Contestations over Land in Plural Legal Regimes 

Contestations over Land in Plural Legal Regimes
Indigenous and traditional land rights are protected in many legal systems. Still, conflicts over land affecting vulnerable communities are rapidly escalating across the globe and are often highly transnational. Our knowledge about the mobilization and traction of protective land regimes remains fragmented, localized, and weakly theorized. Through cross-regional investigation of conflicts affecting the land rights of vulnerable communities who in theory are protected by law, the PluriLand project aims to develop a new theory of land claiming. The study is profoundly interdisciplinary, and compares these processes across six countries: South Africa, Ethiopia, India, Brazil, Guatemala, and Colombia. These countries display a mixture of colonial and non-colonial histories and capture a range of circumstances within and between Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well as in terms of periodization of key political moments in contestation over land. This panel will present preliminary findings from the project.
The CMI/LawTransform PluriLand project is enabled by a Norwegian Research Council FRIPRO grant.
Participants: Tatiana Alfonso CIDE México (digital), Helena Alviar Sciences Po Paris, Ana Braconnier CIESAS, Jackie Dugard Columbia University USA / Wits University, South Africa, Namita Wahi Centre for Policy Research, India
Moderator: Rachel Sieder CIESAS, Mexico