Struggle For Land Research Articles

Ethnic Difference at the Center of Land Struggles in the Americas: A Complex History of Marginalization and Multidimensional Challenges among the Garifuna in the Northern Honduras

ABSTRACT Across the world, natural resources play a critical role in shaping livelihoods among the ethnic and indigenous communities. This article highlights the struggles Garifuna in northern Honduras face regarding land ownership, despite being constitutionally recognized yet ignored by the government. For them, land struggles are also their racial struggles. Contested land ownerships are the outcomes of historical discriminations, leaving Garifuna vulnerable to violence. This article addresses the multidimensional aspects of land-based struggles that have resulted in social, cultural, and environmental damage, creating insurmountable pressures on local Garifuna livelihoods.

Land and Living on Little in Kenya

In these three volumes, Ambreena Manji, Barbara Thomas, and Julie Zollman detail how poor people in Kenya navigate everyday struggles against restrictive social, economic, and political constraints to build livelihoods through their individual and collective efforts in order to access basic social services, land, markets, and employment, and to participate in the social, economic and political arenas. In the latest edition of her book, Politics, Participation and Poverty: Development Through Self-Help in Kenya, first published in 1985, Thomas chronicles innovative ways in which the rural poor in six locations in Eastern, Central, and Rift Valley Provinces have exploited the complex competitive web of Kenya’s electoral patron-client linkages at local and national levels to access scarce resources for community development projects. The trend of unequal development based on region, class, gender, and ethnicity that informed development through self-help in the 1970s and 80s persist to date, as elaborated in Zollman’s Living on Little: Navigating Financial Scarcity in Modern Kenya. While Manji, in The Struggle for Land & Justice in Kenya, focuses on struggles over land and justice from the colonial era to the present, Thomas and Zollman highlight continuing struggles by people living on little to access scarce essential services and land in their quest for personal and community development. While these titles fit into distinct disciplinary fields and use diverse methodological approaches, they meticulously weave profound narratives of the resilience of ordinary Kenyans building livelihoods, families, and communities with little resources.

Indigenous territories and territorialities in Brazil: conflicts, r-existences and rights.

In contemporary Brazil, a geopolitics of dispossession is underway in the territorialization of agro- business, of which the greatest victims are the indigenous peoples. The objective of this paper is to analyze the territories and territorialities of r-existence of indigenous peoples and traditional communities in the light of territorial conflicts in the struggle for land, water and forest. Faced with the attacks of the genocidal policies of the Brazilian State and the context of the pandemic, indigenous peoples have carried out their struggles through mobilizations, marches and r-existence. In the struggle against the pandemic, urban and climate crisis, it is important to consider territories and territorialities that fight for and by indigenous peoples, guided by the principles of environmental justice, which focus on the protection of the environment, the body-territory of the Earth, and which effectively aim to reduce inequality, poverty, oppression, violence and environmental racism.

The Health of Women Living in Rural Settlements: The Women of the Mandacaru Settlement

The health of women living in rural settlements in Brazil goes through a diversity of situations that requires intensity and dedication, as it goes through the struggle for land, housing, survival. These women struggle for space, autonomy, work, and their health care practices are strongly aligned with these processes. Thus, the objective of this research was to understand how these women live in the Mandacaru Settlement and the relationship between their experiences and life experiences and health. This is a qualitative research with ethnographic approach through immersion in the field and using the technique of participant observation. The analyses were performed from the interpretative analysis. These women seek to carry out their care practices within a logic that permeates work, the struggle for land and autonomy as women farmers and rural workers.

Hawai‘i Land Struggles and a Pacific Statehouse

Hawai‘i Land Struggles and a Pacific Statehouse

State-Centered Land Regimes and the Struggle for Customary Land in East Asia

State-Centered Land Regimes and the Struggle for Customary Land in East Asia

Histórias de vida de mulheres Sem Terra: divisão sexual do trabalho na agroecologia

Abstract: In this article, we analyse the sexual division of labour in the agroecological work of women living in Agrarian Reform territories in Paraná. Research data point to women’s increased autonomy, ‘agency’ and active subjectivity. However, we identified the persistence of patriarchal sexual divisions of labour. This leads to longer working days and exhaustion of women’s bodies. In addition, we identified reduced socio-political organization and migration to the realm of agroecological production and trading. These inequalities are reduced by generational factors, schooling, gender education, and countryside-city transience. Given this scenario, the feminist demand for an egalitarian sexual division of labour is relevant in the political struggle for gender, land, agroecology and decoloniality.

