence of the land rights that occurred in Cambodia are thus presented as output of non-linear interactions between legal and non-legal elements that operate at a distance, often unaware of each other.

Righting land wrongs with the pen: The leadership of Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ken Saro Wiwa

This article analyses the leadership of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Ken Saro Wiwa in the protection of indigenous communities’ land rights in Kenya and Nigeria respectively. It uses a case study and ‘leadership as process’ approach to focus on events and actions by Ngugi and Saro Wiwa, alongside the Kamiriithu and Ogoni communities in 1976 – 1982 and 1990 - 1995, respectively. In the case of Kenya, the Kamiriithu community did not attain their land rights and other freedoms following the Ngugi-led activism. Instead, the Kenyan government turned to further repression of individual and collective rights. In Nigeria, Saro-Wiwa was hanged after a trial marred with irregularities. However, oil exploitation activities on land belonging to the Ogoni ceased. There has been progress in holding Shell legally accountable for environmental degradation and a study on the extent of damage done to the ecology has been undertaken. Both writers, despite different outcomes to their activism, played leadership roles in their communities’ struggle for land rights. Their creative writing abilities and achievements played a role in their emergence as leaders and strategies for leadership.

Dreams of growth and fear of water crisis: the ambivalence of “progress” in the Majes-Siguas Irrigation Project, Peru

ABSTRACTThe boom in extractivist industries since the 1990s has resulted in a concomitant increase in socio-environmental conflicts in Peru. In the southern region of Arequipa, the Majes Irrigation Project has transformed 15,000 hectares of desert to fertile land and has become a hub for economic opportunities. In the planned second phase of the project, a new dam will be built to extend the amount of irrigated land and foster large-scale export-oriented agribusiness. Contrary to the government’s promises about progress, modernity and employment, the planned extension triggers anxiety among the local farmers who fear privatization, corporate dominance and a neo-colonial return of foreign big estates. This article examines four different stories – both overlapping and contradicting – about Majes. The first story envisions expectations of growth and modernity, while the second focuses on hard work and sacrifice. The other side of the coin appears in the third story about debt, loss and vulnerability following from neoliberal deregulations. The final story concerns the lack of benefits for the local farmers and the growing inequalities, resulting in struggles for land rights and water justice. The stories reflect clashing local and global scales and tensions between private and public ownership and between individual and collective solutions. The farmers in the highlands are ambivalent about the project because in spite of dreams about progress, they have long-standing concerns with large-scale corporate dominance and lack of local autonomy.

Review of *The Red Professor: The Cold War Life of Fred Rose*

This biography of Marxist anthropologist and prominent Cold War figure Frederick Rose has diverse potential interest, not least because of its subject’s often surprising connections to writers and literary culture in both Australia and the Eastern Bloc. The authors – historians who have worked on Rose’s legacy in other publications – bring to our attention the extraordinary and complex back story of this now little-remembered name, and restore to some contemporary clarity the political stakes at issue in mid-century contests over academic and other forms of cultural authority. In particular, this book reminds us of the length and difficulty of the struggle for Land Rights and cultural autonomy for Indigenous communities, and sheds new light on the contests within and outside professional anthropology that played out in cold-war configurations of Indigenous rights, across the political spectrum, and their influence on post-war culture.

Edward Koiki Mabo: His Life and Struggle for Land Rights

Edward Koiki Mabo: His Life and Struggle for Land Rights

Mi'kmaq in the Halifax Explosion of 1917: Leadership, Transience, and the Struggle for Land Rights

When a ship explosion in Halifax Harbor destroyed much of the surrounding area, among the devastated places was Kebeceque, an informal Mi'kmaw settlement in Dartmouth that had been under non-Native pressure for decades. The white owner of the land had long insisted that the Department of Indian Affairs remove the Mi'kmaq who camped on his property; the Mi'kmaq resisted these demands by relying on traditional practices of seasonal transience and innovative forms of leadership. Showman and Native doctor Jerry Lone Cloud led the struggle to stay in Kebeceque. Among a generation of informal leaders, he was emblematic of multiple Mi'kmaw cultural and economic survival strategies.

Mixed Methods in Studies on Women’s Struggle for Land Rights in Brazil

This study focuses on the extent to which mixed methods have been used in studies of rural women’s struggle for land rights in Brazil based on an analysis of a database of theses managed by the Brazilian government. The analysis focused on three aspects of the studies: identification of methodology, representation of the rural women’s voices, and whether the studies highlighted the women’s role as active agents. Mixed methods guided the analysis strategy of the studies themselves. The results indicate that 74% of the studies use qualitative methods, 22% use mixed methods, and only 4% were exclusively quantitative. Consideration of the studies quality reveals that mixed methods potentially provide a better understanding of the complexity in the struggle for land by women.

