Property,Authority and Citizenship: Land Claims,Politics and the Dynamics of Social Division in West Africa

In the contemporary African context of rising competition and anxiety over access to land, neoliberal policy interventions designed to clarify property rights, broaden political participation and increase official accountability have frequently provoked rather than alleviated social and political conflict. Comparing case histories of local struggles over land and authority in selected rural areas in Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire and Bénin, this paper argues that in situations where access to land has been linked historically to claims on authority and social belonging, pressures to privatize or clarify ownership have intensified debates over citizenship and governance as well as over land claims per se. Ensuing struggles over land and entitlement have intersected with national as well as local economic and political dynamics, reinforcing ‘traditional’ hierarchies, contributing to the proliferation of formal and informal governing agents and institutions, and frequently disrupting or subverting open governance and sustainable resource use, rather than helping to create conditions for sustainable development and democratization.     

Land reform in South Africa and the colonial present

This paper develops Derek Gregory's concept of the ‘colonial present’ by demonstrating how the colonial present in rural South Africa in general and around land reform in particular has conditioned land reform outcomes. My development of the concept departs from Gregory's in two key respects. I argue first that, by viewing it in relation to the geopolitics of capitalism, it can be applied to places beyond the immediate influence of US military power; and, second, that social forces which might begin to undermine the colonial present should be examined. My empirical materials draw upon primary research on the emergence of government-sponsored partnerships between restitution beneficiaries and agribusinesses in northern Limpopo. I use the materials to argue that partnerships have emerged given white farmers’ near-monopoly on skills and the persistent power of traditional leaders, two features of South Africa's colonial past whose importance today is suggestive of a colonial present.     

Reforming Land and Water Rights in South Africa

Redress of historical injustice in access to land provided a mobilizing force for the overthrow of the apartheid government in South Africa. Inequality of access to water resources marks South Africa's history even more profoundly than inequality of access to land. Yet in South Africa, post‐apartheid legislative reform relating to land and water has followed largely separate, if parallel, paths. This article traces the development and current status of water reforms in the Inkomati Water Management Area, where water use is dominated by established commercial agriculture and forestry, by important environmental interests, including the Kruger National Park, and by demands for improved access to water from a black population of around 1.5 million living in former Bantustan areas. It indicates that in practice water and land reform are interdependent, but, although both have become more closely linked within local political and economic arenas, they remain largely disconnected and disabled by unresolved tensions within their separate policy processes. The article argues that the commoditized nature of land and water use within the established patterns of commercial agriculture sets constraints on what redistributive land and water reform can deliver to those historically dispossessed. In particular, increasing recourse to ‘strategic partnerships’ between African community landowners and commercial agribusiness as a means of maintaining the productivity of commercial farmland poses questions about the control and beneficial use of new forms of communal property.     

Land and society in early Canada and South Africa

The rural societies of early Canada and South Africa overwhelmingly comprised independent families on their own land and, in comparison with their European antecedents, were strikingly egalitarian and homogeneous. The transformation and simplification of European society in early Canada and South Africa was not the result of fragmentation—the isolation of particular elements of the European whole in remote new settings. Rather, these two colonial societies were common products of the introduction of European assumptions about family and land into settings where land was cheap and markets for farm produce were poor. Taken together these factors are sufficient to explain the general character of rural society in early Canada and most of early South Africa.     

The Squatters' Movement in Europe: A Durable Struggle for Social Autonomy in Urban Politics

Squatting empty properties for living or to develop public activities has lasted in European cities for more than three decades. Although local and national contexts differ significantly, there are also some general trends and patterns that deserve careful attention. When squatting occasionally appears in public debates, controversy is generated and many gaps open between academic, social and political perceptions. In this article I use evidence from several European cities to argue that the squatters' movement has produced an original impact in urban politics. The main feature of this impact has been to generate a relatively wide autonomous and mainly non‐institutional mode of citizen participation, protest and self‐management. How has this been possible? Which are the specific contributions made by this urban movement? These are questions that both scholars and activists continuously claim to be relevant, so that this research attempts to offer some general answers based on detailed comparisons and experiences.     

Rethinking Land Struggle in the Postindustrial City

The racial and cultural politics of land and property are central to urban struggle, but have received relatively little attention in geography. This paper analyzes land struggles in Detroit where over 100,000 parcels of land are classified as “vacant”. Since 2010, planners and government officials have been developing controversial plans to ruralize Detroit's “vacant” neighborhoods as part of a program of fiscal austerity, reigniting old questions of racialized dispossession, sovereignty, and struggles for liberation. This paper analyzes these contentious politics by examining disputes over a white businessman's proposal to build the world's largest urban forest in the center of a Black majority city. I focus on how residents, urban farmers, and community activists resisted the project by making counterclaims to vacant land as an urban commons. They argued that the land is inhabited not empty and that it belonged to those who labored upon and suffered for it. Combining community‐based ethnography with insights from critical property theory, critical race studies, and postcolonial theory, I argue that land struggles in Detroit are more than distributional conflicts over resources. They are inextricable from debates over notions of race, property, and citizenship that undergird modern liberal democracies and ongoing struggles for decolonization.     