Repenser les luttes pour l’accès à la terre dans la ville postindustrielle1

Les politiques raciales et culturelles concernant l’accès à la terre et la propriété sont au coeur des luttes urbaines, mais ont reçu relativement peu d’attention de la part des géographes. Cet article analyse les luttes pour l’accès à la terre qui ont cours à Détroit, où plus de 100 000 terrains sont classés comme « vacants ». Depuis 2010, les urbanistes et les autorités gouvernementales ont élaboré des plans controversés dans le but de ruraliser les quartiers « vacants » de Détroit dans le cadre d’un programme d’austérité fiscale, ranimant d’anciennes questions de dépossession liée à la race, de souveraineté et de luttes de libération. Cet article se penche sur ces politiques litigieuses à travers l’examen des conflits provoqués par la proposition d’un homme d’affaires blanc de construire la plus grande forêt urbaine du monde au centre d’une ville à majorité noire. Je me suis intéressée à la façon dont les résidents, les agriculteurs urbains et les activistes communautaires ont résisté au projet en revendiquant les terrains vacants en tant que communs urbains. Ils ont fait valoir que ces terres sont occupées et qu’elles appartiennent à ceux qui ont travaillé et souffert pour elles. En combinant l’ethnographie communautaire aux idées de la théorie critique de la propriété, des études critiques de la race et de la théorie postcoloniale, je soutiens que les luttes pour la terre à Détroit dépassent les conflits sur la redistribution des ressources. Elles sont indissociables des débats sur les notions de race, de propriété et de citoyenneté qui sous-tendent les démocraties libérales modernes et les luttes actuelles pour la décolonisation.

Rethinking Public Spaces in Africa

The struggles for land and spatial justice feature very strongly in the modern history of the African continent, which has not only deeply shaped the continent’s history, but continues to shape its present and unfold in its future. In such contexts, geographic space as well as public space is layered with physical, symbolic and political meanings. Who has access to the benefits and resources of the city and who does not, who is able to flourish and who cannot, are therefore part of much larger historical and societal questions, reflecting the beliefs and values we hold and pursue as communities, governments, nations, and perhaps also as Africans.The centrality of public spaces in Africa informed the formation of the Centre on African Public Spaces (CAPS). Initially established by the City of Johannesburg metropolitan municipality in response to the 2018 Africities Summit’s call for a regional knowledge-sharing platform on public spaces, CAPS is the first multidisciplinary initiative formed through international collaborations with the ‘UN-Habitat Global Public Space Programme’ and the ‘GIZ Inclusive Violence and Crime Prevention Programme’. CAPS also brings together municipalities and provincial governments across the continent, universities and civil society organisations.

Shutting Down the Machines of Destruction: Possibilities for Agrarian Life on the Protest Blockade

AbstractThe protest blockade is one tool for seeking liberation from the state while living within it. I offer a critical analysis of the protest blockade in agrarian struggles for land and life in Indonesia and beyond. I specify my discussion with a retelling of a Sumatran land‐back movement of smallholders and landless workers who twice turned to the blockade to reclaim their land from a plantation company. I consider how these blockades and others in Sumatra and Borneo created direct‐action power, thereby expanding people's possibilities for livelihood and autonomy in landscapes of extraction and exploitation. Blockading action is a process that unfolds from within as activists challenge the legitimacy of their rulers and set out to create more emancipatory spaces and territories. When protestors blockade the bulldozers, logging trucks, and other machines of capitalist exploitation of workers and ecologies, they seek to disrupt the infrastructures and commodity flows of the dominant political‐economic order as well as open up new agrarian possibilities. These protest blockades are central to the anarchist, Indigenous, and decolonial politics that motivate direct‐action protests across the globe.

Territories of hope: A human geography of agrarian politics in Brazil

The Landless Rural Workers Movement ( Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST)) is widely recognized for its struggles for land and for producing healthy food. Since its birth, 40 years ago, the MST has continued to territorialize itself, producing its own existence. There are hundreds of thousands of families fighting for the peasant condition, which is much more than fighting for land. In this article, I argue that MST members are not simply fighting for land in isolated agrarian reform settlements. Rather, as the mística suggests, they are producing new understandings, practices, and imaginaries of the Brazilian national space. Through their mobilization, their labor on the land, and their solidarity as expressed in countless meetings, marches, and collective organizations, they are actively producing alternative territories that sit within but resist the hegemonic national territory. I incorporate theories from critical human geography to argue that territory is a category that unites land and governance. Territorial control is established by (depends on) the norms, rules, and rights in any given place and time. Within the context of the modern nation-state, the MST can be understood as producing new territories, ones that are aspirational and emerging—I call these “territories of hope” to signal the material and symbolic labor of collective desire. These territories are constituted through relations within MST settlements and between MST members and the state, agribusiness corporations, and the broader public across various spatial and temporal dimensions and scales.

