Land rights are uneven in Indonesia as they favor government over citizens as rights subjects. Mo... more Land rights are uneven in Indonesia as they favor government over citizens as rights subjects. Moreover, legal complexity and social inequality make legal knowledge about land rights rather inaccessible to small-scale farmers and the urban rank and file. Finally, the presumption of legality enables government institutions to acquire land and establish land control even if juridical settlements have been made against it. Despite these three forms of rightlessness, law and legalization are important for ordinary people who experiment and improvise to legalize their claims. And, crucially, such manufacture and persuasion of legality can have the effect of law. KEYWORDS legalization; rightlessness; presumption of legality; land conflict; representation of rights; Indonesia 'If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences'. (Thomas and Thomas, The Child in America, 1928)
This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the su... more This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.
Weak, fragile and failed. Mainstream scholarship on states and state formation in post-colonial s... more Weak, fragile and failed. Mainstream scholarship on states and state formation in post-colonial societies has often used these adjectives to describe dysfunctional public administrations. Kaplan's seminal article (1994), 'The Coming Anarchy', which sketched out imminent lawlessness and state disintegration, was the forerunner of huge scholarly interest in state formation in poor countries. This first generation of the 'fragile states' literature, with its focus on how actual government structures fall short of an ideal Weberian index of a rational state, was, however, essentialist, ahistorical and teleological (for a concise overview see . The present brief contributes to a novel understanding of public authority and state formation. It draws on a recent publication, Rule and Rupture, edited by Christian Lund and Michael Eilenberg (2016), and argues that public authority is not simply given but constituted through social contracts of property and citizenship. And this is an ongoing process.
Land issues are often not about land only. Rather, they invoke issues of property more broadly, i... more Land issues are often not about land only. Rather, they invoke issues of property more broadly, implicating social and political relationships in the widest sense. Struggles over property may therefore be as much about the scope and structure of authority as about access to resources, with land claims being tightly wrapped in questions of authority, citizenship, and the politics of jurisdiction. This dynamic relationship between property and citizenship rights, on the one hand, and the authority to define and adjudicate these questions are –we believe – central to state formation (Boone 2003a, 2007; Lund 2008).1 In a recent issue of this journal, land markets in Africa receive special attention. The editors, Colin and Woodhouse (2010), give special emphasis to the multiple processes of commoditization of land and how they are embedded in different social relations. That particular issue focuses on how a great variety of transactions and market dynamics generate commodity characteris...
Regimes of possession are constituted by rules of property. This includes the asset, rights subje... more Regimes of possession are constituted by rules of property. This includes the asset, rights subjects, and institutions of public authority. They are all coded in specific ways, and they connect to each other. When governments engage with land, they recode the constituent parts of the regime, engaging in property, subject, and even state formation. Yet, in a context of legal and institutional pluralism, many institutions and actors with varying degrees of relative autonomy and legitimacy make up the field of land struggle. All engage in coding of possession. Governments, claim to act within the law when they grant or dispossess citizens of land. Likewise, people aim to legitimate land claims through reference to law in creative ways. Examples show how different repertoires of legalization conspire with efforts to recode different constituent elements of possession into dispossession.
This paper examines how a local community has tried to legalise its possession of land in the out... more This paper examines how a local community has tried to legalise its possession of land in the outskirts of the city of Medan, Indonesia. In the absence of accessible legal pathways and in the face of state and gang violence, the community has resorted to an imaginative mimicry of legal land access procedures. This paper argues that law-making does not exclusively originate from the state, but also from society, and as such the community has effectively created legal facts. Data were collected through interviews and long-term contact with the community.
In this paper, we review four African experiences with property formalisation in order to examine... more In this paper, we review four African experiences with property formalisation in order to examine whether they conform to hypothesised mainstream effects. First, the demand for formalised rights must be deconstructed, taking into account the interests of local groups. No formalisation effort is likely to be embraced by all. Second, formalisation represents not only the recording of existing realities, but will often trigger alterations in the rights and institutions themselves. Third, given the generally limited resources of African governments, important trade-offs exist between cost and complexity, and there is often tension between capacity and ambitions. Each of these issues requires careful attention prior to, rather than subsequent to, the implementation of formalisation programmes.
