christian lund

Regimes of possession are constituted by rules of property. This includes the asset, rights subjects, and institutions of public authority. They are all coded in specific ways, and they connect to each other. When governments engage with land, they recode the constituent parts of the regime, engaging in property, subject, and even state formation. Yet, in a context of legal and institutional pluralism, many institutions and actors with varying degrees of relative autonomy and legitimacy make up the field of land struggle. All engage in coding of possession. Governments, claim to act within the law when they grant or dispossess citizens of land. Likewise, people aim to legitimate land claims through reference to law in creative ways. Examples show how different repertoires of legalization conspire with efforts to recode different constituent elements of possession into dispossession.

This chapter discusses the relationship between law and property. The old aphorism that “possession is nine-tenths of the law” suggests that property rights are not merely about legal rights, but, more importantly, about social relations and the political and physical capacity to hold things of value: land, in particular. For many people in Indonesia, rights remain a faint promise, and justice a mere rumor. Land conflicts and dispossession have placed unjust burdens on ordinary people for generations and under different regimes. Some people acquire land, but more seem to lose it when their lack of wealth, knowledge, language, connections, and organization leaves them vulnerable. Possession may be nine-tenths of the law, but the last tenth, recognition, still matters a great deal. Moreover, recognition often takes the form of legalization, through efforts to make claims and decisions appear legal. And, crucially, this very plausibility of legality can have the effect of law. The chap...

The old aphorism “possession is nine-tenths of the law” is particularly relevant in Indonesia, which has seen a string of regime changes and a shifting legal landscape for property claims. Ordinary people struggle to legalize their possessions and claim rights in competition with different branches of government, as well as police, army, and private gangs. Some people acquire land, but more seem to lose it when their lack of wealth, knowledge, language, connections, and organization leaves them vulnerable. Possession may be nine-tenths of the law, but the last tenth, recognition, still matters a great deal. Moreover, recognition often takes the form of legalization, through efforts to make claims and decisions appear legal. And, crucially, this very plausibility of legality can have the effect of law. The book is about how and why people and institutions work to make claims stick by legalizing them: the relationship between legal recognition and possession. The book explores the rel...

The end of the civil war in Aceh brought peace, but it has been of a predatory nature. As a moment of rupture, the peace revealed interests, powers and dynamics, and it offered an opportunity for their reconfiguration. When unrest ceased, old agrarian conflicts between smallholders and planters resumed. Peace held promise of land reform. Yet old patterns of smallholder dispossession were entrenched as the former insurgency leadership aligned with the old elite of plantation companies. Oil palm contract-farming schemes effectively alienated smallholders from their land, and violence precluded their organization. As a result, large-scale plantation production expanded. Through the creation of a violent frontier, smallholders were denied recognition of independent rights and property. In essence, smallholders were dispossessed by a combination of violence, political power and duplicitous paperwork. The study is based on fieldwork in areas where current land conflicts are played out, as well as on secondary sources.

ABSTRACT In the first year of the journal of Legal Pluralism’s existence, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann’s article Forum shopping and shopping forums. Dispute processing in a Minangkabau village in West Sumatra was published. Christian Lund reflects on the continued theoretical and methodological relevance of the article for the social scientific study of law and legal pluralism, property and conflict, institutions and authorities, and the role of claimants.

This paper examines how a local community has tried to legalise its possession of land in the outskirts of the city of Medan, Indonesia. In the absence of accessible legal pathways and in the face of state and gang violence, the community has resorted to an imaginative mimicry of legal land access procedures. This paper argues that law-making does not exclusively originate from the state, but also from society, and as such the community has effectively created legal facts. Data were collected through interviews and long-term contact with the community.

In Colonial Lives of Property Brenna Bhandar examines how modern property law contributes to the formation of racial subjects in settler colonies and to the development of racial capitalism. Examining both historical cases and ongoing processes of settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and Israel and Palestine, Bhandar shows how the colonial appropriation of indigenous lands depends upon ideologies of European racial superiority as well as upon legal narratives that equate civilized life with English concepts of property. In this way, property law legitimates and rationalizes settler colonial practices while it racializes those deemed unfit to own property. The solution to these enduring racial and economic inequities, Bhandar demonstrates, requires developing a new political imaginary of property in which freedom is connected to shared practices of use and community rather than individual possession.

The history of land control in Indonesia is overwhelmingly one of colonial conquest, government enclosure and expropriation of traditional property rights. However, beneath these great transformations, counter-currents also flow. Encroachment on state land and its gradual privatization by ordinary people sometimes gnaw at government property. Through a series of small, sometimes innocuous actions, people manage to undo the previous ownership regime. This article shows how settlers over a period of some 30 years – through a strategic mixture of civic disobedience and civic compliance – managed to appropriate, formalize and effectively privatize land belonging to the state-owned railway company in the city of Bandung. The authors argue that disobedient occupation and subsequent obedient payment of taxes, documentation of residence and ‘normalization’ of the area have reduced the company's ownership to thin formality, whereas new residents hold all the substantial elements of property rights to the land.

In this book, based on his doctoral dissertation, Onoma sets out to answer the question “Why do some leaders create and reinforce institutions that govern property rights in land while others neglect or undermine these same types of institutions?”~ 3! while situating this ...

... Mathieu discusses these is-sues on the basis of observations and data from Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire and Rwanda. Land issues are also fundamentally at stake in Christian Lund's article. ... A slightly different aspect is taken up by Lars Engberg-Pedersen in his contribu-tion. ...