УКРАЇНСЬКІ НАЦІОНАЛЬНІ ЦІННОСТІ ТА СИМВОЛИ В СУЧАСНОМУ УКРАЇНСЬКОМУ ТА СВІТОВОМУ ІНФОРМАЦІЙНО-КОМУНІКАЦІЙНОМУ ПРОСТОРІ

<p><strong><em>The purpose of the research: </em></strong><em>is to identify the main trends in the spread of Ukrainian national values and symbols in the modern Ukrainian and international information and communication space during the full-scale invasion of the russian federation into Ukraine.</em></p><p><strong><em>Research methodology. </em></strong><em>During the research, the following methods were used: analysis, synthesis, generalization – to study the sources of relevant issues and to understand the opinions of scientists about the essence of national values in general and authentic values in particular; comparison – to identify trends in the use of symbols to denote Ukrainian national values in the conditions of a full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation into Ukraine in the Ukrainian and global information and communication space; observation and description – to clarify the peculiarities of the use of Ukrainian symbols on television, in the Internet media and in social networks. </em></p><p><strong><em>Results.</em></strong><em> It is concluded that the research of values in the information and communication space of Ukraine usually concerns the moral and ethical plane. If we are talking about Ukrainian national values, they have traditionally been the object of study in the field of national security policy. Today, in the conditions of the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the importance of Ukrainian national values, the process of symbolizing which can be observed both on television and in the Internet media, as well as in social networks and popular messengers, is being actualized. The most symbolic now are the colors of the Ukrainian flag as the state symbol of Ukraine. At the same time, the process of symbolization affected such Ukrainian national values as the trident, Cossack, mace, embroidered towel, vyshyvanka (embroidered shirt or dress) and borscht. In the Ukrainian information and communication space, in particular on television and in the Internet media, blue and yellow colors symbolize, mainly, the official representations of Ukraine as a state and its officials. In social networks and messengers, emojis, as well as photos, posters or videos in blue and yellow colors have a much wider functional palette: from a visual marker of Ukrainian material to an incentive to unite in the struggle for the native land. In the global information and communication space, a bright trend towards the use of Ukrainian national symbols during public actions in support of Ukraine as a state and the Ukrainian people as a fighter for the freedom and independence of their country has been observed. In addition, the participants of such actions turn to the leadership of European countries and the world with specific requests: for help in liberating the courageous defenders of Azovstal, recognition of the Russian Federation as a sponsor of terrorism, etc. </em></p><p><strong><em>Novelty. </em></strong><em>New trends in the symbolization of Ukrainian national values and the expansion of their functions in the Ukrainian and global information and communication space during the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation into Ukraine are outlined. </em></p><p><strong><em>Practical value.</em></strong><em> The obtained results can be used in the educational process in colleges and universities that prepare specialists according to the educational programs of fields 061 «Journalism» and 021 «Audiovisual Art and Production» and for further scientific investigations concerning the influence of national values and symbols through mass media and social networks. </em></p><strong><em>Key words:</em></strong><em> Ukrainian national values and symbols, authentic values, Ukrainian and global information and communication space, color of the Ukrainian flag, trident, Ukrainian Cossacks, embroidery, television, Internet media, social networks.</em>

Paying for ecological services in Ecuador: The political economy of structural inequality

AbstractPaying Indigenous communities to conserve land for carbon sequestration is a controversial way of tackling climate change. Critics argue that paying for ecological services (or ‘PES’) in the form of carbon offset programmes reduces land and social relations to an economic transaction that devalues Indigenous livelihoods and communities. At the same time, empirical studies have shown that Indigenous communities have accepted and even embraced the idea of being paid to conserve land for climate change mitigation. This paper explores this apparent contradiction by investigating the implementation of Programa Socio Bosque (PSB), a PES carbon sequestration programme in Ecuador. Drawing upon primary fieldwork in the highland province of Chimborazo, it makes the case that PES programmes need to be understood as form of state power that reconfigures and reinforces the ways in which Indigenous peoples engage with the state. Particularly important in this regard is the role of the state in reinforcing the agrarian conditions under which Indigenous communities use and interpret PES payments while at the same time reconfiguring new forms of land conservation. Empirically, the research reveals important complementarities between the goals of carbon sequestration PES programmes and Indigenous land‐use practices. Methodologically, it highlights the importance of situating the study of PES programmes in a context of land struggles, community–state relations and agrarian change.

