The chapter describes some of the political challenges involved in managing the transition from emergency activities to longer-term 'developmental' policies in Rwanda and Burundi. In post-genocide Rwanda, uncompensated expropriation and a nationwide settlement policy may have reduced short-term problems over secondary occupation of property, but have created lingering grievances. International agencies have underplayed the role of state agency in their analysis of these problems.

Female-headed households often experience inequalities in access to resources and income-generating opportunities. Conflicts may make women poorer. But it is important to realise that conflicts also offer an opportunity for change in which gender stereotypes shift and gender roles and identities can be renegotiated. Did genocide and civil war in Rwanda lead to new opportunities for rural women?

The protection given to the land rights of women, orphans and any other vulnerable groups in Northern and Eastern Uganda is probably as good as can be found anywhere in the world. Customary land law is based on three main principles. First, everyone is entitled to land, and no-one can ever be denied land rights. A second principle is that all inherited land is family land, never individual property.

This urgent alert is based on the forceful evictions of Maasai pastoralists from their homes and grazing lands in Loliondo Division, Ngorongoro District in Northern Tanzania and the gross human rights violations that are being committed. 

The eviction operation started on the 4th July 2009 and was conducted by the notorious riot police, the Field Force Unit, with assistance of private guards from the Otterlo Business Cooperation (OBC). They entered the villages by shooting in the air and using teargas before pouring petrol on the Maasai homes and setting them on fire.

Land use conflicts are common phenomena in Tanzania and the world at large. One major reason before going to specific cases hinges on the fact that land does not expand while people and other living organizations that depend on it keeps on increasing on the early surface. This un matching ratio between land as basic resources for livelihoods and its users constantly results into land use conflicts.

This article examines the evolution of policy recommendations concerning rural land issues since the formulation of the World Bank’s “Land Reform Policy Paper” in 1975. That paper set out three guiding principles: the desirability of owner-operated family farms; the need for markets to permit land to be transferred to more productive users; and the importance of an egalitarian asset distribution.

IWGIA has recently been informed by local partners in Tanzania that a government operation aimed at forcefully removing pastoralists from the Kilosa district in the Morogoro Region in southern Tanzania started on the 29.1.2009. The Tanzanian government wants to remove all pastoralists from Kilosa district and, according to some sources, the whole of Morogoro Region, and force them to other areas of Tanzania. Such areas have though, according to IWGIA local partners as yet not been specified, and the affected families do not know where to go to.

Since 1990 at least eighteen violent conflicts have been fuelled by the exploitation of natural resources. In fact, recent research suggests that over the last sixty years at least forty percent of all intrastate conflicts have a link to natural resources. Civil wars such as those in Liberia, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo have centred on high-value resources like timber, diamonds, gold, minerals and oil. Other conflicts, including those in Darfur and the Middle East, have involved control of scarce resources such as fertile land and water.

It is almost a decade now since the fights between Pastoralists and peasants broke out in Kilosa district Morogoro region in December 2000 claiming tens of people’s lives and causing irreparable losses and damages their properties. While the wounds of that dark record are still fresh in some of the minds of the communities in Kilosa, another very serious fight between the same or rather similar groups occurred this October prompting the media and human rights activists to find some ways to intervene in a bid to find lasting solutions for the problems.

Contains an overview and thematic notes on gendered access to land and property; legal reforms and women’s property rights; land dispute resolution; gender-responsive titling; case studies from Nepal and Honduras; further reading.

O artigo busca, por meio da análise da atuação do Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (no Brasil) e do Landless People´s Movement (na África do Sul), analisar as formas emergentes que o Estado adquire nesses dois contextos sociais. O objetivo central é mostrar que nesses países, chamados aqui de não exemplares, é preciso que se desenvolva uma teoria complexa que rompa com o dualismo sociológico Estado/Sociedade civil.

Africa has half of the world’s 25 million internally displaced persons (IDPs). These IDPs are citizens displaced by development projects, natural disasters or violence. Violence, linked to civil war or repression, is the predominant cause of displacement. As respected Kenyan lawyer Makau wa Mutua emphasizes, bad government is at the root of this tragedy “with the most repressive governments producing the largest numbers of IDPs”.[1]