Peer2Politics

Several billion rural poor still lack secure land tenure. Their communal assets are most affected. But this is beginning to change. These changes can play a crucial role in limiting conflict in troubled agrarian regions. They can also help remove impediments to transition to fairer and more accountable forms of the modern agrarian state. This lecture–the Third Al Moumin Distinguished Lecture on Environmental Peacebuilding–reexamined the known fact that land grievances help trigger conflicts and war in the context of stumbling transformation and detectable innovations in the property sector. It argued that departure from classical trajectories of property rights development is timely, and in which new legal and institutional treatment of community land rights is key. Drawing principally upon African cases, it illustrated how positive paths to secure tenure and peace are being built. -