This chapter conceptualizes, codes, and provides a visualization of property rights gaps. Land can be held by individuals, groups, and governments; ownership can be formalized or informal in various ways; and property rights can face a diverse array of restrictions. I home in on several critical components of property rights in constructing my property rights gap measures: land formalization, defensibility, and alienability. I use these aspects of property rights to construct measures of complete, partial, and absent property rights. Based on these definitions, this chapter outlines the original data, I collected on land reform and property rights through land titling in Latin America, and then visualizes the data used to construct measures of the property rights gap. The chapter situates the data and patterns relative to important forms of landholding such as collective and communal land rights, cooperatives, land that is nationalized, and individually held land. This chapter also discusses the evolution of land rights in Latin America from the colonial period to the early 1900s.

Chapter 4 chronicles how conflict—manifested in physical and structural violence—simultaneously ruptured and sealed government-citizen and citizen-citizen relations thereby casting citizenship as a site of enduring struggle for Liberia. It employs Long’s notion of the interface as well as Galtung’s conflict triangle to designate conflict as a dynamic process in which the ‘incompatibility of goals’ of different actors (contradiction) fuels their perceptions and misperceptions of themselves and each other (attitudes) thereby influencing actions (behaviour) that may range from opposition to accommodation. Specifically, the chapter maintains that Liberian citizenship has been constructed and reconstructed because of conflicts precipitated by four major interfaces between a range of actors beginning with the indigenous wars of resistance during Liberia’s state formation in the nineteenth century and climaxing in twenty-first century post-war rivalries over income, land tenure, and transitional justice. While strained government-citizen relations engendered dissent and divergence, improvements in those relations also ushered in intervals of consent and convergence. This chapter demonstrates that a decade-long impasse on dual citizenship reveals how Liberian citizenship has changed across space and time through conflict and crisis and is still undergoing transformation.

This chapter starts with the puzzle of why governments would distribute land without property rights. It then provides an overview of the evolution of property rights in Latin America from Spanish colonization through decolonization into the present. This period covered land appropriation and forced labor, high landholding inequality, and private property rights by landed elites and the church that were in many countries stripped through land redistribution. But rural peasants received land in collectives, cooperatives, informally, or through nationalizations rather than with individual land titles. The chapter provides a conceptualization of the property rights gap and a typology of different gaps. It frames why withholding property rights is puzzling from the economics perspective that property rights support investment, efficiency, and development. It previews existing explanation for rights informality, including weak state capacity, left-wing ideology, and competing state goals. The chapter then summarizes how authoritarian regimes withhold rights to exert rural social control and democracies and foreign pressure can extend rights.

Chapter 2 presents a detailed study of the first major leg in the Elijah cycle in relation to its immediate context, 1 Kings 12–16. It begins by observing that Elijah functions as a theological icon rather than as a complete psyche on par with the protagonists of modern histories and novels. An agrarian hermeneutic applied to this same material illumines the text’s holistic interest in physiological healing (1 Kings 17), agroecological renewal (1 Kings 18), and social health (1 Kings 19). As a result, Elijah the Tishbite emerges as the prototypical ancestor of Yhwh’s preserved remnant, a prophetic community that the implied reader, too, is encouraged to join. In contrast to the political and theological disaster that the larger book of Kings narrates, 1 Kings 17–19 suggests that Yhwh raises the dead in multiple dimensions.

Chapter 3 examines three progressively related chapters whose main character is Ahab, not Elijah, and thus whose connection with the Elijah narratives (or lack thereof) has attracted much scholarly discussion. It demonstrates that an agrarian hermeneutic generates new insight on the unit’s rhetorical coherence alongside 1 Kings 17–19. In contrast to Elijah’s theological submission to and physiological dependence on Yhwh, 1 Kings 20–22 dramatizes Ahab’s corresponding theological autonomy from Yhwh, leading to the material loss of life and land. Ahab’s story – interwoven with Elijah’s (see 1 Kings 21) but also remaining separate from it (1 Kings 20 and 22) – therefore pre-enacts the Exile in which the book of Kings resolves.

Chapter 4 focuses on Elijah’s immortality, the doubling of his spirit, and Elisha’s role as Elijah’s prophetic heir in the narratives to follow. On paradigm with 1 Kings 17–19, the Elisha narratives depict Yhwh’s renewal of Israel’s land and people together. Moreover, these stories suggest that Elijah’s paradigmatic vitality – even in the prophet’s physical absence – outstrips the theological catastrophe (1 Kings 20–22) with which it contrasts. Thus, as a rhetorical extension of the prophet’s non-death portrayed in 2 Kings 1–2, 2 Kings 3–8 communicates a hope for Israel that proves crucial to the book’s overall message.