Towards transnational agrarian conflicts? Global NGOs, transnational agrobusiness and local struggles for land on Sumatra

ABSTRACT The article explores the spatial dimension of the contested renegotiation of society-nature relations in the context of the oil palm boom in Indonesia. Drawing on qualitative research as well as on concepts of political ecology, materialist state theory and literature on the transnationalization and internationalisation of the state, it argues that conflicts in the context of the oil palm boom cannot merely be conceptualised as local negotiation processes for access to land, but are increasingly transnational in character. Particularly, transnational actors such as oil palm companies and environmental protection organisations as well as transnational regulatory systems such as private sustainability and carbon standards are increasingly relevant in structuring local conflicts. To illustrate how these transnational mechanisms of contestation and conflict resolution operate, the article's empirical focus lies on conflicts over land in the Indonesian province of Jambi on the island of Sumatra.

Book Review

Ambreena Manji’s The struggle for land and justice in Kenya, James Currey, 2020, aims to provide a socio-legal approach to understanding developments in the land domain in Kenya between 2010 and 2020. Specifically, the book studies land accumulation by dispossession and the struggles against exploitation through a justice framework. The book is divided into 8 chapters.

Target lands: continuities and discontinuities in the struggle for land in Minas Gerais

RESUMO O artigo discute os conflitos em torno de determinadas terras em Minas Gerais, no intuito de compreender algumas formas de mobilização e memórias que possibilitaram a rearticulação dessas lutas, especialmente entre as décadas de 1960 e 1980. Trata-se das disputas pela Fazenda do Ministério (Governador Valadares-MG) e por Cachoeirinha (Varzelândia-MG), ambas de caráter emblemático na luta pela reforma agrária no estado. Refletindo sobre as especificidades e semelhanças entre esses dois processos, busca-se compreender a variedade e a complexidade dessas mobilizações, assim como alguns de seus contornos mais amplos. A investigação demonstrou que essas lutas, em alguns momentos, contaram com a participação de organizações e movimentos sociais, que ligaram esses conflitos específicos às suas bandeiras mais amplas, aumentando seu alcance e, assim, a possibilidade de conquista das terras pelos trabalhadores rurais.

Contact Strategies: Histories of Native Autonomy in Brazil by Heather F. Roller

Following historians like Pekka Hämäläinen, who have done comparable work for North America, Roller’s ethnohistory demonstrates that many of Brazil’s Indigenous people not only maintained, defended, and even expanded their autonomy in the face of Luso-Brazilian colonialism but also engaged creatively with the newcomers.1 Elegantly written and painstakingly researched in sources produced by hostile Luso-Brazilians, which Roller carefully reads against the grain, this impressive book shows how “state and settler expansion looked from the vantage point of still-autonomous peoples” (3). Roller focuses on the two best-documented groups, the Mura in the upper Amazon and the Mbayá-Guaikurú (or Guaikurú) in the Pantanal region bordering modern-day Paraguay, but she cites examples from across Portuguese America. These autonomous groups “shape[d] the form and pace of contact” and their descendants still do so today (24–25).The first three chapters about the late-colonial period constitute the strongest part of this book. Chapter 1 examines what Indigenous people knew of Luso-Brazilians and how they navigated the tension between the evident dangers of contact and their desire for the newcomers’ “novel and interesting things” (34). They strategically occupied territory to alternate between raiding and trading (few chose complete isolation), and they assimilated outsiders, whether refugees from colonialism or survivors of Native groups devastated by contact, to strengthen their societies.Six Indigenous peace initiatives between 1775 and 1795, the focus of Chapter 2, took place amid intensifying Spanish–Portuguese rivalry and border demarcation, but they primarily reflected Indigenous peoples’ desire to acquire Luso-Brazilian goods and resources on their own terms. Indigenous groups’ “factionalism” involved internal debates about how to deal with newcomers. When they chose to seek peace, they did so confidently: A frustrated Portuguese fort commander recorded Guaikurú boasts in 1803 to the effect that “even though we [the Portuguese] are very fierce, they know how to tame us” (16, 74).In “practices of peace,” like talks and gift exchanges (the subject of Chapter 3), Luso-Brazilians had “to play by Indigenous rules” (90). As gifts flowed from Portuguese forts in the 1790s, officials grumbled about becoming tributaries of their erstwhile enemies; gradually and grudgingly, they learned something of how the recipients understood gift exchanges. The Guaikurú also learned about Luso-Brazilian society: Those contemplating settlement near a fort demanded that the Portuguese provide slaves to farm for them.Chapters 4 and 5, about the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, do not quite match the quality of the first three. The rich late-colonial sources dry up after independence, and the 1808 declaration of a war of extermination against the Botocudo set a disturbing tone for borderlands interactions throughout Brazil. Independence resulted in cash-strapped successor states on both sides of the old imperial borders, the governments of which offered fewer gifts. Paraguay even declared a war of extermination against the Guaikurú. Internal colonization accelerated, and in 1845, the Brazilian government launched a new program to gather “uncivilized” “Indians” into villages, where they would provide labor for settlers who claimed their former lands. Despite these challenges, Indigenous groups continued to pursue the “strategies of mobility and patterns of seasonal occupation” that had served them well (151). Others negotiated with the new state; delegations of Indigenous leaders routinely turned up in Rio de Janeiro and provincial capitals.Rereading early twentieth-century “salvage ethnography,” Roller shows how the Kadiwéu (descendants of the Guaikurú) and the Mura re-invented themselves and remained in contact with outsiders. The cultural purity that preoccupied early anthropologists meant (and means) far less to Indigenous groups whose “capacity for cultural persistence through transformation” laid the groundwork for their contemporary struggles for land and autonomy, briefly discussed in the conclusion (190).Roller limited her research to Luso-Brazilian sources; future work in imperial Spanish archives and those of the successor states may reveal additional dimensions to her story. Contact Strategies sets a high standard for ethnographic research that future historians may fruitfully emulate to extract insights from hostile sources that rarely even acknowledged Indigenous people by name.

