PluriLand: researching competing legal orders in contestations over land

A #BeEx2023 event 
Date: Monday 14th of August, 2023 
Time: 11:30 -12:35

Venue: Kulturhuset 

 

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 contestations over land.

In her keynote, Rachel Sieder will present the project and how it combines theoretical and methodological approaches, as well as some of the ethical issues arising. The keynote will be followed by a roundtable where members of the project team will discuss some of the central findings so far. 

The CMI/LawTransform PluriLand project is enabled by a Norwegian Research Council FRIPRO grant.

Roundtable participants: Tatiana Alfonso, Red ALAS; Mekonnen Firew Ayano, NY State University at Buffalo, USA; Ana Côrtes, University of Coimbra, Portugal/LawTransform; Jackie Dugard, Columbia University, USA/University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa; Rachel Sieder, CIESAS, Mexico; Namita Wahi, Centre for Policy Research, India.

Moderator: Ana Braconnier, CIESAS, Mexico.