State,war, and land dispossession: The multiple paths to land concentration

We focus on the role of the state in land dispossession during war. State agencies promote land accumulation not only through coercive paths, but also by combining political and market mechanisms. Each mechanism may link the state with different actors and coalitions. We illustrate how this worked in Tibú, a Colombian municipality in which violence against civilians and land accumulation took place in more or less distinct phases. The case highlights the fact that land accumulation during war is not only achieved through coercion. At the same time, it shows the importance of identifying the specific coalitions through which states establish their presence in contested territories during war. We explain such variation as resulting from the types of alliances and coalitions that the state establishes with different sets of stakeholders, and the aims pursued by coalition actors.     

Agrarian change through speculation: Rural elites as land brokers for mining in Colombia

This paper studies the connections between the expansion of mining capital, speculative forms of land grabbing and agrarian transformation. It is argued that in periods of commodity boom, the landowning rural elite benefits from mining through speculative land deals with mining companies. They act as ‘land brokers’ for the mining firms, helping them to overcome a significant barrier to land accumulation through the de facto abolition of landed property. The analysis is based on a qualitative case study on the expansion of coal mining in central Cesar in northern Colombia. To develop my arguments, I refer to the concept of accumulation by dispossession as defined by Michael Levien, and historical materialist approaches on rent, and speculative land dispossession. In addition, I use concepts developed for studying coercive land grabbing and agrarian elite participation in armed conflicts to analyse the mechanisms applied to (coercively) acquire rights to land. It is concluded that with high global prices for minerals, metals and fossil fuels, the expansion of mining in the countryside fosters a process of agrarian change through land speculation that is articulated in a reconcentration of landed property, a re-strengthening of the rural landowning elite and the dissolution of peasant agriculture.     

Agrarian elite participation in Colombia's civil war

Direct elite participation in civil wars remains unexplored terrain. It should be analytically telling, because it involves taking major risks and costs. Here, we consider the direct participation of one rural elite—big cattle ranchers—in the Colombian paramilitary saga. We claim that it was massive, locally specific, regulated by institutions, and riddled by permanent collective action issues. We focus on two important forms of direct participation: ranchers as leaders of paramilitary groups, and ranchers as promoters and beneficiaries of coercive land dispossession. This does not cover the full spectrum of potential elite participation in war, but it is a key starting point to sort out the ways in which extreme inequality is associated with political violence from above.     

Bread or justice - Land restitution and investments in Montes de Maria,Colombia

In 2011, Colombia started a legal land restitution process whereby government institutions help internally displaced people (IDPs) reclaim land dispossessed after 1991 through the violent conflict involving the communist guerilla, paramilitaries and the army. The designated land courts normally covers voluntary sales at the going market price at the time of dispossession, presuming buyers took advantage of the IDPs’ need for money and their low expectations of returning from their current sites of refuge. We study the rise and fall of a commercial cassava operation that started to buy land from IDPs openly in the Montes de María region on Colombia’s Caribbean coast after peace returned in 2007. After losing several land restitution court cases, the company shifted from dairy cattle that required high investments to the less demanding, but also less productive, buffalo to minimize losses in case of future successful restitution claims. The land restitution law will probably be extended beyond the initial 2021 limit due to slow progress, thereby perpetuating the insecure property rights situation that hinders investments in agriculture.     

Dispossession by neglect: Agricultural land sales in Southern India

Active land markets in the periphery of Chennai have resulted in large tracts of agricultural land being bought by non‐agricultural actors seeking returns primarily from speculation. We argue in this paper that the financialization of land and consequent spurt of agricultural land sales are central to what scholars have termed land grab. Recent literature on land grabs has focused primarily on processes of accumulation by dispossession and the coercive role of the state. Our contention is that land grabs more commonly occur due to the state underinvesting in agriculture, resulting in “dispossession by neglect” of especially marginal and small farmers. Dispossession by neglect better captures the fluid boundary between the coercive and voluntary in contemporary land grabs.     