This chapter discusses the relationship between law and property. The old aphorism that “possessi... more This chapter discusses the relationship between law and property. The old aphorism that “possession is nine-tenths of the law” suggests that property rights are not merely about legal rights, but, more importantly, about social relations and the political and physical capacity to hold things of value: land, in particular. For many people in Indonesia, rights remain a faint promise, and justice a mere rumor. Land conflicts and dispossession have placed unjust burdens on ordinary people for generations and under different regimes. Some people acquire land, but more seem to lose it when their lack of wealth, knowledge, language, connections, and organization leaves them vulnerable. Possession may be nine-tenths of the law, but the last tenth, recognition, still matters a great deal. Moreover, recognition often takes the form of legalization, through efforts to make claims and decisions appear legal. And, crucially, this very plausibility of legality can have the effect of law. The chap...
The old aphorism “possession is nine-tenths of the law” is particularly relevant in Indonesia, wh... more The old aphorism “possession is nine-tenths of the law” is particularly relevant in Indonesia, which has seen a string of regime changes and a shifting legal landscape for property claims. Ordinary people struggle to legalize their possessions and claim rights in competition with different branches of government, as well as police, army, and private gangs. Some people acquire land, but more seem to lose it when their lack of wealth, knowledge, language, connections, and organization leaves them vulnerable. Possession may be nine-tenths of the law, but the last tenth, recognition, still matters a great deal. Moreover, recognition often takes the form of legalization, through efforts to make claims and decisions appear legal. And, crucially, this very plausibility of legality can have the effect of law. The book is about how and why people and institutions work to make claims stick by legalizing them: the relationship between legal recognition and possession. The book explores the rel...
Cities are growing in numbers and size all over the globe, and the shelves of books on cities are... more Cities are growing in numbers and size all over the globe, and the shelves of books on cities are weighed aslope. As theatres of politics, government planning, resistance, and the leading edge of modernity, civility, decay, and violence, cities are concentrations of opportunity, danger, and transformation. 1 This review essay will reflect a particular perspective, namely urbanisation as a frontier process. That is, the suspension of previous resource control on spaces with changing land use, and an attempt to impose new rights and forms of access (Rasmussen and Lund 2018). The usurpation of space usually dissolves existing property systems, and challenges prevailing land rights. The subsequent land control is a complex cocktail of commodification, enclosure, dispossession, formalisation, and legalisation. This is no picnic. To canvass some of the interrelated dynamics of urban land control, I sketch out the arguments of four books on Asian urbanisation. Harms (2016), Levien (2018), Peters (2013), and Rithmire (2015), examine how different groups engage in efforts to control land. They focus on
This concluding synthesis argues that practices of legitimation can empirically deconstruct any g... more This concluding synthesis argues that practices of legitimation can empirically deconstruct any given energy transitions case to identify
The end of the civil war in Aceh brought peace, but it has been of a predatory nature. As a momen... more The end of the civil war in Aceh brought peace, but it has been of a predatory nature. As a moment of rupture, the peace revealed interests, powers and dynamics, and it offered an opportunity for their reconfiguration. When unrest ceased, old agrarian conflicts between smallholders and planters resumed. Peace held promise of land reform. Yet old patterns of smallholder dispossession were entrenched as the former insurgency leadership aligned with the old elite of plantation companies. Oil palm contract-farming schemes effectively alienated smallholders from their land, and violence precluded their organization. As a result, large-scale plantation production expanded. Through the creation of a violent frontier, smallholders were denied recognition of independent rights and property. In essence, smallholders were dispossessed by a combination of violence, political power and duplicitous paperwork. The study is based on fieldwork in areas where current land conflicts are played out, as well as on secondary sources.
Politics, property and production in the West African …, 2001
... agent in charge. No approval is sought from the sous-prefet, nor any consent from the other m... more ... agent in charge. No approval is sought from the sous-prefet, nor any consent from the other members of the Rural Council (see Blundo, 1995b: 13; Le Roy, 1980; Mathieu, 1996; Juul, 1991c; Juul, 1999). The extensive formal ...
Land rights are uneven in Indonesia as they favor government over citizens as rights subjects. Mo... more Land rights are uneven in Indonesia as they favor government over citizens as rights subjects. Moreover, legal complexity and social inequality make legal knowledge about land rights rather inaccessible to small-scale farmers and the urban rank and file. Finally, the presumption of legality enables government institutions to acquire land and establish land control even if juridical settlements have been made against it. Despite these three forms of rightlessness, law and legalization are important for ordinary people who experiment and improvise to legalize their claims. And, crucially, such manufacture and persuasion of legality can have the effect of law. KEYWORDS legalization; rightlessness; presumption of legality; land conflict; representation of rights; Indonesia 'If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences'. (Thomas and Thomas, The Child in America, 1928)
This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the su... more This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.
