Why do so many individuals and organizations shy away from calling land grabbing what it is, and either put it in inverted commas or trot out such euphemisms as ‘responsible land-based investment’, ‘commercial pressures on land’ or ‘large-scale investment in land’?
Why are researchers who have worked on land grabbing so apparently timid and complacent in their conclusions, so desperately eager to seek magic, painless ‘win-win’ solutions, and so quick to retreat to ‘each case is different, the devil lies in the detail’ formulations. Could it be that they fear to antagonize their donors?
Why is such an enormous amount of effort, time and resources being invested by organizations such as the World Bank, FAO, IFAD, IFPRI etc, in the drawing up of international, but always voluntary, codes of conduct in an attempt to regulate land grabbing? These will increase the likelihood of poor people losing their land and it will be impossible to bring to account companies which violate them. I agree with Ian Scoones that such principles are ‘doomed to failure, given the lack of capacity, failures of institutional authority, corrupt practices and so on’ highlighted in the World Bank’s September 2010 report, Rising Global Interest in Farmland. Advocates of ‘win-win’ situations argue that many of these are ‘paper deals’ which may never come to fruition. I think that misses the point entirely. Are those whose land rights are threatened expected to sit patiently and wait to see what happens?
Finally, why, given that the long term impact of global land grabbing on many African rural communities could well be catastrophic, does there appear to exist an almost total conspiracy of silence on the subject? Although I sense that this may at last be beginning to change a little.
Parts of Africa are being targeted because ‘African farmland prices are the lowest in the world’ and ‘it is the last frontier’. Many African leaders, and foreign investors, peddle the myth that there is a vast amount of vacant, unused land, owned by no one – and hence available to outsiders. One suggested that pastoralists in Ethiopia ‘can just go somewhere else’, another that Zambia has well over 30 million hectares ‘begging to be utilised’, yet another that 36 million hectares of arable land in Mozambique could be used for biofuels without threatening food production!
Still, doesn’t sound like settler colonialism – but then what is it? I raised some of these issues here, but the matter is far from settled. More scholarship on this is required.
See full article here @ African Arguments.
Hat tip to Aaron B.
Filed under: Africa, postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Highlights from the H-Net discussion network.
Is this list an academic platform or a mediator for political propaganda and agitation?
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… it seems still in accordance with an academic platform, unless I assume one consider’s the list of internationally/academically acknowledged speakers and chairs [both Palestinian and Israeli in fact] non-academic because they dont reiterate a particular political dogma, or because the issues being raised dont echo a colonial logic. That is possible too of course. Thankfully not in London though.
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While there is ample room for discussion of the issue of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, with men and women of good will able to discuss the historical context, political significance, cultural and religious impact, economics and other factors relating to past practices and current results, this conference does not seem to provide the kind of arena in which that would be possible. The perpetrator-victim paradigm, which appears to be the conforming ideology of this conference based on the invitation, is hardly an objective starting point for an examination of a conflict of this magnitude and complexity.
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The conference is organised neither by “semi-academics” nor by “anti-Israelis.” In fact a number of the academic presenters, all very well-known and well-regarded historians, are Israelis themselves. And to be clear and open, I am a chair of one of the sessions, and I have done legitimate research with and on Palestinians. The conference addresses the legacy and continuation of settler-colonial discourses and practices from the establishment of the Yishuv to the present. SOAS has invited a number of excellent people; and the suggestion that somehow the conference should be “balanced” is absolutely unheard-of (except in the context of Israel/Palestine, of course, when even a single conference that may critically view the history of Israel is required to be balanced by a partisan view that lauds the state and every one of its actions as the most moral on earth).
I love these H-Net discussion networks. Recall the discussion on violence in South Africa bogged down into a succession of personal snipes, in the wake of the Terre’Blanche murder, for instance.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights, Website | Closed
is decolonisation dead?
“Is decolonization dead?” What does such a question mean? In what ways could decolonization be dead? That would be, it seemed to me, either the day when the colonized have thoroughly overcome colonization OR the day when the colonized themselves are all dead.