中国土地市场制度变迁及演化方向

研究目的：分析土地市场的制度变迁，揭示土地制度的演化方向。研究方法：蛛网模型和制度经济学分析方法。研究结果：中国土地市场制度变迁的重心从收益、产权制度向价格、公共平台和秩序制度转换。研究结论：未来制度完善的主要方向是土地市场交易秩序的完善、公共平台的架构以及将产权基础、交易规则等既有的制度应用到农村土地市场中。     

农村土地经营权抵押贷款风险及防控机制研究

[目的]土地经营权抵押贷款业务的开展能有效解决农村融资难的问题,但面临的风险也是阻碍土地经营权抵押贷款深入推动的主要原因,因此明确风险并制定相关防范措施是推动经营权抵押贷款业务发展的关键。[方法]文章通过识别土地经营者、金融机构、政府3个风险主体面临的抵押风险,并深入探析风险形成的原因,从实施主体和实施进程构建土地经营权抵押风险防范机制。[结果]在土地经营权抵押前、抵押过程中和抵押后主体面临着不同的风险,风险的主要成因包括市场化机制缺失、金融机构自身问题、农业收入不稳定、配套机制不健全等因素。[结论]土地经营权抵押风险防控应该围绕风险主体和抵押实施进程构建,通过成立土地管理中心缓解抵押主体风险,通过环境保障、信用保障、抵押配套、风险控制、风险分担、风险转移、社会保障、抵押物处置等机制体系构建实现对土地经营权抵押进程的风险防控,以此保证土地经营权抵押业务的深入推进。     

Understanding property market operations from a dual institutional perspective: The case of Lagos,Nigeria

This paper examines the Nigeria Land Use Act and considers how provisions of the Act inform and influence traditional landholding systems, the operation of the commercial real estate market, and the activities of the “omo-onile.” The research adopts a qualitative strategy and combines analysis of legal statute with in-depth, semi-structured interviews with market participants active in different capacities within the land and property markets of Lagos, Nigeria.The paper identifies a number of inconsistencies in the provisions of the Act and concludes that the recognition given to the traditional landholding system by the Act has not been effective in tackling informality and illegality in Lagos land and property markets.The paper provides insight into how informal institutions of norms, culture, and conventions of a real estate market characterize property ownership and affect transaction processes. This study shows how informal institutions may be used to circumvent formal institutions of a market when formal rights to property are poorly delineated and assigned. In these conditions market actors will incur higher transaction costs in the process of policing transactions and enforcing contractual agreements.     

Special Economic Zones and Accumulation by Dispossession in India

This paper seeks to reconstruct David Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession (ABD) through an ethnography of a Special Economic Zone in Rajasthan, India. While Harvey sees ABD as an economic process of over‐accumulated capital finding new outlets, I argue that it is an extra‐economic process of coercive expropriation typically exercised by states to help capitalist overcome barriers to accumulation – in this case, the absence of fully capitalist rural land markets. In India's privately developed SEZs, the accumulation generated by this dispossession – which represents the disaccumulation of the peasantry – occurs through capitalist rentiers who develop rural land for mainly IT companies and luxury real estate, and profit from the appreciation of artificially cheap land acquired by the state. While such development has only minimally and precariously absorbed the labour of dispossessed farmers, it has generated a peculiar agrarian transformation through land speculation that has enlisted fractions of the rural elite into a chain of rentiership, drastically amplified existing class and caste inequalities, undermined food security and, surprisingly, fuelled non‐productive economic activity and pre‐capitalist forms of exploitation.     

Land rights in postwar Liberia: The volatile part of the peace process

The end to the war in Liberia, along with quality leadership and a large UN presence has laid the foundation for a successful peace process. Now the delicate part of the process is underway—building viable, equitable, and durable social relations, institutions and legal constructs. A potentially volatile part of any postwar scenario is the inability of land rights institutions to perform in an effective, legitimate, equitable manner. Reform of land tenure via policies, laws, institutions, and capacity, needs to happen in a manner that is able to attend to both the land rights related causes of conflict, and the tangle of land problems brought on by the war itself. This article reports on the current situation in Liberia, and examines the primary set of land tenure problems in the country. The article concludes with a series of suggestions for dealing with the unique circumstances of postwar land tenure, and the Liberian case.     