Weak, fragile and failed. Mainstream scholarship on states and state formation in post-colonial s... more Weak, fragile and failed. Mainstream scholarship on states and state formation in post-colonial societies has often used these adjectives to describe dysfunctional public administrations. Kaplan's seminal article (1994), 'The Coming Anarchy', which sketched out imminent lawlessness and state disintegration, was the forerunner of huge scholarly interest in state formation in poor countries. This first generation of the 'fragile states' literature, with its focus on how actual government structures fall short of an ideal Weberian index of a rational state, was, however, essentialist, ahistorical and teleological (for a concise overview see . The present brief contributes to a novel understanding of public authority and state formation. It draws on a recent publication, Rule and Rupture, edited by Christian Lund and Michael Eilenberg (2016), and argues that public authority is not simply given but constituted through social contracts of property and citizenship. And this is an ongoing process.
Land issues are often not about land only. Rather, they invoke issues of property more broadly, i... more Land issues are often not about land only. Rather, they invoke issues of property more broadly, implicating social and political relationships in the widest sense. Struggles over property may therefore be as much about the scope and structure of authority as about access to resources, with land claims being tightly wrapped in questions of authority, citizenship, and the politics of jurisdiction. This dynamic relationship between property and citizenship rights, on the one hand, and the authority to define and adjudicate these questions are –we believe – central to state formation (Boone 2003a, 2007; Lund 2008).1 In a recent issue of this journal, land markets in Africa receive special attention. The editors, Colin and Woodhouse (2010), give special emphasis to the multiple processes of commoditization of land and how they are embedded in different social relations. That particular issue focuses on how a great variety of transactions and market dynamics generate commodity characteris...
Regimes of possession are constituted by rules of property. This includes the asset, rights subje... more Regimes of possession are constituted by rules of property. This includes the asset, rights subjects, and institutions of public authority. They are all coded in specific ways, and they connect to each other. When governments engage with land, they recode the constituent parts of the regime, engaging in property, subject, and even state formation. Yet, in a context of legal and institutional pluralism, many institutions and actors with varying degrees of relative autonomy and legitimacy make up the field of land struggle. All engage in coding of possession. Governments, claim to act within the law when they grant or dispossess citizens of land. Likewise, people aim to legitimate land claims through reference to law in creative ways. Examples show how different repertoires of legalization conspire with efforts to recode different constituent elements of possession into dispossession.
This paper examines how a local community has tried to legalise its possession of land in the out... more This paper examines how a local community has tried to legalise its possession of land in the outskirts of the city of Medan, Indonesia. In the absence of accessible legal pathways and in the face of state and gang violence, the community has resorted to an imaginative mimicry of legal land access procedures. This paper argues that law-making does not exclusively originate from the state, but also from society, and as such the community has effectively created legal facts. Data were collected through interviews and long-term contact with the community.
In this paper, we review four African experiences with property formalisation in order to examine... more In this paper, we review four African experiences with property formalisation in order to examine whether they conform to hypothesised mainstream effects. First, the demand for formalised rights must be deconstructed, taking into account the interests of local groups. No formalisation effort is likely to be embraced by all. Second, formalisation represents not only the recording of existing realities, but will often trigger alterations in the rights and institutions themselves. Third, given the generally limited resources of African governments, important trade-offs exist between cost and complexity, and there is often tension between capacity and ambitions. Each of these issues requires careful attention prior to, rather than subsequent to, the implementation of formalisation programmes.
This chapter discusses the relationship between law and property. The old aphorism that “possessi... more This chapter discusses the relationship between law and property. The old aphorism that “possession is nine-tenths of the law” suggests that property rights are not merely about legal rights, but, more importantly, about social relations and the political and physical capacity to hold things of value: land, in particular. For many people in Indonesia, rights remain a faint promise, and justice a mere rumor. Land conflicts and dispossession have placed unjust burdens on ordinary people for generations and under different regimes. Some people acquire land, but more seem to lose it when their lack of wealth, knowledge, language, connections, and organization leaves them vulnerable. Possession may be nine-tenths of the law, but the last tenth, recognition, still matters a great deal. Moreover, recognition often takes the form of legalization, through efforts to make claims and decisions appear legal. And, crucially, this very plausibility of legality can have the effect of law. The chap...
