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  • Editors' Introduction
  • Elliot Fratkin, Editor and Sean Redding, Editor

We are pleased to introduce Volume 60, Number 3, of the African Studies Review. We begin this issue with an ASR Forum titled "Land Disputes and Displacement in Postconflict Africa," which includes articles by Susan Reynolds Whyte and Esther Acio; Lotte Meinert, Rane Willerslev, and Sophie Hooge Seebach; Ingunn Bjørkhaug, Morten Bøås, and Tewodros Kebede; Amanda Hammar; and Sara Berry. The Forum was conceived of and organized by two guest editors, Daivi Rodima-Taylor and Lotte Meinert, to whom we extend our appreciation and gratitude. The second half of the issue presents a commentary on Ken Saro-Wiwa's "Africa Kills Her Sun" by Angela L. Rodrigues, an analysis of views on Canadian migration among Nigerian youth by Charles Adeyanju, an article about the political authority of chiefs in Sierra Leone by Peter Albrecht, an article on oil extraction in Uganda by Andrzej Polus and Wojciech J. Tycholiz, and an analysis of monument "vandalism" in South Africa by Sabine Marschall.

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The ASR Forum presents a series of articles dealing with conflicts over land and land transfers, particularly following long periods of political violence. Susan Whyte and Esther Acio's article, "Generations and Access to Land in Postconflict Northern Uganda: "Youth Have No Voice in Land Matters" (17–36), looks at how normal land transfers from fathers to sons among Acholi people were disrupted during the violence of the 1990s and 2000s caused by both the Lord's Resistance Army and the Ugandan government. She describes how young men and women of the "war generation," displaced or challenged by the twenty-year conflict, must use new strategies gain access to land, including renting or buying land from relatives. Whyte describes the resistance by elders to change the rules of gerontocracy and patriliny, while young men and women have created ways to access land based on a redefinition of family relations in this postconflict society.

The article by Lotte Meinert, Rane Willerslev, and Sophie Hooge Seebach, "Cement, Graves, and Pillars in Land Disputes in Northern Uganda" (37–57), discusses the ways in which burial sites take on a new significance as markers of land ownership in postconflict areas. The Acholi [End Page 1] people of northern Uganda are still recovering from twenty years of war and conflict with both the Lords Resistance Army and the Ugandan government under Museveni. Here, graves mark claims not only to kinship affiliation, but also to territory itself. The authors discuss the ways in which "the properties of cement both embody and symbolize processes of making something appear permanent, inflexible, and nonnegotiable" (39). In another example, the authors note that the Ugandan government had recently tried to place cement pillars as demarcation of a forest preserve, and to exclude the local population (the Ik) from entering the forest and hunting and farming as they had previously. The local population protested against this use of cement and what they saw as an aggressive act of land appropriation. The state, which has not officially resolved the dispute, ceased policing the forest and the markers became overgrown, giving the population the freedom to reclaim their use rights (as they saw them) to the forest.

In "Displacement, Belonging, and Land Rights in Grand Gedeh, Liberia: Almost at Home Abroad?" (59–79), Ingunn Bjørkhaug, Morten Bøås, and Tewodros Kebede examine what happens when refugees enter the area of another group with whom they have historically cordial ties—specifically, the situation of Gueré refugees fleeing civil war in Côte'd'Ivoire who entered Liberia in an area occupied by their "cousins" from the Krahn ethnic group. The authors argue that such affinities are situational, and that refugees are not always "almost at home abroad," particularly if their host population perceives threats to stressed land resources and larger political alignments.

In "Urban Displacement and Resettlement in Zimbabwe: The Paradoxes of Propertied Citizenship" (81–104), Amanda Hammar describes the situation of impoverished urban squatters in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, who live illegally under constant threat of violent displacement by various local and national authorities. Examining the movement by the Bulawayo City Council to formally resettle the squatters in houses on peri-urban...

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