This chapter investigates the social, political and environmental characteristics and impacts of food and farming in the current era of neoliberal globalization. Drawing from environmental sociology, political economy and political ecology, we consider the ways that problems with capital, labour and land intersect with ecological constraints (such as climate change and declining fossil fuels). Productivist agriculture, industrialisation, supermarketization and financialization have contributed to the demise of local food systems, the promotion of ‘obesogenic’ diets, the creation of food waste and the global ‘land rush’, with implications for both the natural environment and for deteriorating conditions for labour. Farmers have shifted from feeding nations to producing for a global economy in which food is overproduced while global hunger increases. These contradictions have prompted significant social, political, and financial struggles. Multiple ‘neoliberalisms’ have therefore emerged, and neoliberal food and farming is highly contested. The chapter concludes with a discussion of alter-globalization; an alternative to neoliberal globalization that challenges the notion of capitalist growth, highlights limits to consumption, and largely rejects market solutions to environmental problems. The right to food, ‘food sovereignty’, redistributive land reform, smallholder and family farming, de-corporatization, agro-ecology and improved democracy are discussed as key elements informing critique and resistance.

Land and state efforts in management have surged onto environmental sociologists’ agenda, but our tools for examining concerns around land are limited. Practitioners of political ecology have examined just these issues in great depth, and there is much we can learn from them. Their work on how states steer development projects details how states and capitalists advance projects that displace or enlist people for productive efforts that can devastate landscapes. Their studies of land enclosure for conservation or forestry make sense of the push and pull among groups concerned with wildlife, profit, and the welfare of residents. Examining ecological restoration efforts, political ecologists identify the conditions under which these projects succeed and fail, showing how processes policymakers fail to consider often cause surprising outcomes. A further opening of the conversation between environmental sociologists and political ecologists bears great promise for cross-fertilization.

Although it is well known that the colonial state embarked upon creating a “rule of property” in India from the eighteenth century onward, the manner in which this project unfolded in early East India Company settlements such as Bombay was different from the territories that only later came under British control. In the latter, a confident and assertive colonial state executed its agenda; in the former, a tentative Company was concerned initially with asserting its sovereignty by asserting that all the land in Bombay belonged to it. In cities like Bombay, thus, a deep and enduring tension lay at the heart of the rule of property: between a state that endorsed a liberal vision sanctifying private property, on the one hand, and a state that jealously guarded its proprietary rights over lands, on the other hand. This tension was deployed by state and nonstate actors to pursue their own ends.

U.S. Native American literature corresponds in the first instance with the anticolonial literatures of what used to be called the Third World. As such its periodization cannot be made to fit within the periodizations of U.S. American literature, either in terms of centuries or moments (modern/post-modern). More properly, one might begin to think of this literature, if one wants to periodize it at all, in terms of pre-and post-invasion. In this paper, I look at one instance of this correspondence of resistance in Acoma poet Simon Ortiz’s Fight Back: For the Sake of the Land/ For the Sake of the People and Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s Journal of an Ordinary Grief. I undertake this project both to reorient our thinking about the global place of U.S. Native American Literature and to think about the way this reorientation effects the hegemony of the current periodization of U.S. American literature.

Where a settlor creates a trust it will be enforceable once the requisite formalities are satisfied. A key feature of a trust is the separation of the legal and the beneficial title. The trustee holds the legal title and the beneficiaries hold the equitable interest. In order for the trust to be enforceable by the beneficiaries there must be no doubt that the property has been validly passed to the trustee or that the settlor has made a valid declaration of a trust. Anyone can create a trust of personalty unless he/she is shown to be mentally ill and unable to understand the nature of the gift and or in the case of land under under the age of eighteen. There are strict formalities where trust property comprises land the formalities are very specific and must conform with the Law of Property Act 1925 s.53. A distinction is drawn between trusts of land which must be evidenced in writing and trusts of equitable interests which must be in writing at the time of the disposition. There are some exceptions to this rule for instance there is no disposition if both the legal and equitable interest are transferred together. Emphasis is placed on the role of formalities. It is important to be able to locate the legal and equitable title in particular to prevent fraud.

