Introduction: Land politics in Africa – Constituting Authority Over Territory, Property and Persons

Land issues are often not about land only. Rather, they invoke issues of property more broadly, implicating social and political relationships in the widest sense. Struggles over property may therefore be as much about the scope and structure of authority as about access to resources, with land claims being tightly wrapped in questions of authority, citizenship, and the politics of jurisdiction. This dynamic relationship between property and citizenship rights, on the one hand, and the authority to define and adjudicate these questions are – we believe – central to state formation (Boone 2003a, 2007; Lund 2008).¹

In a recent issue of this journal, land markets in Africa receive special attention. The editors, Colin and Woodhouse (2010), give special emphasis to the multiple processes of commoditization of land and how they are embedded in different social relations. That particular issue focuses on how a great variety of transactions and market dynamics generate commodity characteristics in land. It adds much-needed African historical and contextual nuance to Polanyi’s Great Transformation (1944) as Colin and Woodhouse defy any assumption of markets as singular or uniform or even that they somehow exist ex ante. They demonstrate how markets come about, are structured and are reproduced. In some ways, the present collection complements this focus on market dynamics. We want to investigate the relationships between property and citizenship and political institutions, and how each of these plays a role in constituting the others. This seems especially relevant in the light of the many efforts at land tenure reform that tend to assume the separate and settled existence of property, of citizenship, and of the state. Such compartmentalized understandings of land politics will, no doubt, miss the point. We consider none of these socio-political features as separate or pre-established facts. Rather, land politics involves dynamic claims whose success and materialization depend upon rapports de force among actors, social groups and those wielding different forms of institutional authority over land, as well as on broader and more diffuse forms of social and political recognition.

Recognition of property, citizenship and authority are mutually constitutive processes. They may operate in dialectical relation to promote state formation. Often, processes of recognition become focal points of contestation among groups in society. They become sites of resistance to the processes by which those wielding state policy, law, coercion and resources seek to gather (and sometimes, to institutionalize) power and control over resources and populations within their jurisdictions.

The normative and institutional pluralism prevailing in many poor societies, including most African societies, means that people struggle and compete over access to land by referring to competing principles of tenure, such as ancestral or cultural entitlement, actual use, market acquisition or government allocation. Such principles may combine in various ways. Contestation over land and resources often involves struggles not only over land per se, but also over the legitimate authority to define and settle land issues. Politics surrounding land institutions and land issues can be viewed as part and parcel of the processes of gathering authority over persons and resources, or state formation. Authority can be reproduced, extended and solidified in these ways, but change is not necessarily unidirectional. Contestation can also circumvent, undermine or dissipate authority.

Our concern in presenting this collection of articles lies in examining how institutions and actors attempt to create and assert authority to determine access to land, and to exercise land control. A shared concern is to discern the stakes and trajectories that are visible in these processes. We examine the actors and political stakes that are involved, and show how (that is, by what means, under what circumstances, to what extent) national governments work with, through and against other actors to gather and institutionalize authority and resource control. The studies show that control over land and over political identity does not merely represent or reflect pre-existing authority. It produces it.

The emergence, reproduction and possible erosion of authority over land has implications for land rights, for how they are distributed across persons and social groups, and for a range of other political...