Losing your Land: Dispossession in the Great Lakes

by An Ansoms and Thea Hilhorst

An Ansoms (Editor), Thea Hilhorst (Editor), Aymar Nyenyezi Bisoka, Chris Huggins, Daniel Fahey, Emery Mushagalusa Mudinga, Jana Hoenke, Jean-Philippe Peemans, Klara Claessens, Jana Hönke, Sara Geenen, and Vincent Manirakiza

0 ratings • 0 reviews • 0 shelved
Book cover for Losing your Land

Bookhype may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases. Full disclosure.

Examines a new aspect of one of the highest profile issues facing Africa today-land-grabbing-and shows the widespread impact of small-scale dispossession.



Dispossession of land on a small scale can have as great an impact on living conditions as large-scale land-grabs. With the increasing commodification of land, new forms of dispossession, in urban as well as rural districts, are also gaining in importance.
This book looks at this largely uninvestigated issue through case studies in the Eastern DRC, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda: here the loss of land often represents the loss of people's livelihoods inthese areas of extreme land scarcity in highly populated regions. In the post-conflict states of the Great Lakes, governance challenges increase the risk of dispossession of the already poor and vulnerable: formal institutions are weak or biased; customary authorities have lost some of their moral authority. The cases in this book show in particular how local power dynamics, often rooted in history, bear upon the processes of land competition, dispossession and land grabbing. This timely volume will be important not only for those in African Studies, but for those in development studies, as well as practitioners and policy-makers worldwide.

An Ansoms is assistant professor in development studies at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium); Thea Hilhorst is a senior advisor at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam.
  • ISBN10 1847011055
  • ISBN13 9781847011053
  • Publish Date 16 October 2014
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country GB
  • Imprint James Currey
  • Format Paperback (US Trade)
  • Pages 232
  • Language English