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The Sriperumbudur–Oragadam region, on the southwestern periphery of the Chennai metropolis, in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, is the location of several projects for setting up export processing zones and special economic zones. The implementation of these projects has led to large-scale land acquisition. This article examines the responses of agrarian households to the state-led land acquisition process and the outcomes of their actions. The article argues that attending to everyday practices over a period of time can enhance the understanding of the anti-dispossession politics. Further, it highlights the limitations of Levien's theory of land dispossession and the Speculative Urbanism theory when it comes to capturing the complexity and the nuances of anti-dispossession politics.

The twelve articles in this special issue feature the work of scholars studying the dispossession of rural land in China and India. Each offers new insights about the extent and patterns of dispossession, the complex dynamics driving it, the consequences for farmers, as well as the factors shaping resistance or compliance. Although each article treats developments within one country, the collection helps uncover features common to rural land dispossession in China and India, and illuminates differences that shape the processes of dispossession in each country. Comparison of the two countries helps us to not only understand the future implications of this enormously important issue for economic growth, social inequality and politics in both countries, but also contributes insights useful for understanding this issue elsewhere in the world.

The twelve articles in this special issue feature the work of scholars studying the dispossession of rural land in China and India. Each offers new insights about the extent and patterns of dispossession, the complex dynamics driving it, the consequences for farmers, as well as the factors shaping resistance or compliance. Although each article treats developments within one country, the collection helps uncover features common to rural land dispossession in China and India, and illuminates differences that shape the processes of dispossession in each country. Comparison of the two countries helps us to not only understand the future implications of this enormously important issue for economic growth, social inequality and politics in both countries, but also contributes insights useful for understanding this issue elsewhere in the world.

This paper takes a fresh look at the land dispossession that is central to Chinese urbanisation. It documents in detail the property rights changes that occur when village land is taken by a municipal government and analyses the value of those rights by looking at compensation accounts for a case study village in the city of Xiamen in Fujian Province. The purpose of the paper is to show the complexity of the property rights dynamics during land expropriation and the results in terms of villager income. The paper also shows that, in Xiamen, the local state has made a series of concessions such that displaced villagers now receive a compensation package that not only includes compensation for lost agricultural land, production and homes but also a share of the urban land value uplift created by the infrastructure investments of the municipal state.

1 Introduction: Causes & Risks of Dispossession & Land Grabbing in the Great Lakes Regio. - 2 Land Grabbing & Development History: The Congolese Experience. - 3 This Land is My Land: Land Grabbing in Ituri (DRC). - 4 Land Grabbing by Mining Companies: Local Contentions & State Reconfiguration in South Kivu (DRC). - 5 Competition over Soil & Subsoil: Land Grabbing by Local Elites in South Kivu (DRC). - 6 The Continuities in Contested Land Acquisitions in Uganda . - 7 Land Grabbing & Power Relations in Burundi: Practical Norms & Real Governance. - 8 Land Grabbing & Land Tenure Security in Post-Genocide Rwanda. - 9 The Reorganization of Rural Space in Rwanda: Habitat Concentration, Land Consolidation & Collective Marshland Cultivation. - 10 'Modernizing Kigali': The Struggle for Space, in the Rwandan Urban Context

