BiblioVault - Books about Land tenure

The Geographies of Social Movements

Afro-Colombian Mobilization and the Aquatic Space

Ulrich Oslender

Duke University Press, 2016

In The Geographies of Social Movements Ulrich Oslender proposes a critical place perspective to examine the activism of black communities in the lowland rain forest of Colombia's Pacific Coast region. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in and around the town of Guapi, Oslender examines how the work of local community councils, which have organized around newly granted ethnic and land rights since the early 1990s, is anchored to space and place. Exploring how residents' social relationships are entangled with the region's rivers, streams, swamps, rain, and tides, Oslender argues that this "aquatic space"—his conceptualization of the mutually constitutive relationships between people and their rain forest environment—provides a local epistemology that has shaped the political process. Oslender demonstrates that social mobilization among Colombia's Pacific Coast black communities is best understood as emerging out of their place-based identity and environmental imaginaries. He argues that the critical place perspective proposed accounts more fully for the multiple, multiscalar, rooted, and networked experiences within social movements.

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Governing Maya Communities and Lands in Belize

Indigenous Rights, Markets, and Sovereignties

Laurie Kroshus Medina

Rutgers University Press, 2024

Confronting a debt crisis, the Belizean government has strategized to maximize revenues from lands designated as state property, privatizing lands for cash crop production and granting concessions for timber and oil extraction. Meanwhile, conservation NGOs have lobbied to establish protected areas on these lands to address a global biodiversity crisis. They promoted ecotourism as a market-based mechanism to fund both conservation and debt repayment; ecotourism also became a mechanism for governing lands and people—even state actors themselves—through the market. Mopan and Q’eqchi’ Maya communities, dispossessed of lands and livelihoods through these efforts, pursued claims for Indigenous rights to their traditional lands through Inter-American and Belizean judicial systems. This book examines the interplay of conflicting forms of governance that emerged as these strategies intersected: state performances of sovereignty over lands and people, neoliberal rule through the market, and Indigenous rights-claiming, which challenged both market logics and practices of sovereignty.

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A Greater Ireland

The Land League and Transatlantic Nationalism in Gilded Age America

Ely M. Janis

University of Wisconsin Press, 2014

During the early 1880s a continual interaction of events, ideas, and people in Ireland and the United States created a "Greater Ireland" spanning the Atlantic that profoundly impacted both Irish and American society. In A Greater Ireland: The Land League and Transatlantic Nationalism in Gilded Age America, Ely M. Janis closely examines the Irish National Land League, a transatlantic organization with strong support in Ireland and the United States. Founded in Ireland in 1879 against the backdrop of crop failure and agrarian unrest, the Land League pressured the British government to reform the Irish landholding system and allow Irish political self-rule. The League quickly spread to the United States, with hundreds of thousands of Irish Americans participating in branches in their local communities.
As this "Greater Ireland" flourished, new opportunities arose for women and working-class men to contribute within Irish-American society. Exploring the complex interplay of ethnicity, class, and gender, Janis demonstrates the broad range of ideological, social, and political opinion held by Irish Americans in the 1880s. Participation in the Land League deeply influenced a generation that replaced their old county and class allegiances with a common cause, shaping the future of Irish-American nationalism.

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Grounded Authority

The Algonquins of Barriere Lake against the State

Shiri Pasternak

University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Western Political Science Association's Clay Morgan Award for Best Book in Environmental Political Theory
Canadian Studies Network Prize for the Best Book in Canadian Studies
Nominated for Best First Book Award at NAISA
Honorable Mention: Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Book Prize

Since Justin Trudeau’s election in 2015, Canada has been hailed internationally as embarking on a truly progressive, post-postcolonial era—including an improved relationship between the state and its Indigenous peoples. Shiri Pasternak corrects this misconception, showing that colonialism is very much alive in Canada. From the perspective of Indigenous law and jurisdiction, she tells the story of the Algonquins of Barriere Lake, in western Quebec, and their tireless resistance to federal land claims policy.

Grounded Authority chronicles the band’s ongoing attempts to restore full governance over its lands and natural resources through an agreement signed by settler governments almost three decades ago—an agreement the state refuses to fully implement. Pasternak argues that the state’s aversion to recognizing Algonquin jurisdiction stems from its goal of perfecting its sovereignty by replacing the inherent jurisdiction of Indigenous peoples with its own, delegated authority. From police brutality and fabricated sexual abuse cases to an intervention into and overthrow of a customary government, Pasternak provides a compelling, richly detailed account of rarely documented coercive mechanisms employed to force Indigenous communities into compliance with federal policy.

A rigorous account of the incredible struggle fought by the Algonquins to maintain responsibility over their territory, Grounded Authority provides a powerful alternative model to one nation’s land claims policy and a vital contribution to current debates in the study of colonialism and Indigenous peoples in North America and globally.

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Guerrilla Auditors

The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay

Kregg Hetherington

Duke University Press, 2011

Guerrilla Auditors is an ethnographic account of the rise of information, transparency, and good governance in the post–Cold War era, and the effects of these concepts on Paraguay’s transition to democracy. Kregg Hetherington shows that the ideal of transparent information, meant to depoliticize bureaucratic procedures, has become a battleground for a new kind of politics centered on legal interpretation and the manipulation of official documents. In late-twentieth-century Paraguay, peasant land politics moved unexpectedly from the roads and fields into the documentary recesses of state bureaucracy. When peasants, bureaucrats, and development experts encountered one another in state archives, conflicts ensued about how bureaucracy ought to function, what documents are for, and who gets to narrate the past and the future of the nation. Hetherington argues that Paraguay’s neoliberal democracy is predicated, at least in part, on an exclusionary distinction between model citizens and peasants. Despite this, peasant activists have found ways to circumvent their exclusion and in so doing question the conceptual foundations of international development orthodoxy.

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