ECAS 2013

Until recently, the Pokot in the Kenyan Rift-Valley have been pastoral nomads. They managed an open, communal, non-fragmented rangeland with few restrictions regarding grazing and (temporary) settlement. In the past two decades, this has changed dramatically. The growing importance of rain-fed crop cultivation, increasing sedentarization, rapid population growth, the implementation of wildlife conservation projects, violent conflicts with neighboring pastoralists and the exploitation of geo-thermal power have led to major land-use changes and to an ongoing and profound fragmentation of the landscape. This has led to a rapid demise of customary tenure arrangements. While previously rights to land and land-based resources were largely overlapping, shared and flexible, they are now increasingly defined on exclusive notions of belonging, on family, clan and village basis. While Pokot society begins to develop more consistent relations to bounded territories, conflicts around access to and control over land have intensified. New discourses of belonging to the land are created and negotiated, and new institutions are developed to legitimize, consolidate and codify individual tenure. Drawing on data from ethnographic and interdisciplinary field work, this paper explores the profound intra-societal struggles and the problems of local mechanisms of dispute settlement that accompany the ongoing and rapid individuation of property rights.

Much of the works on nature conservation in Africa have often sidelined the agency of different actors, particularly of local people in articulating, negotiating and contesting discourses related to establishment of protected areas. Recognizing multiple interpretations and struggles over land hinges on how various actors employ different negotiation strategies and power positions in the process of achieving their interests and/or blocking the interests of others. In the Nech Sar National Park case, the Guji and Koore people have been challenging state intervention by systematically employing different forms of resistance and negotiation including open violence, cattle trespass, encroachment, hunting and using state judiciary system itself. In addition to the local people, there are regional and international actors involved in the contestation over the territory whose representation of the space varies significantly. While the territory signifies livelihood space for some actors, others such as the state and Multinational Conservation Companies label it as "Wilderness" that deserves human stewardship. It is also marked as a cultural and spiritual space for the Guji Oromo, for example. Thus, this paper argues that for a better understanding of land-related conflicts, recognition to multiple interpretations of representations of the land and how actors define it are important. Drawing on empirical data and theoretical arguments, the paper tries to unveil broader understanding on the cultural, political, economic and environmental dimensions behind land-related conflicts.

In post-war and newly independent South Sudan many conceptions of landownership exist. The paper relates two cases of land dispute (which both happened in Eastern Equatoria State, South Sudan) to each other and explains the involvement of the different actors (NGO, Local communities, Government, Church). One of the land cases examines several women who lost their farming land to urbanization, the need of the UN for expansion and to the land claims of the ethnic majority in town. While the new government strengthens the land rights of local communities, local minorities lose their land and, for the moment, silently complain.

The second case describes the processes resulting out of a land dispute causing several death, followed by peace talks about a junction of two roads which got into the attention of two neighboring local communities. Formerly, during civil war, the road was dangerous and the place not to be. Nowadays the road is in the focus of economic actors opening shops at a junction and individuals which desire access to facilities such as schools.

The work is based on one year anthropological research, with focus on different types of actors in the state formation process. Both cases shed lights on the role of the government and local communities in both, creating, solving or ignoring these land disputes and on how so called traditional conflict resolution methods are not adapted to urbanization and the new civil code of South Sudan.

This presentation explores the political economy of involuntary displacement in Ghana's capital city Accra, through an examination of the attempted large scale eviction of the city's largest 'unplanned settlement' Old Fadama. My intention is to unpack and analyze the strategies and tactics employed by key actors (these include Old Fadama's residents, local and national government authorities, the Ga Dagme (an Accra based ethnic group that considers itself to be the 'original' owners of the land the settlement is built on), as well as Non-Governmental Organizations and international solidarity network's such as Shack Dwellers International), to articulate, mediate and defend land and resource claims in the area and analyze the resulting anti-eviction movements.