Introduction

The most famous song by the celebrated American folk singer Woody Guthrie – This Land is Your Land (1940) – was a response to dispossession and alienation during the Great Depression in the United States, but its message transcends space and time. Guthrie sought to remind Americans of massive land grabs by government agencies and private interests (Terrell, 1972; Reisner, 1993; Brown, 2001), which deprived millions of people – including indigenous populations – of land and livelihood. Guthrie’s song provides a useful starting point for understanding land grabbing in the Ituri District of Northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The people of Ituri experienced three distinct phases of land grabbing, starting with Belgian colonizers, continuing under the post-independence rule of Mobutu Sese Seko, and expanding during the war (1996-2007) and post-war (2007-present) periods. Over time the perpetrators have shifted from international to national to local actors, creating multiple layers of land conflict that limit post-conflict reconciliation and development, and threaten to reignite violent conflict.

The story of land grabbing in Ituri highlights several themes about how and why people take land from each other, and thus has relevance for similar situations in other places. These themes include (1) the importance of historical context in understanding current issues, (2) the incorporation of land into broader power struggles in ways that produce violence, and (3) the challenges faced by post-conflict efforts to resolve land conflicts. In addition, (4) perception is a key element in understanding claims about which land is ‘your land’, which land is ‘my land,’ and whether the land was created ‘for you and me,’ or just for ‘me.’

Many contemporary episodes of land grabbing have ties to historical events and processes. For example, in highly publicised cases in Zimbabwe (Moyo, 2005) and the West Bank (Blanche, 2008), current land grabs are intimately tied to and should be understood in relation to their historical contexts. In Eastern Sudan, the post-independence state continued colonial land use policies that exacerbated local conflicts, thus linking recent land grabs to perceptions of historical injustice and increasing the likelihood of violent conflict (Fahey, 2007; El Hadary and Samat, 2011). Also in Ituri, many recent land grabs have ties to historical policies that favoured certain groups over others. This chapter will illustrate how disputes over boundaries, ownership, or access are often interpreted through perceptions of past greed and grievance.