Unless, of course, “decolonization” here refers simply to an academic fad whose time has come and gone, and so its being “dead” only means that it is no longer worthy of study, no longer worthy of attention, no longer worthy of tenure—if it ever had been perceived as such by mainstream academics, for the colonized themselves have had a hard enough time getting tenure. Perhaps it is no longer hip, now that something hipper must have come along. So these must be the postdecolonial days during which we must all be doing our Postdecolonial Studies.
But if, on the other hand, “decolonization” still refers to decolonization—the rigorous, dangerous, and ongoing process of challenging the external and internalized roots, mechanisms, institutions, willful as well as unconscious blindnesses, and the unrelenting sanctioned violence of colonialism—then decolonization has hardly begun.
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights, Website | Closed
symposium on ‘political authority, recognition, and the right of indigenous peoples’ published
Breanna M. Forni, ‘Political Authority, Recognition, and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: An Introduction’, pp. 44-46.
Burke Hendrix, ‘Political Authority and Indigenous Sovereignty’, pp. 47-52.
Andrew Volmert, ‘Indigenous Self-Determination and Freedom from Rule’, pp. 53-59.
Jorge M. Valadez, ‘Deliberation, Cultural Difference, and Indigenous Self-Governance’, pp. 60-65.
Filed under: law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
This forum discusses the comparative dimensions of settler colonialism in Israel and the U.S.-Mexico border region, including separation walls, issues of migration, and the control of movement, dispossession, and settlement. The contributions take a variety of perspectives, both activist and scholarly. They engage with the longer historical perspective and with contemporary realities that suggest the comparability of the experience of Chicana/os and other Latina/o minorities in the United States and Mexico and that of the Palestinian populations of the Occupied Territories and Israel itself. Methodologically, they cross the disciplinary boundaries that separate disparate instances of oppression and struggle and propose that both scholarly and activist work should make connections between locations while respecting the distinctiveness and specificity of places and histories. Solidarity, these essays suggest, is based not on absolute identification, but on differentiated experiences of oppression and struggle against systems of domination like settler colonialism and capitalism.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
This essay revisits the language of conquest in metropolitan writings advocating Elizabethan Atlantic expansion. It argues that contrary to the belligerent connotations scholars usually attach to the word conquest, in Elizabethan England it was a term used in a benign and benevolent manner that fit within humanist goals for a noble, peaceful, and long-term relationship with both the people and land of America. By the early seventeenth century, however, this idea of benign conquest was overshadowed by factors such as the example of Spanish conquest in the New World, which tainted the English benign usage, and the transition from theory in the Elizabethan age to practice under the early Stuarts, which showed that the American natives were not willing to accept English presence on the benevolent terms anticipated by English humanists. Another factor that led to the decline in the language of benign conquest was the formulation of the “conquest doctrine” in the law of nations, which gave the term an exclusively belligerent connotation. Owing to these various factors, by the time the permanent English empire in America was established, the idea of benign conquest no longer had a place in domestic, colonial, or supranational discourse.
Keywords:Elizabethan Atlantic expansion, conquest doctrine, benign conquest, Ken MacMillan, Humphrey Gilbert, Walter Ralegh, Richard Hakluyt, Alberico Gentili, English colonialism
Filed under: Empire, law, Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty, United States | Closed
‘In many parts of Israel, imported plants have crowded out native species’, Haaretz reported yesterday.
“Many years ago, eucalyptus trees were planted in the Dan reserve and proliferated rapidly,” Dr. Didi Kaplan, the authority’s ecologist for the northern region, explained yesterday. “They are hindering the development of the reserve’s natural vegetation, among other things by preventing light from penetrating.”
After much effort, the INPA persuaded the Jewish National Fund and Kibbutz Dan, which had planted the trees, to cut them down.
“The results are simply amazing,” Kaplan said. “Immediately after the trees were cut down, indigenous plant species, like small-flowered willow-herb, appeared after decades of absence.”