Chapter 8 examines the land and stock market bubbles that occurred in Japan in the 1980s. In the seven years before its peak, the Japanese stock market appreciated 386 per cent. Similarly, land prices rose by 207 per cent. By August 1992, the Japanese stock market had fallen 62 per cent from its peak, and by 1995, land was 50 per cent below its peak. Both land prices and the stock market continued to fall into the next decade. The chapter then uses the bubble triangle to explain the Japanese land and stock bubbles. These bubbles were purely political creations. Not only did the Japanese government provide the spark, but it systematically cultivated all three sides of the bubble triangle with the explicit goal of generating a boom. This process was clearest in the realm of money and credit, where an expansion was both a central part of Japan’s economic policy and, after the Plaza Accord, an international commitment. The chapter concludes by looking at how the collapse of the Japanese bubbles weakened the country’s banking system, which eventually had to be rescued by the government, and resulted in a stagnant economy for over two decades.

We can only understand the positions that British parties adopted in respect of Aboriginal interests in land of grasp that this matter arose only incidentally and that those positions were a product of political contestation between these players. Furthermore, there are no sound historical reasons for suggesting that the Colonial Office’s senior officials sought to uphold native rights of property in land in the colony of South Australia. They made vague and formulaic references to the possibility that there might be native peoples who had native title to land, but they did so in trying to rein in the colonisation proposed by the South Australia Colonisation Commission. It is naïve to suggest that their position on the native people’s interests in land was a product of a commitment to some high-minded religious, moral or legal principles. While they held that they had a duty to protect the interests of the native peoples, they were convinced that there were very real political limits to any attempt to uphold any rights that Aboriginal people might have. This conviction owed a good deal to their perceptions of the relative power of the imperial and colonial government, the settlers and the Aboriginal people.

I argue that imperial agents treated legal concepts as a resource rather than a script for claiming possession of overseas territories, and did so in order to make vague claims to legitimacy vis-à-vis their imperial rivals rather than make strictly legal claims. I have found no evidence to suggest that James Cook claimed possession of New Holland on the grounds of terra nullius, res nullius or occupation. It is more likely that Cook relied upon two other legal concepts: discovery and possessio. Cook’s claim-making was primarily done with a European audience in mind rather than a local one, that it was concerned with staking a preliminary claim, and that his claim-making did not determine how questions about sovereignty or title in land were to be treated later. We need to focus on the sequence of events that began with the encounters between Cook’s party and the Aboriginal people, and the perceptions that Cook and Banks subsequently formed of the natives. After the colony was planted, the British government never saw any need to negotiate with the local people for cession of sovereignty or the purchase of land because it was relatively well-armed and encountered no powerful rival sources of power.

The winter and spring of 1844–45 saw debate about native title in New Zealand reach a zenith in Britain. In a fierce parliamentary clash, the Treaty of Waitangi became the reference point in discussions of native title. This was not a consequence of the meanings or the importance attributed to the Treaty at the time it was made in 1840 but a result of the claims that had been made about it since 1842–43. In fact, the Treaty’s rise to prominence was the result of a struggle over the meaning of native title. The continuing attack by the New Zealand Company and allies, such as Lord Howick, saw the government increasingly arguing that the Treaty had to be upheld because it had acquired the nature of a solemn contract, and the honour and good faith of the British Crown and the nation were at stake. At the same time, the way that principal political players in Britain represented the natives’ military power varied enormously according to political circumstances and need, which draws into question the conventional wisdom that the British government respected the New Zealanders and their rights because of the simple fact of their might.

Hobson’s successor as Governor, Robert FitzRoy found New Zealand in crisis but had few resources to address it and adopted rash measures that appeared to abandon the means by which the British government hoped to acquire ownership of vast swathes of land. A major political struggle erupted in London between the New Zealand Company and the Colonial Office with the former spinning a powerful tale that its troubles were primarily the result of the natives’ rights of property in land being defined wrongly. More specifically, the Company’s directors and Lord Howick blamed the Treaty of Waitangi for the way that the natives’ rights in land had been defined. It mattered not a jot that the stories told about its significance involved more fiction than fact. For its part, the Colonial Office insisted that the Treaty had to be upheld in light of what had happened in the past, the facts on the ground in New Zealand and the undertakings the Crown had given the natives. In the colony, abstract legal principles and philosophical ideas similarly played little role in the way the key British players approached native title, especially in comparison to a mixture of moral, political and strategic considerations.