The report documents how affected communities have lost their livelihoods because of land grabbing by national and international business corporations. Local communities have not been consulted and they have received little or no compensation for their loss. The communities have been evicted from their land and have faced systematic human rights violations.

Debates and critiques around land policy often focus on the neo-liberal agenda of formalising land as alienable property, most notably through land titling schemes. Sometimes these schemes are posited against alternatives such as land reform and community land holding under common property arrangements. Claims and counter- claims are made for land titling as a means to boost smallholder security in the face of involuntary or otherwise unfair alienation of land sometimes under the rubric of land grabbing.

In recent years the Lao government has provided many foreign investors with large-scale economic land concessions to develop plantations. These concessions have resulted in significant alterations of landscapes and ecological processes, greatly reduced local access to resources through enclosing common areas, and ultimately leading to massive changes in the livelihoods of large numbers of mainly indigenous peoples living near these concessions.

OVERVIEW: The Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) is a landlocked country situated in Southeast Asia, bordering Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, China and Myanmar. Despite a recent increase in the rate of urbanization and a relatively small amount of arable land per capita, most people in Lao PDR live in rural areas and work in an agriculture sector dominated by subsistence farming. Lao PDR’s economy relies heavily on its natural resources, with over half the country’s wealth produced by agricultural land, forests, water and hydropower and mineral resources.

Since ceasefire agreements were signed between the Burmese military government and ethnic political groups in the Burma–China borderlands in the early 1990s, violent waves of counterinsurgency development have replaced warfare to target politically-suspect, resource-rich, ethnic populated borderlands. The Burmese regime allocates land concessions in ceasefire zones as an explicit postwar military strategy to govern land and populations to produce regulated, legible, militarized territory.

An exclusive focus on external forces risks the production of an overgeneralized account of a ubiquitous neoliberalism, which insufficiently accounts for the profusion of local variations that currently comprise the neoliberal project as a series of articulations with existing political economic circumstances. Although the international financial institutions initially promoted neoliberal economics in the global South, powerful elites were happy to oblige.

Land reform, land politics and resettlement in Laos have changed people’s land access and livelihoods. But these reforms have also transformed political subjectivity and landed property into matters for government to a degree hitherto unknown in Laos. The control over people, land and space has consolidated sovereignty in ways that make government an ineluctable part of people’s relation to land. This transforms agrarian relations. Three cases demonstrate how rural small holders’ access to land depends on the ways in which property and political subjects have been produced.

This study assesses the determinants of forest land allocation to households in the forest tenure reforms in China in the period 1980-2005 using data from three provinces in Southern China; Fujian, Jiang Xi and Yunnan. Furthermore, it assesses the current level of tenure security on forest land and how this tenure security is affected by past and more recent policy changes.

Peri-urban areas in Africa are usually dynamic with respect to land tenure. Statutory, informal and customary tenure systems often co-exist and interfere with each other. This disclosure of legal pluralism often leads to lower levels of tenure security, especially for people with low incomes. Pro-poor land administration tools have been designed to cater for the poor. The question arises whether these tools have the desired impact. This question is answered by confronting the existing tenure regimes with the pro-poor land administration tools.

Since a new quasi-parliamentary government led by former army officers began work in Burma (Myanmar) earlier this year, some observers have argued that the government is showing a commitment to bring about, albeit cautiously, reforms that will result in an overall improvement in human rights conditions.

Marsabit County is situated in the northern part of Kenya, bordering the Republic of Ethiopia to the north and Lake Turkana to the west. With approximately 66,000 square kilometres of which 4,956 km2 are covered by Lake Turkana, the foremost part of Marsabit County is an extensive plain which lies between 300m and 900m above sea level. It is characterized by a population density averaging 2 persons per km2 and a distribution varying between 1 person up to 22 persons per km2, depending on the scarcity of water as well as the amount of permanent and semi-permanent settlements.

This report includes a situation update submitted to KHRG in September 2011 by a villager describing events occurring in T'Nay Hsah Township, Pa'an District during September 2011. It details an incident in which a soldier from Tatmadaw Border Guard #1017 deliberately shot at villagers in a farm hut, resulting in the death of one civilian and injury to a six-year-old child.