PluriLand: Theorizing Conflict and Contestation in Plural Land Rights Regimes

The PluriLand project examines land rights claiming in plural legal regimes through cross-regional research into judicialized conflicts over land affecting the land rights of vulnerable communities. Despite the protection of indigenous, traditional and/or communal land rights in many legal systems, conflicts are rapidly escalating across the globe and are often highly transnational. Yet our knowledge about the mobilization and traction of protective land regimes remains fragmented, localized and weakly theorized. PluriLand is an interdisciplinary study of land claims and their intragroup effects across six countries: South Africa, Ethiopia, India, Brazil, Guatemala, and Colombia. These countries capture a range of legal regimes within and between Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well as in terms of periodization of key political moments in contestations over land. The research team have reviewed general and country specific literature, addressing the theoretical and methodological challenges and routes for comparing processes of transformative judicialization across sites, countries, and frames. We have systematized relevant case law for our respective cases, and are in the stage of data analysis. PluriLand builds on and extends our current theoretical knowledge about sociolegal mobilization. Our initial results suggest that claims for land are different from other forms of social and economic rights claiming, demanding revised conceptualizations and timeframes of what might be “transformative” about this form of sociolegal mobilization. Factors shaping land claiming through law in the twenty-first century, include: (1) multiple overlapping forms of regulation; (2) entrenched interests linked to the historical constitution of state power and capital, leading to highly asymmetrical power relations; (3) claims to land based on different kinds of “place-based” identity rights; (4) changing transnationally driven patterns of land use; and (5) the impacts of climate degradation. Despite important constitutional provisions providing for special land rights for certain groups or specifying its social functions in a range of contexts, land rights litigation has rarely led to major changes in public policy or wide scale redistribution. Yet while the prospects for effecting broader policy transformations through land rights litigation may be low, the symbolic and political effects of legal mobilization include strengthening claimants’ forms of organization and placing other narratives about land and territory in the public domain. We maintain that by juridfying alternative “legal land ontologies”, sociolegal mobilization around land by marginalized groups can challenge legally enshrined concepts of property, and the social practices and imaginaries that underpin them. Litigating land rights may be less about transforming policies or delivering specific policy outcomes and more about inspiring new understandings of justice. Our comparative analysis suggests that the extent to which land litigation is transformative depends on: (1) judicial interpretation; (2) the extent to which judicially mandated outcomes include both recognition and redistribution; (3) the extent to which judicial decisions are enforced, and; (4) the degree of organization of claimants. Another finding is that the time frame for measuring “transformative” outcomes of land rights claiming is much longer than that generally used for assessing socioeconomic rights litigation.

Three quarters of the world’s poor are rural and most depend on land for their livelihood. Development pressures, population growth and climate change have led to increasingly acute and transnationalized competition over land, often resulting in violence, dispossession and displacement of historically marginalized, discriminated and impoverished groups, and greater intra group social exclusion. Land regimes comprise plural and overlapping forms of legal ordering and informal norms governing the ownership, access and use of land. These are distinguished not only by colonial and postcolonial legacies of land rights determined by race, ethnicity and gender, but also by the imbrication of state law, international human rights law, and transnationalized regimes of corporate private property. PluriLand will analyze the relationships between the legally plural land regimes and processes of sociolegal mobilization. Going beyond an analysis of law-on-the-books by adopting a law-in-action perspective on land claiming, and extending beyond ethnographic, single country or regional analyses, our project will develop a theory of land claiming, drawing on case studies from Asia (India), Africa (Ethiopia, South Africa) and Latin America (Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala) in order to build a comparative, multi-factor typology focused on: (1) the kinds of threats to existing land rights regimes; (2) the types of frames used to pursue different land claims, and; (3) the legal sites in which they are disputed. Bringing together expertise in law, sociology, comparative politics, and anthropology, PluriLand will explore the relationships between these three factors combining theoretical insights from the literature on legal pluralism, sociolegal mobilization, land and development, and property and territorial rights in order to better understand the contexts, processes and intra-group effects of land-claiming, particularly gender and interethnic/racial dynamics.