INTRODUCTION: LAND POLITICS IN AFRICA – CONSTITUTING AUTHORITY OVER TERRITORY, PROPERTY AND PERSONS

Land issues are often not about land only. Rather, they invoke issues of property more broadly, implicating social and political relationships in the widest sense. Struggles over property may therefore be as much about the scope and structure of authority as about access to resources, with land claims being tightly wrapped in questions of authority, citizenship, and the politics of jurisdiction. This dynamic relationship between property and citizenship rights, on the one hand, and the authority to define and adjudicate these questions are –we believe – central to state formation (Boone 2003a, 2007; Lund 2008).1 In a recent issue of this journal, land markets in Africa receive special attention. The editors, Colin and Woodhouse (2010), give special emphasis to the multiple processes of commoditization of land and how they are embedded in different social relations. That particular issue focuses on how a great variety of transactions and market dynamics generate commodity characteristics in land. It adds much-needed African historical and contextual nuance to Polanyi’s Great Transformation (1944) as Colin and Woodhouse defy any assumption of markets as singular or uniform or even that they somehow exist ex ante. They demonstrate how markets come about, are structured and are reproduced. In some ways, the present collection complements this focus on market dynamics. We want to investigate the relationships between property and citizenship and political institutions, and how each of these plays a role in constituting the others. This seems especially relevant in the light of the many efforts at land tenure reform that tend to assume the separate and settled existence of property, of citizenship, and of the state. Such compartmentalized understandings of land politics will, no doubt, miss the point. We consider none of these socio-political features as separate or pre-established