The old aphorism “possession is nine-tenths of the law” is particularly relevant in Indonesia, wh... more The old aphorism “possession is nine-tenths of the law” is particularly relevant in Indonesia, which has seen a string of regime changes and a shifting legal landscape for property claims. Ordinary people struggle to legalize their possessions and claim rights in competition with different branches of government, as well as police, army, and private gangs. Some people acquire land, but more seem to lose it when their lack of wealth, knowledge, language, connections, and organization leaves them vulnerable. Possession may be nine-tenths of the law, but the last tenth, recognition, still matters a great deal. Moreover, recognition often takes the form of legalization, through efforts to make claims and decisions appear legal. And, crucially, this very plausibility of legality can have the effect of law. The book is about how and why people and institutions work to make claims stick by legalizing them: the relationship between legal recognition and possession. The book explores the rel...
Cities are growing in numbers and size all over the globe, and the shelves of books on cities are... more Cities are growing in numbers and size all over the globe, and the shelves of books on cities are weighed aslope. As theatres of politics, government planning, resistance, and the leading edge of modernity, civility, decay, and violence, cities are concentrations of opportunity, danger, and transformation. 1 This review essay will reflect a particular perspective, namely urbanisation as a frontier process. That is, the suspension of previous resource control on spaces with changing land use, and an attempt to impose new rights and forms of access (Rasmussen and Lund 2018). The usurpation of space usually dissolves existing property systems, and challenges prevailing land rights. The subsequent land control is a complex cocktail of commodification, enclosure, dispossession, formalisation, and legalisation. This is no picnic. To canvass some of the interrelated dynamics of urban land control, I sketch out the arguments of four books on Asian urbanisation. Harms (2016), Levien (2018), Peters (2013), and Rithmire (2015), examine how different groups engage in efforts to control land. They focus on
This concluding synthesis argues that practices of legitimation can empirically deconstruct any g... more This concluding synthesis argues that practices of legitimation can empirically deconstruct any given energy transitions case to identify
The end of the civil war in Aceh brought peace, but it has been of a predatory nature. As a momen... more The end of the civil war in Aceh brought peace, but it has been of a predatory nature. As a moment of rupture, the peace revealed interests, powers and dynamics, and it offered an opportunity for their reconfiguration. When unrest ceased, old agrarian conflicts between smallholders and planters resumed. Peace held promise of land reform. Yet old patterns of smallholder dispossession were entrenched as the former insurgency leadership aligned with the old elite of plantation companies. Oil palm contract-farming schemes effectively alienated smallholders from their land, and violence precluded their organization. As a result, large-scale plantation production expanded. Through the creation of a violent frontier, smallholders were denied recognition of independent rights and property. In essence, smallholders were dispossessed by a combination of violence, political power and duplicitous paperwork. The study is based on fieldwork in areas where current land conflicts are played out, as well as on secondary sources.
Politics, property and production in the West African …, 2001
... agent in charge. No approval is sought from the sous-prefet, nor any consent from the other m... more ... agent in charge. No approval is sought from the sous-prefet, nor any consent from the other members of the Rural Council (see Blundo, 1995b: 13; Le Roy, 1980; Mathieu, 1996; Juul, 1991c; Juul, 1999). The extensive formal ...
Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. ISBN: 978-0-8223-7146-5 (paper); ISBN: 978-0-8223-7139-7 (cl... more Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. ISBN: 978-0-8223-7146-5 (paper); ISBN: 978-0-8223-7139-7 (cloth) In the global present, the emergence of new regimes of neoliberal accumulation have proved that neither capitalistic expansion nor (settler) colonialism belong to bypassed stages of history (Lloyd and Wolfe 2016; Veracini 2019). On the contrary, contemporary modes of capital accumulation continue to perpetuate forms of racially inscribed dispossession and appropriation. In settler colonial contexts such as Canada, Australia or Israel/Palestine, land appropriation remains the triggering engine of different accumulation strategies that are oriented towards the encroachment of the settler constituency and the erasure of Indigenous communities, a process that constantly regenerates itself.
In the current postcolonial setting, which looks an awful lot like a past colo nial one, Palestin... more In the current postcolonial setting, which looks an awful lot like a past colo nial one, Palestinians are not allowed to dream about a future. Time collapses into anachronistic contemporaneity in Somd eep Sen's book, and the task of teasing out temporal perspectives as different stances on Palestine is, in fact, a search for a generic conceptual language for colonial subjugation. In its unique specificity, the history of Palestine and Israel offers a synoptic view of colonialism and its permanent state of exception. The thing is, in a certain sense, there is only the present, and both the past and the future are funneled through the capacity to make sense of it in the now. That this should be simple and without contradictions would be too much to expect. The five commentaries that follow engage with Decolonizing Palestine from different perspectives with emphasis on his tory, social movements, subjectivity of the colonized, and the precarity of governmental authority.
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