Property And Political Order In Africa

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.

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.

This book provides unique insight into the relationship of institutions that govern land rights to local and national politics in African countries.

The first detailed study of institutional economics and public choice traditions in Afghanistan.

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Explores and challenges existing conventions of inequality in Africa while offering new insights to explain persistent poverty across the continent.

This book provides new insight into the high-stakes struggle to control land in the Global South through the lens of land titling in Zambia and Senegal. Based on extensive fieldwork, it shows how chiefs and communities challenge the state, in an era of increasing scarcity and booming global land markets.

This book provides a significant contribution to the literature on land reform in various African contexts. While the economic evidence is clear that secure property rights are a necessary condition for catalysing broad-based economic development, the governance process by which those rights are secured is less clear. This book details the historical complexity of land rights and the importance of understanding this history in the process of trying to improve tenure security. Through a combination of single country case studies, comparative case studies and regional comparisons, the book is unequivocal that good governance is paramount for improving the performance of land reform programmes. All attempts at moving towards more formal secure tenure require congruence with informal norms, beliefs and values, and a set of clear systems and processes to avoid corruption and unintended negative consequences.