Suchergebnisse

The ongoing use of landscape-based conflict commodities — diamonds and other minerals, timber, wildlife, etc. — to finance wars continues to evolve. The success with which such commodities can be transacted to support militaries, militias and insurgencies has led belligerents to innovate with additional commodities. Housing, land and property (HLP) rights within war zones have belatedly joined the list of conflict commodities that are subject to transaction, and to such an extent as to warrant significant concern. However, the use of 'conflict HLP rights' has not yet been operationally described in the way that other conflict commodities have been. This is a necessary first step towards deriving and designing countermeasures. This article makes a preliminary attempt to delineate the exploitation of conflict HLP rights by examining how they are transacted to support belligerent groups in three conflicts: Darfur, Colombia and Syria.

Rectifying land rights in war-torn settings are among the most daunting challenges of peacebuilding. War-torn land tenure situations are unique settings in their combination of a weakened and chaotic formal (statutory) system, vigorous but very fluid informal tenure activity, along with the presence of political demands regarding land, and international actors that have a large interest and influence in the success of any improvement or recovery. While this combination carries risks, it also represents real opportunity for practical and policy reform in the formal and customary land tenure sectors of countries recovering from armed conflict. In this regard the statutory tenure reorganization and reform efforts supported by the UN need to assess how the development of informal tenure institutions, problems, and processes are proceeding 'on the ground,' so as to draw legitimacy from these processes into reformulating national tenure structure, policy, law, and enforcement; thereby contributing to durable peace. This has the advantage of working 'with the grain,' and building on what has already been learned, disseminated, and accepted within the informal tenure system as the formal legal system is being reformed and implemented -- as opposed to expecting people to disengage from binding customary obligations involving land when improved formal laws are finally enacted and enforced. Without this purposeful connection, tenure institutions at different levels risk evolving in different directions, with considerable difficulty and volatility later on for any attempts to reconnect them. With such a connection however, new policy can support what people are already doing, and engage in on-going issues of disputing, resettlement, restitution, proof of claim, and the role of land and property in economic development. In post-crisis settings, new laws have the opportunity to address land and property issues in the context of what people are already doing 'on the ground', with a view to moving from the fluidity of crisis situations to a more solidified and peaceful social and legal environment as an outcome. Positive examples exist, and several of them are presented in this paper. The article discusses the primary challenges regarding land rights in war-torn settings and then includes both practical and policy options for overcoming them. The paper draws on the author's land tenure experience in 15 war-torn countries. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractThe severity of the population dislocation and destruction of housing, land and property (HLP) in the Ukraine war has driven efforts for starting reconstruction planning prior to the war's end. This comes with the realization that recovery will entail considerable preparation, including efforts at using seized Russian assets to finance it. Engaging in HLP restitution and compensation will be a primary recovery challenge, with the Ukrainian government moving forward with legislation for facilitating this. However, the government's current approach to processing what will be millions of HLP claims for restitution and compensation faces a daunting challenge. Housing, land and property rights prior to the war comprised a dense tangle of confusion, corruption, and inadequate documentation; such that attempting to untangle each claim on a case‐by‐case basis as currently planned is highly problematic and risks instability. This article describes this tangle as five categories of problems: (1) the post‐Soviet transition, (2) rule of law problems, (3) administrative tangles, (4) corruption, and (5) war‐related issues. The article then recommends that the government and international community pursue a 'mass claims and transitional justice' approach to large‐scale HLP restitution which is aligned with international best practice and able to supersede the tenurial tangle.

AbstractThe inclination to pursue monetary compensation to solve difficult large‐scale housing, land, and property (HLP) claims problems resulting from wartime population dislocation as part of peacebuilding efforts has become common in recent years. Certain donors, countries, militaries, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), and policy organisations see compensation as a relatively quick, easy, and conclusive solution to massive numbers of destabilizing HLP claims. This article examines such a preference and finds that while the international legal, human rights, and moral foundations for using compensation in this way are significantly developed, a series of operational tensions exists that preclude compensation from being the easy remedy it is often thought to be.

The current relationship between Syria and the West cripples any real prospect for reconstruction. Western sanctions on reconstruction as a political tool aimed at the regime, have wide-ranging negative impacts on the civilian population – while having little hope of political success. For agriculture the repercussions of sanctions on reconstruction are severe, affecting refugee returns, livelihood recovery, food security and stabilization. This article examines the priority dilemma of sanctions on agricultural reconstruction, and argues that they are counterproductive, particularly given that the war is now larger and more problematic than what a reformed government's relationship with civil society could resolve.

The Arab Spring uprisings have released a flood of land and property conflicts, brought about by decades of autocratic rule. Expropriations, corruption, poor performance of the rule of law, patronage and sectarian discrimination built up a wide variety of land and property transgressions over approximately 30 years. The result has been the creation of longstanding, acute grievances among large components of national populations who now seek to act on them. If new, transitional or reforming governments and their international partners fail to effectively attend to such grievances, the populations concerned may act on them in ways that detract from stability. This article critiques the case of Yemen, whose transitional government, with international support, initiated a land and property mass claims process in the South in order to address a primary grievance of the southern population as part of the National Dialogue transition. A series of techniques are described that would greatly improve the mass claims process once it inevitably recommences after the Houthi conflict comes to an end. These improvements would attach more importance to socio-political realities and how to quickly attend to them, as opposed to an over-reliance on specific legalities. Such an approach could have wider utility among Arab Spring states seeking to address similar land and property grievances.