Keynote Speech at the Conference on Land, Memory, Reconstruction and Justice: Perspectives on Land Restitution in South Africa 13-15 September 2006, Houw Hoek Inn, Cape Town. Published by East African Law Review, University of Dar es Salaam (2009). Pp. 103-124 ; Tension as mobs invade 'idle' land at the coast, read the first page of the Daily Nation Newspaper on September 4th 2006. The paper went on to describe how residents of parts of Mombasa, mostly youths wielding pangs and other weapons had invaded plots they claimed belonged to absentee landlords. A few days earlier the Kenyan President had been reported in the local newspapers as having put absentee landlords on notice. This incident as many others in the last twenty years have illustrated how owners of land can lose their land to others who believe that they also have a claim to the property in question. As Cronon has argued, ownership is a complex social institution that varies widely between and among cultures and therefore only makes sense if the people with whom the property rights holder lives recognise that ownership and vest on that person the rights to impose sanctions against the violation of those rights by anyone else.1 Dispossession is a common phenomenon in many parts of the world where colonisation entailed the process of taking over land owned by natives and passing this over to the colonisers and their vasals. The underlying assumption was that the colonised had no rights to land either as individuals or as groups. For instance, in the case of Isaka Wainaina & Another v. Murito wa Indagara & Ors, Chief Justice Barth's interpretation of the provisions of the 1915 Crown Lands Ordinance in Kenya was to the effect that Africans were mere tenants at will of the Crown with no more than temporary occupancy rights to land.2 This ignored any rights existing under customary law. The nullification of natives' rights to land in favour of new 'owners' through processes that were not understood by the natives created a duality of rights' systems. Indeed the acquisition of land rights for settlers was mainly done through political processes (declaration of protectorate, designation of land as owned by the coloniser etc) that were followed by legal instruments giving the political acts the requisite binding force. Dispossession from land also entailed dispossession from resources that people depended on for their livelihoods. Wildlife and forest preservation areas were carved out of land previously occupied by the natives but that had been expropriated from them and declared crown land. In other cases, areas were declared protected and the interests of wildlife and forest conservation promoted in total disregard of the concerns of the communities living in them. The boundaries of what was designated as the Southern game reserve in Kenya, for instance, practically coincided with those of the Maasai native reserve.3 Thus communal wildlife and forest resources were formally made state property and managed by wildlife and forestry departments in total disregard of the prior rights of the natives to those resources and products. Some areas were declared national parks because the colonisers saw no other use for them. 4 In this general schema, however the rights of the settler farmers to their land and other resources found therein were rigorously protected. Evidently, the establishment of protected areas entailed the dispossession of people's land (as the habitat for the wildlife or forests) as well as the animals and forest products. This process severed the connections that existed between the natives and their physical environment. It introduced new values for wildlife and forests based on commercial exploitation which were the preserve of the new 'owners' of land and resources. Consequently, the parks were culturally alien to the communities living in and around them.5 The process of dispossession was not uncontested. Communities resisted it but were overpowered and subjugated under the new property ownership systems. Confronting dispossession in many countries thus remains a critical part of the resolution of land and resource crises. This is in a context where such dispossession is not acknowledged and the rights have passed on to new holders. It is also exacerbated by new forms of dispossession through privatisation of resource rights (land, water etc) and the consequential passage of public goods into private hands without securing the interests of all actors that have previously had access to the resources. It is within this context that restitution is discussed. ; Tension as mobs invade 'idle' land at the coast, read the first page of the Daily Nation Newspaper on September 4th 2006. The paper went on to describe how residents of parts of Mombasa, mostly youths wielding pangs and other weapons had invaded plots they claimed belonged to absentee landlords. A few days earlier the Kenyan President had been reported in the local newspapers as having put absentee landlords on notice. This incident as many others in the last twenty years have illustrated how owners of land can lose their land to others who believe that they also have a claim to the property in question. As Cronon has argued, ownership is a complex social institution that varies widely between and among cultures and therefore only makes sense if the people with whom the property rights holder lives recognise that ownership and vest on that person the rights to impose sanctions against the violation of those rights by anyone else.1 Dispossession is a common phenomenon in many parts of the world where colonisation entailed the process of taking over land owned by natives and passing this over to the colonisers and their vasals. The underlying assumption was that the colonised had no rights to land either as individuals or as groups. For instance, in the case of Isaka Wainaina & Another v. Murito wa Indagara & Ors, Chief Justice Barth's interpretation of the provisions of the 1915 Crown Lands Ordinance in Kenya was to the effect that Africans were mere tenants at will of the Crown with no more than temporary occupancy rights to land.2 This ignored any rights existing under customary law. The nullification of natives' rights to land in favour of new 'owners' through processes that were not understood by the natives created a duality of rights' systems. Indeed the acquisition of land rights for settlers was mainly done through political processes (declaration of protectorate, designation of land as owned by the coloniser etc) that were followed by legal instruments giving the political acts the requisite binding force. Dispossession from land also entailed dispossession from resources that people depended on for their livelihoods. Wildlife and forest preservation areas were carved out of land previously occupied by the natives but that had been expropriated from them and declared crown land. In other cases, areas were declared protected and the interests of wildlife and forest conservation promoted in total disregard of the concerns of the communities living in them. The boundaries of what was designated as the Southern game reserve in Kenya, for instance, practically coincided with those of the Maasai native reserve.3 Thus communal wildlife and forest resources were formally made state property and managed by wildlife and forestry departments in total disregard of the prior rights of the natives to those resources and products. Some areas were declared national parks because the colonisers saw no other use for them. 4 In this general schema, however the rights of the settler farmers to their land and other resources found therein were rigorously protected. Evidently, the establishment of protected areas entailed the dispossession of people's land (as the habitat for the wildlife or forests) as well as the animals and forest products. This process severed the connections that existed between the natives and their physical environment. It introduced new values for wildlife and forests based on commercial exploitation which were the preserve of the new 'owners' of land and resources. Consequently, the parks were culturally alien to the communities living in and around them.5 The process of dispossession was not uncontested. Communities resisted it but were overpowered and subjugated under the new property ownership systems. Confronting dispossession in many countries thus remains a critical part of the resolution of land and resource crises. This is in a context where such dispossession is not acknowledged and the rights have passed on to new holders. It is also exacerbated by new forms of dispossession through privatisation of resource rights (land, water etc) and the consequential passage of public goods into private hands without securing the interests of all actors that have previously had access to the resources. It is within this context that restitution is discussed.

