The Support to Responsible Agricultural Investments (S2RAI) Project promotes internationally recognized principles and guidelines to ensure food and land tenure security for communities in the context of large-scale commercial land investment as well as strengthen the institutional frameworks and coordination structures at federal and regional levels in relations to responsible agricultural investment in Ethiopia.

How can maps drawn over a century ago still lead to conflict between two countries? The Southeast Asian countries of Thailand and Cambodia are neighbors with a difficult history and a shared border. Their religious similarities have made sacred spaces along the border a divisive issue, with the sacred site of Preah Vihear a central point of controversy.

On 27 September 2020, Azerbaijan went to war with Armenia on a scale not seen since the ceasefire of 1994. The conflict ended in another cease- fire on 10 November 2020, however, in addition to the theatre of war, the conflict has been prosecuted and continues to be fought post-ceasefire, through claims to cultural heritage which are employed in international organisations to substantiate the legitimacy of territorial claims.

A border dispute between Indian and Chinese troops, the most dangerous in 45 years, has roiled relations in the High Himalayan valleys and plateaus separating India (Ladakh) and China (Aksia Chin). Against this barren landscape, ancient pathways connecting Central, South, and East Asia converge, making the area today a key nodal point of commercial and strategic interest to three nuclear powers, India, China, and Pakistan.

This paper seeks to answer the question: how does land become grabbable and local people relocatable? It focuses on the historical and current conditions of land tenure that enable land grabbing. While recognising the important contributions thus far made by the critical literature on land grabbing, this paper moves forward towards understanding specific processes that befall before land is grabbed and its original users relocated.

Socioeconomic shocks can shape future land-use trajectories. Armed conflicts are an extreme form of a socioeconomic shock, but our understanding of how armed conflicts affect land-use change is limited. Our goal was to assess land-use changes related to the 1991–1994 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus region. We classified multi-temporal Landsat imagery, mapped land-use changes during and after the conflict, and applied matching statistics to isolate the effect of the conflict from other potential drivers of land change.

The crucial event in the reporting period was undoubtedly Armenia’s war with Azerbaijan. On September 27, 2020 Azerbaijan started its war on Nagorno-Karabakh, a long-disputed region called Artsakh in Armenia, which lasted for 44 days. It ended on November 10, 2020, when Russia facilitated a cease-fire, apparently just after the Azerbaijani forces had captured most of the territories occupied by Armenia in the previous war in the early 1990s, plus a major chunk of Nagorno-Karabakh proper.

During the reporting period, the consolidation of authoritarian rule in Azerbaijan continued. Snap parliamentary elections in February 2020 did not meet international standards for free and fair competition. However, some notorious high-ranking state officials were fired, and corrupt local level administrators detained on corruption charges. These developments, in addition to the appointment of some young professionals to ministerial posts, raised hopes for a possible opening of the country to real reforms and changes.

This publication serves as an introduction to a collection of articles published in the African Studies Review. It discusses the implications of as well as the question through what actors, processes, and relationships land deals become stalled or partially implemented. The reviewed articles draw on long-term, in-depth ethnographic research of land deals in Senegal, Tanzania, and Zambia. 

This report documents the evaluation of the Cambodian Land Dispute Independent Mediation (CLAIM) project, an independent mediation between Socfin-KCD Co., Ltd. and Coviphama Co., Ltd., known as Socfin Cambodia and five Bunong villages from Busra Commune, Mondulkiri Province, Cambodia. MRLG provided funding for CLAIM. The evaluation was undertaken by the Australian Disputes Centre (ADC) in 2022.

Securing land rights of all including the youth to allow for investment is very imperative. This is because access to land is very fundamental to ending extreme poverty especially in the Sub-Saharan Africa where agriculture remains the economic backbone of majority of households.  To this end, access to fair and timeous land disputes resolution mechanism to adjudicate and resolve disputes which create tenure insecurity is critical. This study investigates land dispute cases and the resolution mechanisms among the youth land holders in the Techiman area of Ghana.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women displaced by war remain unable to return to their homes because of systemic injustices that prevent them from proving or claiming ownership of their property.

New research by the Norwegian Refugee Council reveals that displaced women in Iraq are much worse off than men: they are 11 per cent more likely to face barriers impeding them from going back home after years of suffering in displacement camps since the end of the war against Islamic State group in their areas of origin.