Facing land grabs and eviction in the name of development, women worldwide increasingly join land rights struggles despite often deeply engrained images of female domesticity and conventional gender norms. Yet, the literature on female agency in the context of land struggles has remained largely underexplored. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, my findings suggest that land rights activism in Cambodia has undergone a gendered re-framing process.

This paper analyzes frontier dynamics of land dispossessions in Ethiopia’s pastoral lowland regions. Through a case study of two sedentarization schemes in South Omo Valley, we illustrate how politics of coercive sedentarization are legitimated in the ‘civilizing’ impetus of ‘improvement schemes’ for ‘backward’ pastoralists. We study sedentarization schemes that are implemented to evict pastoralist communities from grazing land to be appropriated by corporate investors.