Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in indigenous, traditional and customary approaches to peace-making in the context of civil wars. Supporters claim that indigenous approaches to peacemaking are participatory and relationship-focused, and that peaceful outcomes have a higher chance of community adherence than template-style international peace interventions effected through the `liberal peace'. Using historical and contemporary examples, this article assesses the feasibility of a complementary relationship between customary and Western forms of peace-making.

In north-western Kenya, significant oil reserves have been discovered and the first oil trucks have left Turkana County in June 2018. On the east side of Lake Turkana, the largest wind power project on the African continent was completed in mid-2017. This article applies a local to global perspective to explore the benefits and externalities for the local communities living in close proximity to the oil and wind exploitation sites. A particular focus is placed on governance of energy resources, water and employment opportunities and its impacts on new and existing conflict dynamics.

This article serves as an introduction to the special issue ‘A Local to Global Perspective on Resource Governance and Conflict’. It advances the debate on natural resource governance and conflict by bringing together three different strands of literature with the aim of developing a local to global research perspective and framework for analysis. First, this article reviews and identifies research gaps in the literatures on (1) the resource curse, (2) environmental security and (3) the large-scale acquisition of land and natural resources.

Thirteen years after the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, investment in women as agents of change in peacebuilding remains inadequate. One of the unexplored entry points for strengthening womens contributions to peacebuilding relates to the way in which they use, manage, make decisions on and benefit from natural resources.

The current approach to peacebuilding by the international community is to focus on the priorities thought to be important to recovery, but this occurs in a largely non-integrated way. With these different endeavors largely isolated from each other in planning, analysis, implementation, and measures for success, little is known about how they interact and whether or not the aggregate effect contributes to, or detracts from durable peace. This is especially important for priorities which in some way interact with each other on the ground among a recipient population.

1.1Abstract

[Summarise the case study in 50-100 words]

Twenty years of

legal struggle to

obtain ownership

of public ‘khas’

land In 1994, the landless villagers of Rajarampur in Dinajpur

district, Bangladesh, applied for access to public ‘khas’

land (government owned land available for allocation

according to government priorities) that had been lying

fallow for years. In 1995 they occupied 115 acres of this

fallow land. The occupation was contested by local elites,

The village of Rampur, in the Dinajpur district of

Bangladesh, was established on public ‘khas’ land in 1953

by landless farmers. However, in the following decades,

different groups of local elites claimed the land and tried

to evict the villagers. Thanks to support from CDA, the

villagers resisted the harassment and false claims. In 2000

the court quashed the false claims; in 2001 the village was

beneficiary to a governmental land distribution scheme;

1.1Abstract

[Summarise the case study in 50-100 words]

Abstract: Conflict and vested interest on khasland are common phenomenon in rural Bangladesh due to impact of colonial exit. Landless poor are living upon other’s land which is very painful in their life at the age of modern state. Many landless poor are living without having legal access to Government khas land.

NRC interviewed 580 Syrian refugee households in Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq to assess their potential Housing, Land and Property (HLP) claims inside Syria if they were to return home.

From January 15 to February 6, 2018, the USAID’s Tenure and Global Climate Change Program and Land Portal Foundation co-facilitated a dialogue on experiences of documenting household and community-level customary rights in Zambia. The dialogue brought together the perspectives of government, traditional leaders, practitioners, civil society, and academics to consider how customary land documentation can contribute to national development goals and increased service delivery in rural and peri-urban areas.