土地立体利用与三维地籍

人口和产业在城市的集聚导致城市人地矛盾日趋紧张,为了集约和节约用地,土地利用的立体化趋势越来越明显.这使得人们对土地的理解也从二维变为三维,土地三维权利和建筑物区分所有制度也逐步确立.不同的产权单元在空间上叠加,抽象的产权束在空间上的表现形态为复杂的产权簇或产权层.但传统的地籍是以地表权利为核心的,不能满足实际需求,有必要建立三维地籍.从各国的实践经验看,三维地籍的主要问题是现行法律对三维产权规定的缺位以及一些技术问题.随着我国不动产空间权利设定的进程,三维地籍的建设要从法律和技术两方面人手,逐步过渡到完全的三维形式,以满足国家(政府)层面和普通层面的需求.     

Donning Coase‐coloured glasses: a property rights view of natural resource economics*

Economic analysis of natural resource and environmental issues inappropriately places too much emphasis on Pigouvian externalities and too little on Coasean property rights and transaction costs. The crucial questions are who has what property rights and what are the transaction costs associated with these property rights. Asserting an externality implicitly assumes a set of property rights and hence a distribution of the social costs, but it is precisely a lack of property rights that allows decision makers to ignore social costs. By viewing natural resource and environmental problems through a Coasean lens, we better focus our attention on how property rights evolve, how they influence transaction costs, and how those transaction costs affect the potential for bargaining to minimise social costs.     

Capitalist development in hostile conjunctures: War,dispossession, and class formation in Turkey

This article analyses how periods of geopolitical conflict and violence have affected the development of capitalism and class formation in Turkey. We argue that all major episodes of conflict, violence and war—from forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of the non‐Muslims in the late 19th and the early 20th century, to Kurdish secessionist warfare in the 1990s and the Syrian Civil War—have become major historical turning points in the development of historical capitalism in Turkey. These “hostile conjunctures” transformed capitalism through their direct and indirect effects on dispossession, class formation, and capital accumulation. Although each of these conflicts produced a violent dispossession process, none of them resembled the rural dispossession process in England. To make sense of Turkey's experience, we turn our attention to what we call the “Castilian/Spanish road,” and what Lenin called the “Junker/Prussian road” and the “farmers/American road.” Our analysis shows that these differential paths of dispossession, class formation, and capital accumulation have produced highly variegated rather than uniform outcomes. We conclude that we are living in a new “hostile conjuncture,” which is pregnant to a major structural crisis and is generating the preconditions of another historical transformation in the way capitalism operates.     

Patterns of revenue distribution in rural residential land consolidation in contemporary China: The perspective of property rights delineation

Rural residential land consolidation (RRLC) in contemporary China refers to activities related to the replanning and reallocation of rural residential land to construct new rural residences, to increase land-use efficiency and to improve rural amenities in the context of rural revitalization. The objective of this study is to elucidate the patterns of revenue distribution in RRLC by addressing the following questions. Given incomplete and ambiguous formal rules in China, how can rural land property rights be delineated to distribute and coordinate interests among stakeholders in RRLC? Furthermore, what are the factors that determine the delineation of rural land property rights to distribute land revenue? A theoretical framework for the delineation of rural land property rights is developed from the perspectives of the institutional environment, governance and resource allocation. A comparative analysis of two typical cases of RRLC in contemporary China is conducted to support the research hypotheses. This study finds that bargaining power is the fundamental determinant of delineating rural land property rights to distribute revenue in RRLC. Furthermore, intergovernmental competition motivates the local government to fully deploy strong bargaining power, while concerns about social stability provide some constraints. A strong capability for collective action reinforces the bargaining power of rural households. This study provides new insights into the delineation of rural land property rights and subsequent revenue distribution based on distinctive institutional settings and RRLC in China, enriching the theoretical and empirical findings in the property rights school. Policy recommendations on revenue sharing of RRLC are proposed accordingly.     

