Land and the Politics of Belonging in West Africa

Land and the Politics of Belonging in West Africa PDF Author: Richard Kuba
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047417038
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Recognizing that land rights are ambiguous, negotiable and politically embedded, these case studies explore the long-term processes and recent changes in contemporary rural West Africa affecting the conversion of control over land into social and political capital and vice versa. They point to the colonial origins of what came to be viewed as ‘customary’ tenure and to the legal pluralism characterizing pre-colonial tenure arrangements. Furthermore, they show the spiritual and ritual importance of land that can be converted into political power and economic prerogatives, a dimension neglected by much of the recent literature. Analyses cover forest and savannah, state and segmentary societies, facilitating comparison and insights across the Anglo-Francophone divide.

Land and the Politics of Belonging in West Africa

Land and the Politics of Belonging in West Africa PDF Author: Richard Kuba
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047417038
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book

Book Description
Recognizing that land rights are ambiguous, negotiable and politically embedded, these case studies explore the long-term processes and recent changes in contemporary rural West Africa affecting the conversion of control over land into social and political capital and vice versa. They point to the colonial origins of what came to be viewed as ‘customary’ tenure and to the legal pluralism characterizing pre-colonial tenure arrangements. Furthermore, they show the spiritual and ritual importance of land that can be converted into political power and economic prerogatives, a dimension neglected by much of the recent literature. Analyses cover forest and savannah, state and segmentary societies, facilitating comparison and insights across the Anglo-Francophone divide.

Land, Mobility, and Belonging in West Africa

Land, Mobility, and Belonging in West Africa PDF Author: Carola Lentz
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253009618
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
An ethnographic study of issues of land rights, property regimes, and ethnicity in West Africa. Focusing on an area of the savannah in northern Ghana and southwestern Burkina Faso, Land, Mobility, and Belonging in West Africa explores how rural populations have secured, contested, and negotiated access to land and how they have organized their communities despite being constantly on the move as farmers or migrant laborers. Carola Lentz seeks to understand how those who claim native status hold sway over others who are perceived to have come later. As conflicts over land, agriculture, and labor have multiplied in Africa, Lentz shows how politics and power play decisive roles in determining access to scarce resources and in changing notions of who belongs and who is a stranger. “Illuminates the distinctive historical trajectory of land claims, authority, and belonging among the Dagara and Sisala peoples of the Black Volta region, and locates this specific case history within broader debates over transformation in access, use, and control over land in colonial and postcolonial Africa.” —Sara Berry, Johns Hopkins University “Important in the sense that it constitutes a detailed historical study of how complex narratives of belonging and notions of property interlock. . . . It is academic work of the first order.” —Christian Lund, Roskilde University

Property and Political Order in Africa

Property and Political Order in Africa PDF Author: Catherine Boone
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107040698
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
In sub-Saharan Africa, property relationships around land and access to natural resources vary across localities, districts, and farming regions. These differences produce patterned variations in relationships between individuals, communities, and the state. This book captures these patterns in an analysis of structure and variation in rural land tenure regimes. In most farming areas, state authority is deeply embedded in land regimes, drawing farmers, ethnic insiders and outsiders, lineages, villages, and communities into direct and indirect relationships with political authorities at different levels of the state apparatus. The analysis shows how property institutions - institutions that define political authority and hierarchy around land - shape dynamics of great interest to scholars of politics, including the dynamics of land-related competition and conflict, territorial conflict, patron-client relations, electoral cleavage and mobilization, ethnic politics, rural rebellion, and the localization and "nationalization" of political competition.

African Alternatives

African Alternatives PDF Author: Patrick Chabal
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004161139
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
To stimulate the exploration of African initiative and creativity beyond immediate socio-economic and political circumstances this book demonstrates that societies in Africa have always showed the ability to negotiate whatever constraining ecological, economic and political circumstances they faced.

Land, Law and Politics in Africa

Land, Law and Politics in Africa PDF Author: Jan Abbink
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900421738X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
This book offers a series of new studies on the dynamics of political and legal culture as well as of conflict management in contemporary Africa, taking inspiration from and honoring the scholarly contributions and impact of Prof. Gerti Hesseling (1946-2009) in African Studies.