Manufacturing amnesia: Corporate Social Responsibility in South Africa

'Manufacturing amnesia' argues that the term 'Corporate Social Responsibility' has been abandoned by most South African firms in favour of the term 'corporate social investment'. This has been done in order to divert attention from calls on business to redress the results of its historical contribution to the apartheid system. The discourse of reconciliation has further served to erase memories of past corporate behaviour. It also masks continuing inequalities and unsustainable practices. Business has responded weakly to the pressures for CSR, of which five broad areas are identified and analysed. Voluntary sustainability initiatives have not succeeded and compliance with black economic empowerment charters and environmental standards have to be legislated and regulated. Firms need to reassess their legacies more honestly until which time their CSR contributions will be regarded as cosmetic and self-serving.     

The Use and Abuse of Ideology: The Struggle for Africa

WILLIAM FREUND. The Making of Contemporary Africa: The Development of African Society since 1800. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Pp. 357. $19.50 (US); MAI FALMBERO, ed. The Struggle for Africa, trans. E.M.K. Andree, Mai Palmberg, and Howard Simson. London: Zed Press, 1983. Pp. iii, 286. $31.95 (Can.).Reviewed by John Flint     

Disability Consciousness on the Frontlines of Urban Struggle

Drug wars, austerity and gentrification are interwoven social relations in many North American urban centres and are typically met with organising of varying degrees of militancy. Loïc Wacquant characterises many of these sites as highly stigmatised, associated with violence and pathology. In Toronto's downtown east end (DEE), one such stigmatised urban space, disabled activists are far from unfortunate casualties. They tend to refer to the DEE as an “urban battleground”, where disabled people politicise and challenge the DEE's pathology and stigma by linking into emerging radical disability politics across the global North and by developing localised revolutionary disability consciousness. Drawing on oral stories, zines and blogs of disabled activists and workers in Toronto's DEE, this article uses Rachel Gorman's dialectic of disability/disablement to analyse the emergence of revolutionary disability consciousness and the centrality of disabled people on the frontlines of anti‐gentrification and harm reduction organising in Toronto's DEE.     

State Spaces of Resistance: Industrial Tree Plantations and the Struggle for Land in Laos

Land grabbing has transformed rural environments across the global South, generating resistance or political reactions “from below”. In authoritarian countries like Laos, where resource investments are coercively developed and insulated from political dissent, resistance appears absent at first glance. Yet, it is occurring under the radar, largely outside transnational activist networks. In this article, we examine how resistance can protect access to rural lands in contexts where it is heavily repressed. Resistance here occurs with, rather than against the state by foregrounding the contradictions of land use and ownership within state spaces, such as competing goals of large‐scale industrial plantations versus smallholder agriculture and national forest conservation. Such contradictions are engaged by using historical, place‐based political connections to exploit the scalar frictions of a fragmented state and occupying plantation clearance sites to highlight contested lands in situ. Nonetheless, such strategies remain spatially and socially uneven amongst the Lao peasantry.     

South Africa and the African Renaissance

This article addresses the question of the new South Africa's relationships with other countries in Africa in the context of the idea of an 'African Renaissance' which has recently gained currency. The authors identify two opposing conceptions of Africa's development, which they call 'globalist' and 'Africanist' respectively, and explore the tensions besetting South Africa's participation in an 'Africanist' project. They discuss the dilemma of South Africa's role on the continent as both an obvious and an impossible candidate for leadership, and argue for an 'Africanist' and post-structuralist approach to the political, economic and cultural development of the African continent.     

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’.     

Spatial processes and politics of renewable energy transition: Land,zones and frictions in South Africa

This paper seeks to make a contribution to on-going debates about how to conceptualise the spatial processes of renewable energy transition. It makes a case for understanding renewable energy transitions as simultaneously spatial and political processes, constitutive of new territories and configuring development pathways. Drawing on a case study of South Africa's Renewable Energy Independent Power Procurement Programme (REI4P), the paper explores the ways in which energy transitions are intrinsically bound up with both the materiality and the historical and contemporary politics of land. It then examines the relationship between energy transitions and territory to conceptualise the ways in which transitions take on an experimental shape in the form of 'zones'. The paper argues that these zones are new territories deploying forms of spatial and political-administrative exceptionality, which allow political and economic actors to exercise authority and commercial power. Two types of zone emerging from South Africa's energy transition exemplify these processes: legally-defined zones for the development of solar and wind energy and zones of socioeconomic development required by REI4P. The paper explores the spatial and political consequences of these strategies and suggests that these may not necessarily translate into conflict and confrontation, but instead produce uneasy co-existences of different political, social and spatial projects and interests, with potential to create new polities.