Territorial Rights for Individuals, States, orPueblos? Answers from Indigenous Land Struggles in Colonial Spanish America

Who should have rights to territory? Dominant political theories hold that either individuals or state-based groups (states, nations, or state-based civic peoples) have foundational territorial rights. However, they cannot accommodate some Indigenous peoples’ claims that the land should be subject neither to private ownership nor to sovereign state control. Given these claims, some scholars have recently revised these theories to mediate between state jurisdiction and private property. But those revisions have thus far neglected the views of Indigenous peoples who did not experience Anglo-American settler colonialism. This article therefore examines contemporary territorial rights theories in light of the experience of colonial Spanish America. Using sixteenth-century documents in which Indigenous communities conceptualized and asserted their rights to territory, historical evidence of political struggles between these communities and the colonial state, and interpretations of colonial legal thinkers from the seventeenth century (particularly Juan de Solórzano Pereira), I argue that, in addition to individuals and state-based groups, we should consider another subject of territorial rights:pueblos,or grounded communities.

The Struggle for Land, Water, Forests and Law: a milestone in the history of the IPDMS Ongoing Training Program

Ler A Luta pela Terra, Água, Florestas e o Direito, obra organizada por Euzamara de Carvalho, Luiz Otavio Ribas e Carla Benitez, é mergulhar no início de um capítulo importante dos 10 anos de história e desafios do Instituto de Pesquisa, Direitos e Movimentos Sociais (IPDMS): os livros do Programa de Formação Permanente do IPDMS. A obra que temos em mãos é um marco, pois se trata do primeiro volume lançado com esse título e dentro da proposta do que hoje são os cadernos do Programa de Formação Permanente do IPDMS. Cadernos que desde início foram pensados como uma forma de dar visibilidade à produção teórica e as temáticas abordadas por pesquisadoras e pesquisadores vindos do campo e de populações tradicionais.

Toward “Total Freedom”: Black Ecologies of Land, Labor, and Livelihoods in the Mississippi Delta

We ground this article in the uneven geographies of the Mississippi Delta, a region constructed at the intersection of agro-environmental racism and plantation violence, nutrient-rich soil, and dynamic Black geographies. The processes of containment, dispossession, and commodification of life and land were essential to the construction of the region following a particular agricultural and racial development trajectory dominated by what Clyde Woods calls the Plantation Bloc. And yet, strategies and struggles to make life against and outside of these dynamics also took hold of the region. We reconceptualize the Mississippi Black Freedom Movement and the overlapping struggles for land, housing, healthcare, and new forms of work as movements against agro-environmental racism and the making of a place-based environmental justice rooted in Black ecologies. Drawing on Black and abolition ecologies we trace connections across rural Black organizing in cooperative, farm, and catfish processing communities in the Mississippi Delta. By organizing along modes of collective flourishing and against threats to daily life, these movements provide an alternative trajectory to agro-environmental racism and sought to create a place of stewardship and co-operation.