加快中国土地产权制度建设的建议

研究目的:通过分析当前中国土地产权制度存在的问题和症结,提出进一步完善土地产权制度的建议,为决策层和立法机关提供参考.研究方法:采用理论分析的方法.研究结论:中国土地产权制度建设存在两种土地产权不平等、土地所有权、使用权和他项权利种类不丰富、内容不完整等缺陷,应对两种土地产权给予平等的保护;细化土地使用权的类型,增加土地使用权的层次;完善土地登记制度,明确土地登记的法律效力;依法保护土地财产权;成立专门的土地争议调处机构,加大对土地争议的调处力度.     

论土地制度的公私矛盾

研究目的：梳理土地制度的公私关系，探讨土地制度运行的内在规律。研究方法：归纳与演绎、文献研究法、比较分析法。研究结果：土地制度是人类进入文明社会（出现国家及法律）以后的基础性制度，并交替存在着公有制、私有制等制度形态；无论是实践中还是在理论上，土地公有制与私有制选择始终是一对矛盾，但产权是否清晰与土地公有私有无关，财产权神圣不可侵犯应同等保护公私财产，平等保护财产权并非追求财产平等。研究结论：土地作为自然资源的本质属性决定了其产权制度的基本特征，土地所有制度属于政治范畴，土地产权制度与财富分配机制属于经济问题，土地制度规则应遵循公权与私权均衡，公利与私利分野。     

Violent visions of an ownership society: The land administration project in Petén, Guatemala

This article is a case study of phase one of the World Bank's land administration project in Petén, Guatemala. Although the project's stated aims are merely to formalize an existing set of individual landed property rights, this development intervention necessarily changes the property regime, thereby changing underlying relationships that land as property embodies. Impact evaluations conducted by development economists may fail to substantively address displacement and violence that occur as a short-term effect of the project and long-term disparate impacts of the project that may exacerbate existing inequalities. The case of Petén also highlights the possibility for violent enforcement of property boundaries, where conflict surges between the disenfranchised and those who gain power under the new property regime.     

Security of Property Rights for Whom?

Property insecurity of non-elites can be compatible with or even enhance economic growth, but it also encourages conflict—which can undermine long-term growth and economic development. Using a new set of indicators which measure the property insecurity of marginalized ethno-cultural minority groups, this article demonstrates that the severity of property insecurity for the worst-off group in a country is strongly associated with the onset of armed conflict, and—once civil war is controlled for—property insecurity for marginalized minorities corresponds with higher growth rates. Economic growth can occur when the property rights of elites are secure but marginalized minorities face a high risk of expropriation, as land may be reallocated into the hands of investors with skills and access to capital. However, the potentially growth-enhancing effect of forced displacement and resettlement is reduced, because the property insecurity of minorities also increases the likelihood of armed conflict.     

农地产权与农户土地租赁意愿研究

研究目的:分析农地产权状况对农户土地租赁意愿的影响.研究方法:定性分析与定量研究相结合.研究结果:在定性分析农地产权状况和农地租赁相互关系的基础上,运用农户调查数据,建立了农地产权与农地租赁意愿的Logistic回归计量模型并应用极大似然估计法对该模型进行估计;根据农地产权与农地租赁意愿计量模型运行结果对农地产权与农地租赁意愿之间的关系、农地产权状况对农地租赁意愿的影响进行了分析,并就进一步推进农地流转提出了相关建议.研究结论:农地产权的流动性、稳定性以及农地收益权的完整性等均对农地租赁意愿产生了不同程度的影响,但是各个因素对于不同区域以及土地租入和租出意愿的影响是不同的.