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, media | Closed
waitangi and kenya
[the speaker] believed that a proposal had been made that the native reserves should be very greatly diminished. It was said that they should not keep natives in the reserves; that if they were allowed to remain in reserves they would not come out and work. He strongly protested against that argument. The natives of British East Africa were there long before we went there, and if the land belonged to anybody it was to the natives of that country. We had taken the country for good or evil, and we had done a good deal for the natives in the way of giving them security, law and order, and the opportunity to earn wages if they wished. We had given them many of the advantages of civilisation and also some of its disadvantages. But, as we had taken nine-tenths of their land from them, it was only fair that they in the House of Commons who had any say in the matter should preserve to these the land which yet remained to them. They knew what had happened when Crown Colony government ceased and self-government was given in certain Colonies. They knew that the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand guaranteed the lands forever to the Maoris and their children, yet the Maoris did not now own a quarter of the land which they used to do. The Waitangi Treaty had been absolutely torn up. He asked the hon. Gentleman to look very closely into any proposals that were made for a change in the land laws in British East Africa.
Wilfrid William Ashley in the House of Commons. He was a conservative MP, who had some close connections with Kenyan settlers (his daughter would marry the son of Lord Delamere, the settler leader).
Hat tip to Aaron B, who points us to this debate from 1908 on land tenure. Watch how it unfolds between Ashley and Cathcart Wason, mythbusting the plight of the Maori between them.
Filed under: Africa, New Zealand, Quote | Closed
Dan Freeman-Maloy, ‘Israeli state power and its liberal alibis’, Race & Class 52, 3 (2011).
This article explores the tension between Israeli state power and its presentation to the West in ostensibly liberal terms. The historical dynamics of metropolitan sponsorship of Zionist settler colonialism are briefly discussed before focusing on the ways in which the politics of artificial demographic management and pan-Jewish entitlement to Palestine are twisted into a conception of Jewish national self-determination that serves as a liberal licence for Israeli state crimes.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights | Closed
In the current historiographical atmosphere, there seems little point for historians to continue pointing out the number of ‘ethnic’, ‘tribal’, ‘racial’ or ‘national’ groups within a confined space. In 1988, in what was quite clearly a re-iteration of a number of revisionist lines of enquiry that came before him, Martin Legassick claimed that all ‘attempts to differentiate Bantu-speakers from Khoisan, Khoikhoi and “San”, Sotho from Nguni, and, within each, subtribes from subtribes’ were utterly flawed, and few at the time — excepting those of the Oxford/’liberal’ school, perhaps — would have disagreed.
Recall the position of the Khoekhoe and the San in historical narratives at the time. Historians of the 1970s and 1980s tended to write of the Khoekhoe as a diverse collection of innovative herders who occupied Southern Africa for thousands of years, interacting with San hunters and eventually VOC society, but seldom anything for the era beyond that. With Britain’s decisive annexation in 1806 came the end of such a narrative. Thereafter, as Cape Coloured/Khoe-San indigenes (for the distinction between two major groups ‘Khoe’ and ‘San’ blurred as populations mixed and colonisation intensified, argued these scholars), their experiences were often homogenised and overlooked, or otherwise appeared only in a handful of studies on Cape policy, labour legislation and early missionary reservations. Pointing out the ‘tribal’ and ‘ethnic’ cleavages that separated Khoe-San South Africans in the period 1840-1950 was simply not a job for historians of South Africa to bother with. (‘Bantu’ South Africa would go onto receive a very different anthropological and historical appraisal, but that’s another story.)
For Legassick however, at this stage of his career under the heavy influence of a Marxist theoretical framework, only ‘the social relations of production’ united and differentiated communities — a picture which seems, to me at least, quite incomplete. Surely, the social relations of production were as much the cause, as they were the effect of politics organic to community and place. Surely, there was a thing called ‘discourse’ that operated tangentially to the realm of economic relationships.
All of this, of course, leads me to Landau’s historical-linguistical exploration of Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400-1948 (2010). This is a major work, one that truly puts its readers to the test, by its frantic changing of lenses between the macro and the micro, and also, by its innovative use of language to make some pretty impressive historical arguments (the most ambitious of these, perhaps, his claim that ‘religion’ as a body of behavior and a concept in South Africa was created in the nineteenth century, and continues to leave a strange legacy today).
From the blurb:
Drawing largely from original sources, Paul Landau presents a history of the politics of the country’s people, from the time of their early settlements in the elevated heartlands, through the colonial era, to the dawn of Apartheid. A practical tradition of mobilization, alliance, and amalgamation persisted, mutated, and occasionally vanished from view; it survived against the odds in several forms, in tribalisms, Christian assemblies, and other, seemingly hybrid movements; and it continues today. Landau treats southern Africa broadly, concentrating increasingly on the southern highveld and ultimately focusing on a transnational movement called the ‘Samuelites’. He shows how people’s politics in South Africa were suppressed and transformed, but never entirely eliminated.
