Land,Law and Courts in India: Tracing Land Rights Debates through Processes of Judicial Decision Making

The pace of industrial and allied infrastructure development in India is encumbered by scarcity in the supply of land. As a result, the state in India has frequently resorted to expropriation of land through conversion of land away from its traditional uses and through displacement of communities. Consequently, land acquisition in the country is mired in disputes over human rights and environmental rights violations. In the face of continued political support for infrastructure‐led development in India, those who stand to lose their land have often resorted to judicial recourse for pressing their rights. This article draws on empirical evidence from court cases related to two urban development projects in the states of Karnataka and Kerala to examine how courts have responded to the question of violation of land rights and appeals against land acquisition for the two projects. The author argues that the courts, while responding to the claims against the two projects, have refrained from holding the implementing agencies or the state governments accountable even in cases where there were recognizable incidents of malfeasance. The article illustrates that the inability of the courts to confront the state lends a tacit assent to the development agenda of the state.     

Winding Back Australian Women's Rights: Conventions,Contradictions and Conflicts

Since 1996, Australia's Coalition government has been involved in winding back women's rights. It has diluted the role of the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, attempted to weaken the Sex Discrimination Act to allow for discrimination on the basis of marital status, and has refused to provide Australian women protection through the international realm via the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. In taking these steps, the government has not only placed rights in conflict against each other but has also been contradictory in its approach. The attempts to wind back women's rights demonstrate the fragility of existing rights protection measures in Australia more generally and suggest the need to consider alternative rights protection mechanisms such as sex equality guarantees in a bill of rights.     

妇女运动拨乱反正述略

文化大革命结束后,伴随党和国家的历史转折,中国妇女运动领域开始拨乱反正,它始于以四人帮为对象的揭、批、查运动,经由中国妇女四大的推动,得到全面展开。拨乱反正以澄清文革前17年妇女运动的路线是非为核心,包括平反冤假错案、调整妇联组织、整顿妇女干部队伍、全面恢复妇女工作。随着拨乱反正的完成,妇女运动走出极左的泥潭,迈向改革开放的新阶段。     

Down to Now: Memory,Narrative, and Women's Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta,Georgia

This paper is a case study of African-American women’s leadership. It documents women’s involvement in a voter registration drive in 1946 and traces the develop-ment of an ‘official history’ of that event that emerged in the ensuing decades. This narrative shifted emphasis from the organising leadership that both women and men exhibited to a form of leadership – success in electoral politics – that pertained almost exclusively to men. Concluding remarks address the relevance of memory and narrative for writing the history of women’s leadership.     

No Change for Thirty Years: The Renewed Question of Women's Land Rights in Rural China

Since the mid‐1990s, a new land‐use rights regime has gradually come into effect in China. It follows upon a series of earlier changes — land reform, collectivization and the first wave of contracting land to households — that paid attention to women's role in publicly recognized work and provided access to land. The new regime, which has gradually come into effect as previous (usually fifteen‐year) terms expired, authorizes an adjustment in land allocation which is then normally frozen for thirty years. An apparently inadvertent effect of this policy is not only the exclusion of young people from direct access to land for up to thirty years from birth, but the de facto separation of the majority of women who marry or remarry patrilocally from allocated land. ‘No change for thirty years’ (sanshi nian bu bian) has thus become the distinctive feature for women of China's current land‐use regime. The state has renounced its potential to reallocate land periodically and there is no indication that market mechanisms are filling, or are capable of filling, the void thereby created. This article examines local conceptions, responses and practices regarding land‐use rights and their transfer within this new framework, using field evidence from three upland agricultural communities in Chongqing and Sichuan (studied in 2003, 2004 and 2005), where land allocations were fixed in 1995, 1999 and 2001 respectively. The ethnographic findings are further explored in relation to contemporary research on gender and land rights.     

Unequal Knowledges in Jharkhand,India: De‐Romanticizing Women’s Agroecological Expertise

Taking the Jharkhand region of India as a case study, this article uses empirical data to intervene in ‘women, environment and development’ and ecofeminist debates regarding women’s environmental knowledge. The article first outlines the adoption of gender/environmental issues into development planning and considers the dangers of overestimating women’s agroecological knowledges and assuming that they can easily participate in development projects. It then highlights the local complexities of environmental knowledge possession and control with reference to gender and other variations in agricultural participation, decision‐making and knowledge transfers between villagers’ natal and marital places. Particular emphasis is placed on the economic, socio‐cultural and ‘actor’ related factors that supplement gender as an influence on task allocation, decision‐making, knowledge distribution and knowledge articulation. The article concludes that given the socio‐cultural constraints women face in accumulating and vocalizing environmental knowledge, simplistic participatory approaches are unlikely to empower them. Instead, more flexible, site‐specific development initiatives (coupled with wider structural change) are required if opportunities are to be created for women to develop and use their agroecological knowledges.     