Land, Listening and Voice: Investigating Community and Media Representations of the Queensland Struggle for Land Rights and Equality

For the most part, the story of the Australian Indigenous land rights struggle has been told by the Australian media – media that have attracted consistent criticism for their portrayal of Indigenous Australians. On the other hand, Australia boasts a vibrant and accomplished Indigenous media sector that has also told the land rights story from a different perspective, albeit to a much smaller audience. The authors are currently a part of a research team seeking to provide a critical analysis of historical and contemporary representations of the land rights movement and the broader struggle for indigenous rights and equality in Queensland. The project seeks to challenge the prevailing dialogue by focusing on the perspectives of people who have been (and still are) involved in the land rights movement. Prioritising and exploring such alternative perspectives will not only present the opportunity to reconsider the role of media representations, but will also enable an Indigenous ‘take’ on them to emerge. This article presents our approach and rationale, discussing the methodological possibilities and challenges of research with Indigenous communities, which ultimately seeks to redress media imbalance and injustice by a retelling that elevates Indigenous voices, stories and pictures.

Participatory multi-criteria assessment as ‘opening up’ vs. ‘closing down’ of policy discourses: A case of old-growth forest conflict in Finnish Upper Lapland

Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), also termed as multi-criteria assessment (MCA), is a powerful policy appraisal tool but as Stirling (2006) has suggested, it can be used both for opening up and closing down policy discourses. Our analysis of MCA in addressing a conflict between state forestry and indigenous Sámi reindeer herding in Upper Lapland, Finland, illustrates MCA's potential in promoting open discussion about policy alternatives and their consequences, and also its limitations in highly controversial policy processes.The key features of the MCA process that served to open up policy discourse were the plural and conditional conclusions, which illustrated the diversity of viewpoints bearing on the Upper Lapland resource management conflict. The main risk of MCA to close down policy processes is to hide the scoring process and let the participants to focus only on the weighing stage. In the article, we present a novel approach to “interrogate uncertainties” and open up the information base. The Upper Lapland case study also illustrates the limits of MCA in the face of fundamental questions of ethical principle. MCA was helpful in addressing the problem situation that was formulated in terms of two competing livelihoods, forestry and reindeer herding, but unhelpful when the problem situation was formulated in terms of indigenous Sámi people struggle for land rights.

Comparative perspectives on Afro-Latin America

A review of Comparative Perspectives on Afro-Latin America by Kwame Dixon and John Burdick (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012. 382 pp., ISBN 978-0-8130-3756-1) reviewed by Eric R. Jackson (Book Review Editor, Journal of Pan African Studies; jacksoner@nku.edu) Associate Professor, Department of History and Geography; Director--Black Studies Program; Northern Kentucky University. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] United States immigration system is outdated and in many ways almost completely broken. Thousands of employers have manipulated the system to hire thousands of undocumented workers from Latin America, particularly those of African descent. It is estimated that about eleven million illegal immigrants now call the United States their home. Also important to this situation is the various voices that emerged during and soon after the 2001 World Conference Against Racism that was held in Durban, South Africa that referenced the immigration problem of the United States. Thus, the one million dollar question is what can be done to resolve this dilemma in a fair and comprehensive fashion? One way to tactical this problem is to examine and understand the cultural heritage and countless histories of some of the major groups of Latin American migrants who seek employment and a better life in the United States. editors of this volume, Kwame Dixon and John Burdick, members of the African American Studies and Anthropology Departments at Syracuse University respectively, seek to perform this task in the book under review here. In Comparative Perspectives of Afro-Latin America Dixon and Burdick offers a powerful and original collection of fifteen essays by various prominent scholars who explore the topics of and cultural differences, Black political mobilization, and various Latin American countries' responses to Afro-Latin activism throughout Latin America. More importantly, however, the overall goal of the editors was to create a volume that will provide a range of disciplinary perspectives, in-depth regional coverage, and cutting-edge analysis of Afro-descendant peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean (1). Also important was the editors' quest to investigate how the region's Afro-descendants are reconfiguring notions of citizenship, territory, race, gender, belonging, and nation (1). volume is divided into three thematic sections titled Blackness and Cultural Differences, Afro Social Movements and Mobilization, and State Responses respectively. Each section discusses some aspect of either the cultural heritage or the potent contemporary realities of the numerous Afro-Latin American socio-economic, political, societal, and ethnic challenges and complexities of this region of the Western Hemisphere that has received little attention from most scholars, political leaders, and community activists. Also included in this volume is a masterful balance of gender-focused essays that broadens the book far beyond any of its competitors. Finally, this book contains several essays that examine a wide-ranging of geographical locations and Afro-Latin American experiences from at least nine different countries. Comparative Perspectives of Afro-Latin America, in general, contains numerous profound and powerful essays that rest on the use of an abundance of personal interviews from members of a variety of Afro-Latin American communities that rarely have had a voice outside of their specific location. use of this type of research methodology greatly enhances the creditability and authenticity of each essay. Also crucial is that the use of this methodology helps the authors greatly analyze the subjects of race, gender, ethnicity, political activism, and geographical location with great ease. For instance, in the essay titled The Black Movement's Foot Soldiers: Black Women and Neighborhood Struggles for Land Rights in Brazil, author Keisha-Klan Y. …

