Natural Resources, Land Grabbing and Resistance in Africa: Perspectives From Academia and Social Movements

21 September 2022. The land question in Africa and elsewhere is intimately linked to issues of citizenship, identity, and notions of political community. 

In recent decades, land governance and management and systems of distribution, access, and control have become increasingly detached from their broader social and cultural meanings, giving way to extractivism and commodification. 

This CORA roundtable aims to bring together research-based perspectives and those of social movements to answer, but not be limited to, the following questions:

1. What are the imprints of colonial and racial regimes of ownership in modern juridical formations across Africa?
2. How has the intimate relationship between land as property and the modern state been consolidating across the continent?
3. What is driving the private appropriation and accumulation of land and natural resources on the African continent and how can promoting a notion of the commons play a role in reversing commodification of land?
4. How can we rethink redistributive and people-centred land and resource policies, and how can we rethink the nation and public space to find pathways to inclusive policies and actions that reduce land-based violence? This includes bringing gender, ethnicity and generation into the equation.
5. How do struggles for land in Africa contribute towards a deeper recognition of multiple subjectivities, agencies and practices?

Panel:

• Moderator : Ruth Hall (PLAAS, University of Western Cape, South Africa). 
• Elizabeth Mpofu (Zimbabwe Smallholder Organic Farmers’ Forum, Zimbabwe)
• João Feijó (Observatório do Meio Rural, Mozambique)
• Ibrahima Coulibaly (ROPPA and CNOP, Mali), Natasha Issa Shivji (Cambridge University, Tanzania)
• Bernardo Castro (Rede Terra, Angola)