Taking the latest round of lawmaking in China as a point of departure, this article provides an in-depth examination of women's land rights on paper and their dispossession of land in reality. To explain the gap between the two, I draw on the extant literature as well as my field research in southwestern China to illustrate the mechanisms responsible for unequal access to farmland between women and men. In illuminating these mechanisms, this article unpacks how, over the past four decades, the combination of ostensibly gender-neutral state policies, seemingly progressive legislation, and ingrained cultural prescriptions and practices has produced profoundly gendered disparities in land use. If state policies and legislation are indeed part of the problem, they must be part of the solution. Decisionmakers at the commanding heights, however, have showed little will to effect sweeping changes aimed at safeguarding women's access to land. Instead, they have opted for piecemeal, fragmented, and localized measures in the hope of chipping away at gender inequality in land possession and management. These tepid measures will have grave implications for women's land use and rights contention in the years to come.

Under the New Order authoritarian regime, the state endorsed terra-nullification of the customary territories had been the basis for the stipulation of state forest (hutan negara).After the fall of the General Suharto led regime in 1998 generated a new phase for the struggles of the customary groups in different parts of the archipelago. This article examines the rise of indigeneity and counter-hegemonic indigenous legal maneuvering spearheaded by Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN) against ongoing land dispossession in Indonesia since the fall of New Order authoritarian regime which includes the indigenous mobilizations (strategy, organization and tactics) in the post-authoritarian country, including the avenue of new types of legal activism when it comes to the creative destruction of global capitalism today. It focuses on two modes of policy advocacy and campaign against land dispossession: (a) the production of the Constitutional Court Ruling No. 35/PUU-X/2012, a new legal landmark that establishes the constitutional norm of the citizenship status of Indonesian indigenous peoples (masyarakat hukum adat) as rights bearing subjects, and the owners of their customary territory; and (b) the National Inquiry on Indigenous Peoples' Rights held by the Indonesian National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM). The discussion describes The Colonialism of 'State-Izing' Customary Communities' Territory, Contemporary Indigeneity Politics in Indonesia, Counter-Hegemonic Indigenous Legal Maneuvering, Judicial Review against The1999 Law No. 41on Forestry, National Inquiry on Indigenous Peoples' Rights, and Connecting Counter-Hegemonic Indigenous Legal Maneuvering with the Grassroots Struggles which focuses on Mobilizing at Multiple Scales. It is concluded from this article that the efficacy of legal struggles is very much depend on the capacity to connect with the grassroots mobilization by continuously promulgating the resurgence of indigeneity politics against the destructive impacts of corporatized state under the servitude of global capitalism, the indigenous movement constituents in Indonesia

U.S. homesteading has been linked to establishing federal sovereignty over western lands threatened by the Confederacy, foreign powers, and the Indian Wars in the last half of the nineteenth century. However, the bulk of homesteading actually took place in the early twentieth century, long after these threats to federal ownership ceased. We argue that this "late homesteading" was also an effort to enforce federal rights, but in response to a different threat—a legal one. Questionable federal land policies in the late nineteenth century dispossessed massive amounts of Indigenous lands, and exposed the federal government to legal, rather than violent, conflict. Late homesteading was used to make the dispossession permanent, even in cases where a legal defeat eventually occurred. Examining the qualitative evidence, and using data on the universe of individual homesteads and federal land cessions across the 16 western states, we find evidence consistent with this hypothesis.

Introduction -- Situating Singur -- Land, identity, and the politics of representation -- Law, judicialisation and the politics of waiting -- Class, caste and community -- Gendered mobilisation: women as activists and symbols -- Activist leadership -- Ma, Mati, Manush : Mamata -- Conclusion

The neocolonial turn toward extractivism intensifies the use of violence while fostering land dispossession, racism, and militarization of social life. Afro-Colombian women resist this process by using their subjectivities politically, strategically, discursively, and textually. An examination through the lens of black/decolonial feminism of the first national Mobilization for the Care of Life and Ancestral Territories, led by 40 black women from the Department of Cauca in 2014, shows that black women's emotions and collective affections were driving forces that exhibited both their exclusions and their resistance. These feelings may be seen as catalysts through which their lived experiences are expressed and performed in the material world. Examination of this event suggests that a more radical analysis of black women's historicity, subjectivities, and struggles is needed to better capture and understand experience-based epistemologies that challenge hegemonic forms of knowledge production. El giro neocolonial hacia el extractivismo intensifica el uso de la violencia al tiempo que fomenta el despojo de tierras, el racismo y la militarización de la vida social. Las mujeres afrocolombianas se resisten a este proceso utilizando sus subjetividades políticas, estratégica, discursiva y textualmente. Un examen a través del feminismo negro/decolonial de la primera movilización nacional por el Cuidado de la Vida y los Territorios Ancestrales, liderada por 40 mujeres negras del Departamento del Cauca en 2014, revele que las emociones y los afectos colectivos de las mujeres negras fueron fuerzas impulsoras que exibian tanto sus exclusiones como sus formas de resistencia. Estos sentimientos pueden verse como catalizadores a través de los cuales sus experiencias vividas se expresan y realizan en el mundo material. El examen de este evento sugiere que se necesita un análisis más radical de la historicidad, las subjetividades y las luchas de las mujeres afrodescendientes para captar y comprender mejor las epistemologías basadas en la experiencia que desafían las formas hegemónicas de producción de conocimiento.