Entering the field: Examining the relevance of political ecology to the agrarian struggle of Anjuman Muzareen Punjab in Pakistan

The widening empirical and theoretical scope of political ecology has been accompanied by discussions on the coherence and content of the field. While these evaluations necessarily focus on what is included in the conceptual boundaries of political ecology, little is said about what is left out. This paper considers the struggle for land rights by Anjuman Muzareen Punjab, a movement of tenant farmers in Pakistan, to illustrate how changing research priorities, difficulties in crossing theoretical and conceptual boundaries, and geopolitics and research access can hinder the visibility of particular forms of socioenvironmental events in mainstream political ecology scholarship.

Aboriginal Sovereignty and the Politics of Reconciliation: The Constituent Power of the Aboriginal Embassy in Australia

As a reoccupation of land immediately in front of Parliament House for six months in 1972, the Aboriginal Embassy was an inspiring demonstration of Aboriginal self-determination and land rights. Since 1972 demonstrators have maintained an Embassy on the site as part of the continuing Aboriginal struggle. Significantly, on its twentieth anniversary in 1992 Embassy protestors declared Aboriginal sovereignty just as the state-initiated formal reconciliation process was getting underway in Australia. Within mainstream public discourse in Australia, reconciliation is understood as aligned with a progressive politics. In this paper we examine the reactionary politics of reconciliation vis-à-vis the struggle for land rights and sovereignty that the Embassy embodies. To this end we examine a debate within legal theory about the relation between ‘constituted power’ (state sovereignty) and ‘constituent power’ (democratic praxis). Following Antonio Negri, the Embassy can be understood as one manifestation of the constituent power of Aboriginal people (and their non-Aboriginal supporters) that the Australian state appropriates to shore up its own defective claim to sovereignty. We illustrate this by comparing the symbolism of the Aboriginal Embassy with that of Reconciliation Place in Canberra. We complicate this analysis by discussing how the Embassy strategically exploits the ambiguous status of Aboriginal people as citizens within and without the community presupposed by the Australian state. In doing so the Embassy makes present the possibility of a break with the colonial past that is often invoked in the politics of reconciliation but which the Australian state has failed to enact.

Disowning Dependence: Single Women's Collective Struggle for Independence and Land Rights in Northwestern India

In April 2008 over 2,600 single women marched for three days to Shimla, the state capital of the northwestern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, to demand rights to land, health care and ration cards for single women. The march was organized by a new social movement called Ekal Nari Shakti Sangathan, comprising divorced, abandoned, never-married women, widows and wives fleeing domestic violence who are demanding rights from the state in their own names (rather than as wives, daughters or mothers); in so doing they are directly challenging the construct of the ‘dependent woman’ naturalized in pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial discourses. The most radical of the demands of this new social movement is the struggle for land rights and the creation of new women-centred family formations. Through an analysis of their collective demands, I argue that the normative, dependent woman is mutually constituted not only at the intersections of gender, kinship and heterosexuality, but also spatially, through denial of rights to land. As single women disown their dependence upon husbands/fathers/brothers and demand land rights, they simultaneously re-imagine gendered selves by envisioning new marital families and re-working the division of labour.

A 10-Point Plan and a Treaty

The last decade of the twentieth century has seen some highly significant symbolic advances for Indigenous people in Australia and Canada representing golden opportunities for their respective governments to advance the reconciliation process. But the political will to capitalise on them has varied enormously. This paper focuses on two case studies drawn from Australia and Canada which look at Indigenous people's continuing struggle for land rights.