This book breaks important, new ground. It is no overstatement to suggest that it is not since the Comaroffs’ Of Revelation series that South African history has received a more sophisticated reworking.
Underlying each nuanced argument is the idea that highveld polities, in all their complexity and diversity, barely correlate with the ‘tribal’ titles that were attached to them. OK, OK, I hear you say, tell me something I don’t know. Well it’s more complicated than that, and there are implications for many scholars here.
Words used to differentiate ‘tribal’ affiliations were simply that – words – which may have conveyed political realities (albeit problematically), but always seemed to mis-communicate matters relating to culture, tradition and ‘the religious sphere’, and what’s more, they were titles that too often glossed over the hybridisation of lived experience. And many of these misinterpretations, Landau points out, continue to pervade historical and anthropological scholarship (and, though he doesn’t suggest as much, popular discourse as well). Thus, ‘[o]nce we stop thinking in terms of “peoples”, who had “beliefs”’, he argues, ‘the highveld’s political tradition, in its real situation in history, comes better into focus’ (248). He’s being modest. What also comes into focus are the many parallels between the pre-historic and the historic, the past and the present, and believe it or not, the black, the brown and the white of South Africa.
Hybridity is what Landau identifies left, right and centre, so much so that he uses the term ‘métis’ to refer to a number of people, the Griqua among them. This dialectal import may not be to the tastes of some South Africanists, but Landau has his reasons. Personally, it is my opinion that if Landau’s terminology encourages scholars to analyse the experiences of hybrid social and political formations from a number of settler colonial frontiers in comparative perspective, then I can only see positives coming from his use of such terminology.
There are a lot of limitations to what the historian, particularly the non-indigenous one, can get away with in their writing these days. After reading Landau’s book, there is an even greater interpretative anxiety that remains behind (particularly if one joins the dots and thinks about the politics of naming and labelling in the present day, in light of his discoveries).
What historians of South Africa can be certain about, however, is the sheer necessity of political mobilisation on the contested highveld, and the importance of selectively deploying key discourses already in circulation for political ends. These are things with which neither Legassick, nor the Comaroffs, would disagree though. What they probably would disagree with, however, is Landau’s time-frame, and his book’s biggest implication, namely, that the history of polities and politics in South Africa is a tale of continuity, one which doesn’t just ‘stop’ with the closing of the frontier zone or the coming of capitalism. The history of peoples is a very different one, Landau would insist — it is fissiparous, quite full of disjunctures, and it is one which too easily replicates the erroneous frameworks developed centuries ago by colonist-ethnographers: and from this critique many scholars, among them Isaac Schapera, and indeed the Comaroffs themselves, are not spared.
It is very much in this tradition that the new generation of historians of a region fixated upon a ‘Rainbow Nation’ mythology might best present their own research. But whereas Landau (not unlike the Comaroffs, actually) prefers to focus on the fickle and opportunistic convergence of politics and religiosity – and Legassick more polemically on the social relations of production before and amid the arrival of industrial capitalism – perhaps, I would suggest, we might focus more closely on the establishment and legitimation of polities, and the types of legal relationships which lay at the foundation of these polities. Law and history have converged elsewhere in settler colonial studies, yet in Southern Africa — with the exception of one or two pieces here and there — a scholarly pre-occupation with sovereignty, jurisdiction, crime, justice, the rule of law and the objects of war through time and space, has not yet taken shape.
Another of the stark historiographical differences which separates South Africa from other settler colonial locales is the methodology. The book touches on a number of the more complex debates in South African historiography, debates in which — remarkably — the analysis of language continues to takes centre stage, well after the linguistic turn. Elsewhere, historians of settler colonialism — perhaps from want of data? — mostly run scared from this kind of analysis. A mono-lingual outsider to South Africa, I began to find the list of new words and ambiguous meanings very challenging, verging on the tedious in fact. South African nationals however, SeSotho speakers in particular, probably won’t, and may get even more out of this book than I did.
Ed Cavanagh
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