For several decades, environmental degradation has been a key issue when a strategy for sustainable development for the Sahelian region is discussed. Under conditions of increased demographic pressure it is a most pressing issue for farmers to change land use practice or land use patterns (or both simultaneously) in a way which can ensure food security and income. Farmers face a reality with increased demand for staple food, possibly even under conditions of declining yields. Provided that they do not change to another type of agricultural system, but in principle maintain their production strategies, the only possible ways to secure food provision are to cultivate more land or to increase productivity on existing fields. Thus, farmers' response options can be based on land use pattern changes as well as on changes in land use practice (Figure 1).

Old Fadama in Accra, Ghana, is a vast informal settlement. A legalistic approach by successive governments has meant a near-absence of statutory institutions and the emergence of alternative public authorities. These endeavour to provide the area with a range of basic public services to solve the area's serious developmental challenges. Through processes of informal negotiation residents establish rights and social contracts that underpin and define what will constitute ideas of state and law. At the same time, self-governance emerges while relations with statutory institutions shift back and forth between vilification, tacit acceptance, and productive cooperation. The article contributes to studies of governance in informal urban settlements on two fronts. First, it shows how informal arrangements lead to the provision of basic public services and influence the workings of formal institutions of government. Second, it challenges facile understandings of large-scale informal set...

ABSTRACT Development studies navigate between policy and social science; between directed progress and change. However, the relative propinquity of social science and policy languages sometimes masks the difference between the two. This article discusses the relationship between development as social change and as a craft and argues for the necessity of recognizing their difference. Moreover, as a social science, development studies also navigate between theoretical generalization and descriptive particularism. By making a distinction between explanatory and heuristic frameworks, development studies can be normalized as a science and thus able to study a contextual moving target while drawing on a general or ‘grand theory’.

ABSTRACT The going has gotten tough in 'God's Own State'. While the licence plate slogan in Abia State in south-eastern Nigeria hints at the profusion of religious denominations, it is, in fact, only one of many forms of networks criss-crossing - or constituting - society. In her study Kate Meagher unravels the social, economic and political networks that run through the small-scale manufacturing sectors in Aba town. The Igbo of south-eastern Nigeria are renowned for their economic entrepreneurship and networks. However, far from constituting a culturally defined infrastructure, Meagher shows, the indigenous economic institutions of Igbo society have undergone significant shifts. In response to pressures and opportunities networks have been refashioned and restructured since colonial times. Instead of celebrating the informality of the shoe and garment sectors, the book argues that informalization and marginalization have weakened the regulatory capacity of these networks. Economic restructuring in Nigeria since the mid-1980s and more recent competition from Asian markets have challenged the small-scale industry and its organization in a fundamental way. The difficulties of organization have led in turn to marginalization of the weak, to desperate measures of protection such as the creation of vigilante groups like the (in-) famous Bakassi Boys, and ultimately to the hijacking of organizations by political entrepreneurs. Liberalization of the Nigerian economy triggered an expansion of the shoe and garment enterprise clusters in Aba. Lay-offs in the formal sector made people turn to the informal sector, where entry costs are quite low - most producers operate with a modest set of tools and machines. The massive influx had deep effects on labour recruitment practices. Historically, apprenticeship was the way into the sector, and after 'graduation' the master would often help his apprentice to set up shop. This form of relationship is eroding: apprenticeships are getting shorter, and increasingly workshops hire labour from outside their network of 'affection'. Labour is increasingly organized through what Meagher calls 'weak ties'. Looking at organizational life, the book discusses the web of associations in which small producers converge. Hometown unions, religious societies, producers' associations, savings clubs, and a range of social clubs and friendship societies constitute a non-state framework for regulation and resource mobilization. Most entrepreneurs are members of several such networks that ideally give access to credit, clients and contacts. However, increasingly, the benefits become limited for the small members. Credit is limited, and competition between networks such as hometown associations and evangelical churches over fees and contributions puts a strain on participation. For the wealthy, it means that reciprocity is increasingly contained within lines of class, which tend to harden. Smaller producers, on the other hand, cannot afford active membership in as many associations as before. As these networks are vital to business, to labour recruitment, and to accumulation, they are opportunities for those who can participate. For those who cannot, they become liabilities of exclusion, and non-participants must focus instead on networks of survival. Network analysis goes beyond the separation of the world into formal and informal. By linking groups and actors, associations and unions, businesses and government agencies, a dense grid of connections is established. However, it is only when 'power' is added to the grid that clear light is shed on the political economy of small-scale producers. Networks are not inert. They are live wires of opportunities and liabilities. Meagher details the power dynamics of segments of the networks by adding layer by layer of ascriptive, affective, business and political dimensions. However, while the structure of networks is portrayed with authority, the internal dynamics of discipline, control, hierarchy, segmentation, inclusion and exclusion in different networks are, regrettably, treated more sporadically, with a focus on the emergence of the vigilante groups. In fact, it might well be the resource mobilization, the rule making and the discipline within these networks that tell us how and why some are maintained and others erode. In her seminal example from another garment sector (Manhattan, NY), Sally Falk Moore (in Law as Process, Routledge, 1978) develops her idea of a semi-autonomous social field capable of producing norms and rules and securing observance and enforcement. A stronger focus on the process of construction, maintenance and destruction of...

... Interplay Between Formal and Informal Systems of Managing Resource Conflicts: Some Evidence from South-Western Tanzania Faustin P. Maganga 51 Scrambling for Land in Tanzania: Processes of ... Foreword What kind of land tenure systems should African countries develop ...