State Life: Land,Welfare and Management of the Landless in Kerala,India

The pressing need to manage the spiralling number of landless people around the world has compelled several states to experiment with scattered land distribution programmes in combination with welfare transfers, instead of comprehensive land reform. This article examines the chasm between land demands and state responses in such contexts. Focusing on the Aralam resettlement site for the landless Adivasis in Kerala, India, it argues that management of the landless could take the form of ‘state life’ — a life envisaged by the state rather than the life the people wish to lead. Three interlinked processes are shown to shape state life in Kerala: the reduction of land to welfare, amplified welfare transfers and the mobilization of assumptions about the target population. State life enables states to extinguish simmering land struggles in the short term, but ultimately it reproduces landlessness.     

Agency,Periodisation and Change in the Gender and Women's History of Colonial India

The paper begins with a critique of the ‘imperialism‐nationalism’ paradigm and its concomitant privileging of the period 1885–1947, which has dominated the writing of modern Indian history. It is argued here that the fixation with the ‘birth‐of‐the‐nation’ theme has led to the neglect of women's agency; that it has resulted in many inconsistencies, dilemmas and unresolved issues regarding a range of topics within Indian gender‐relations; and that this periodisation inhibits the reclamation of terms such as ‘feminist’ and ‘feminism’. The second half of the essay proposes that women's agency can be recovered via a new chronology and a new template for understanding agency within which scholars will be enabled to retrieve the conscious voices of Indian women and record change in gender relations.     

The Carnival of Custom: Land Dives,Millenarian Parades and Other Spectacular Ritualizations in Vanuatu

ABSTRACT This paper deals with the aestheticization and commoditization of culture in specific grand rituals held in Vanuatu. Through political, commercial and juridical processes, the traditional referent of these neo‐ritualizations has been replaced by a celebration of the kastom theme itself; the official value of a regional, national, and global cultural heritage. The examination of two iconic rituals, the Nagol land dive on Pentecost island and the 15th February annual commemoration of John Frum on Tanna island, reveals them as similarly invoking a Christian and colonially inspired reverence in their idealization of an ancestral past. Nevertheless, the increasing monetarization of village communities through the global promotion of kastom spectacles by media and for touristic purposes is ever more frequently considered locally as a factor of inequality or division.     

Hill of Thorns: Custom,Knowledge and the Reclaiming of a Lost Land in the New South Africa

This article provides a detailed ethnographic exploration of a case of land restitution in South Africa. It shows how the development discourse invoked during the process of reclaiming land, rather than being imposed in an entirely top‐down manner, has been the result of negotiations between those claiming and those — in government and NGOs — who have helped them claim. The resulting knowledge about the ownership and appropriate governance of land reveals a complex and often contradictory understanding of concepts like ‘custom’, ‘community’ and ‘power’.     

Law,Courts, and the Judicial Process

Abstract

In I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe explores how precarious the pursuit of happiness is in our liberal society, which provides insufficient moral support for individuals to resist following popular opinion in their pursuit of happiness. For Wolfe, the first step of the pursuit of happiness requires the courage to resist popular opinion and to seek an answer to what happiness is for oneself. As Wolfe shows, our universities are neglecting their task to prepare individuals with a liberal education to guide them on how to live as politically and morally free beings who are responsible for pursuing happiness. Despite appearing to be proud and independent, Charlotte Simmons's education fails to provide her with the moral courage to resist peer pressure. At her university, she adopts scientific viewpoints that undermine political and moral liberty and teach her that her superior intelligence and education are tools of domination. Charlotte puts them in service of gaining popularity. Instead of bringing her happiness, her pursuit of popularity leads to discontentment. Since liberalism provides incomplete moral guidance, Wolfe turns to ancient thinkers to find support for the courage to use political liberty to think about what happiness is and how it is to be pursued. In contrast to Charlotte, Jojo, a star basketball player, turns toward the pursuit of a liberal education to live as a free being and to seek happiness.     

Crime, Courts, and Police

Robert P. Rhodes, The Insoluble Problems of Crime Martin A. Levin, Urban Politics and the Criminal Courts Douglas J. Rosenthal, Lawyer and Client: Who's in Charge? William Ker Muir, Jr., Police: Streetcorner Politicians