Policy analysts, academics, and journalists point to the increasing incidence and importance of land-related conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. After four or five post-independence decades of relative political calm in most of rural Africa, rural districts and provinces in many countries now roil with land-related tension, sometimes expressed in politically charged ways. Tension arises from land scarcities and growing competition over land access, the assertion of citizenship and ethnic claims linked to land entitlements, and, in some cases, enclosure and the growing exclusiveness of land rights.

In some countries, land-related conflict has exploded onto the national political stage. In Kenya, more than 300,000 people were displaced and some 1,500 killed in the violent conflict over land rights in the 1990s. Almost as many were affected by land-related violence in 2007 and 2008. Land-related conflict fueled a political conflagration in Côte d’Ivoire that tore the country in two in 2003, and it paralyzed attempts to reconstitute order through the electoral process. Land conflict also fueled the Mano River Basin civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, war and widespread violence in the villages of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and the war in Darfur, Sudan. In Zimbabwe, land expropriation and reallocation has been at center of the Mugabe regime's desperate struggle to remain in power since 2000.