Land, Labour and Entrustment

Land, Labour and Entrustment PDF Author: Pamela Kea
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004182322
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Challenging portrayals of West African female farmers as a homogenous group, the present study provides an ethnographic account of the contractual relations established between female hosts and migrants, in the exchange of land and labour for agrarian production in The Gambia.

Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa

Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa PDF Author: Robtel Neajai Pailey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108875440
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Drawing on rich oral histories from over two hundred in-depth interviews in West Africa, Europe, and North America, Robtel Neajai Pailey examines socio-economic change in Liberia, Africa's first black republic, through the prism of citizenship. Marking how historical policy changes on citizenship and contemporary public discourse on dual citizenship have impacted development policy and practice, she reveals that as Liberia transformed from a country of immigration to one of emigration, so too did the nature of citizenship, thus influencing claims for and against dual citizenship. In this engaging contribution to scholarly and policy debates about citizenship as a continuum of inclusion and exclusion, and development as a process of both amelioration and degeneration, Pailey develops a new model for conceptualising citizenship within the context of crisis-affected states. In doing so, she offers a postcolonial critique of the neoliberal framing of diasporas and donors as the panacea to post-war reconstruction.

Trans-Atlantic Migration

Trans-Atlantic Migration PDF Author: Toyin Falola
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135900779
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
This book argues that a new cadre of African immigrants are finding themselves in the New World—mostly well educated, high-income earning professionals, and belonging to the category termed "African brain drain," they constitute the antinomy of those Africans who were forcibly removed from Africa during slavery. Along with this sense of freedom and voluntary migration comes a paradox—that of living in two worlds and negotiating the pleasures and agonies that come with living in exile. For the new African immigrant, the primary factor motivating migration is the desire for a better life whether fleeing political persecution, economic crisis, refugee crisis, or a combination thereof. The overall consequences include displacement, alienation, and the not so enchanting reality of exile. In its encompassing structure and multivalent perspectives, Trans-Atlantic Migration sets in motion the shifting theoretical and pragmatic verity that the new African diaspora and transatlantic migrations are paths laden with paradoxes that only time, negotiations, compromises, and sense of identities can ultimately resolve.

Land, Labour and Entrustment

Land, Labour and Entrustment PDF Author: Pamela Kea
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004185380
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Challenging portrayals of West African female farmers as a homogenous group, the present study provides an ethnographic account of the contractual relations established between female hosts and migrants, in the exchange of land and labour for agrarian production in The Gambia.

Power / Knowledge / Land

Power / Knowledge / Land PDF Author: Laura German
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047205533X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
The 2008 outcry over the "global land grab" made headlines around the world, and has led to sustained interest among both academics and the international development establishment. In Power/Knowledge/Land, author Laura German profiles the consolidation of a global knowledge regime surrounding land and its governance within international development circles following the outcry over "global land grabs," and the growing enrollment of previously antagonistic actors within it. Drawing theoretical insights from ontological anthropology and decolonial theory and deploying pioneering analytical techniques inspired by the politics of knowledge, German reveals the inner mechanics of a global knowledge regime that has enabled the longstanding project of commodifying customary land to be advanced by capturing the energies of socially progressive forces. By bringing theories of change from the emergent land governance orthodoxy into dialogue with the ethnographic evidence from across the African continent and beyond, concepts masquerading as universal and self-evident truths are provincialized, and their role in commodifying customary land and entrenching colonial futurities put on display. In doing so, the volume brings wider academic debates surrounding productive forms of power into the heart of the land grab debate, while enhancing their accessibility to a wider audience. Power/Knowledge/Land takes current scholarly debates surrounding land grabs beyond their theoretical moorings in critical agrarian studies, political economy and globalization into contemporary debates surrounding the politics of knowledge--from decolonial theory to ontological anthropology, thereby enabling new dynamics of the phenomenon to be revealed. German also takes a deep look at global knowledge brokers and dynamics in international development, complementing a large body of scholarship on the political economy of land grabs and their situated agrarian dynamics. The book deploys a pioneering epistemology integrating deconstructionist tools of discourse analysis with comparative study and systematic qualitative reviews to hold dominant knowledge and truth claims surrounding theories of change in international development circles against the ethnographic evidence--from situated property relations and ontologies of land, to the impacts of land governance interventions. This helps to reveal the Western and modernist biases in the narratives that have been advanced about women, custom, and security, revealing how the coloniality of knowledge underpins political economies of land.