Grabbing the commons: Forest rights,capital and legal struggle in the Carpathian Mountains

In this paper we show that formalizing communal rights is a process riddled with struggles leading to a partial or total grabbing of commons. Drawing on long-term research and using interviews, surveys, and historical sources, we analyze struggles that emerged from processes of formalizing rights to commons, occurring one century apart in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania. The first wave of formalization, initiated by the state in 1910, institutionalized a model of hybrid commons in which individual rights to communal forests and pastures were understood as inheritable and tradable shares. This generated never-ending contention and a vulnerability to capital, allowing timber companies to grab shares and dispossess rightsholders. The second formalization, post-1989, enabled local communities to regain rights to forests that had been nationalized by the state at the beginning of the socialist rule. However, this resurgence of mountain commons unleashed again a suite of legal struggles, bringing back to life previous vulnerabilities and dispossessions. We argue that the formalization of rights often does not bring clarity and security to commons rightsholders. Instead, it creates a suite of vulnerabilities, ambiguities, and complexity within regulatory texts, begetting the grabbing of the commons.     

Competing entanglements in the struggle to save the Amazon: The shifting terrain of transnational civil society

Transnational civil society has often been conceptualized as a third sector, buffered from the power politics of nation-states and global capital. The relative autonomy of this sector has been seen as key in empowering the voices of marginalized peoples and in advocating new counter-hegemonic agendas on the world stage. Recent research, however, has begun to explore power imbalances within the transnational civic sphere, and how different transnational NGOs' modes of articulation with political institutions and market actors inform those power dynamics. We suggest here that the concept of “entanglements,” recently introduced within political geography, can offer a useful spatial imagery in assessing the effects of these varied lines of influence. The article first traces the evolution of the Amazon Alliance, a transnational network of environmental and human rights NGOs and Amazonian indigenous federations. It then examines a countervailing nexus of governmental and corporate entanglements that have been drawing conservation NGOs away from indigenous eco-political engagement in recent years. To understand the waning salience of the eco-indigenous conservation agenda, we argue, requires analysis of the shifting terrain of civil society, and of the articulation of different NGOs with institutions beyond the frontiers of the third sector.     

The rights of a Florida wife: slavery, U.S. expansion, and married women's property law

Civil law rules were adopted in Florida that granted married women property rights long before legal reforms occurred in northern states. This article analyzes white wives' property and law in Florida between 1820 and 1860. Initially, married women's property rights were inadvertently protected by treaty law and limited to women who married before 1818. Wives' right to own separate property in Florida was subsequently reconfirmed in statute and extended to include later marriages. In contrast, nonwhites generally lost the rights and property they had enjoyed under Spain's civil law in the same period. This contrast reveals that in Florida (and other southern borderlands) it was not concern for women, or simply legal precedent, but the desire to incorporate new territory and expand slavery that influenced the development of marital property law. This challenges previous histories, which have excluded the earlier acts in the Southern borderlands and emphasized those passed in the Northeast beginning in the late 1840s. While those later acts were influenced by the early woman's rights movement and by concern for families reduced to poverty during the rise of market capitalism, this case study indicates that expansion of United States territory and slavery were responsible for the earlier married women's property rights in southern borderland territories such as Florida.     

保障公民的文化权益是维护社会公平的重要保证

公民文化权利与公民政治权利、经济权利一样,属于公民的基本权利。保障公民文化权益,不断满足人民群众日益增长的精神文化需求,对全面建设小康社会和构建和谐社会具有重大的意义。文化差距而产生的文化矛盾、公共文化服务资源短缺等是制约当前公民文化权益健康发展的主要因素。因此,我们必须从现阶段经济社会发展水平出发,以实现和保障公民基本文化权益、满足广大人民群众基本文化需求为目标,坚持公共服务普遍均等原则,兼顾城乡之间、地区之间的协调发展,最大限度地满足人民群众日益增长的精神文化需求。     

Reproductive rights,family planning: a cornerstone of control

The main objective of the action plan for the International Conference on Population and Development is to assure access to high quality information and reproductive health care services in a manner that is affordable, acceptable, and convenient. Informed choice should be voluntary for childbearing and fertility control decisions. Services must be sensitive to the cultural, economic, and demographic diversity of local communities. The target date for countries to implement family planning (FP) and reproductive health programs that are available to all is 2015. Programs must involve women in all phases of planning, management, and delivery of services; outreach programs must be developed to involve men. Public and private FP programs should be directed to removing all obstacles to method use by the year 2005 by redesigning and expanding information and services. IEC (information, education, and communication) should also focus on sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS. Programs should provide high quality condoms from stock on hand. About 55% of couples in developing countries use some form of contraception. The increase in contraceptive use has contributed to the decline in total fertility from 6.1 children per woman in the 1950s to 3.7 in the 1990s. At least 350 million couples still lack access to modern FP methods. The draft plan emphasizes that couples must be given the freedom and responsibility to decide on the number and spacing of their children.     

Population size, concentration, and civil war. A geographically disaggregated analysis

Why do larger countries have more armed conflict? This paper surveys three sets of hypotheses put forward in the conflict literature regarding the relationship between the size and location of population groups. These hypotheses are based on population mass and concentrations, distances, and some residual state-level characteristics. The hypotheses are tested with a new dataset – ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Events Dataset) – that disaggregates internal conflicts into individual events. The analysis covers 14 countries in Central Africa. The conflict event data are juxtaposed with geographically disaggregated data on populations, distance to capitals, borders, and road networks. The paper develops a statistical method to analyze these types of data. The analysis shows that the risk of conflict events increases with local population size, and is particularly large in highly populous locations within a country. We find only a moderate difference in conflict-proneness between areas located close to or far from a country's capital, except when combined with population concentration: Conflict events cluster particularly strongly in larger population concentrations that are distant from the capital, such as the Eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo.     

On plantations,prisons, and a black sense of place

The complexities of black geographies—shaped by histories of colonialism, transatlantic slavery, contemporary practices of racism, and resistances to white supremacy—shed light on how slave and post-slave struggles in the Americas form a unique sense of place. Rather than simply identifying black suffering and naming racism (and opposition to it) as the sole conceptual schemas through which to ‘understand’ or ‘know’ blackness or race, it is emphasized that a black sense of place, black histories, and communities are not only integral to production of space, but also that the analytical interconnectedness of race, practices of domination, and geography undoubtedly put pressure on how we presently study and assess racial violence.     

Advocacy and the struggle for a better science of anthropology

Spaulding, Philip, ed. Anthropology in Praxis. Calgary, Canada: Department of Anthropology, Occasional Papers in Anthropology and Primatology, 1986. iii + 253 pp. N. P.

Paine, Robert, ed. Advocacy and Anthropology, First Encounters. St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1985. xiii 4‐ 278 pp. including references. $15.00 paper.

Agar, Michael H. Independents Declared: The Dilemmas of Independent Trucking. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986. 191 pp. including appendices, literature cited, and index. $24.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.