The Rights and Wrongs of Land Restitution: "Restoring What Was Ours"Forthcoming from Routledge, July 2008 - ordering information here Drawing on memories and histories of past dispossession, governments, NGOs, informal movements and individual claimants worldwide have attempted to restore and reclaim rights in land. Land restitution programs link the past and the present, and may allow former landholders to reclaim lands which formed the basis of earlier identities and livelihoods. Restitution also has a moral weight that holds broad appeal; it is represented as righting injustice and healing the injuries of colonialism. The Rights and Wrongs of Land Restitution: "Restoring What Was Ours" offers a critical examination of land restitution programs. This book takes a comparative ethnographic approach to land restitution: the contributors examine cases from the Americas, Eastern Europe, Australia, and South Africa. In doing so, they highlight the practical and theoretical questions that arise, thereby rethinking the links between land restitution and property, social transition, injustice, citizenship, the state and the market. Restitution may have unofficial purposes, like establishing the legitimacy of a new regime, quelling popular discontent, or attracting donor funds. It may produce unintended consequences, transforming notions of property and ownership, entrenching local bureaucracies, or replicating segregated patterns of land use. It may also constitute new relations between states and their subjects. Land-claiming communities may make new claims on the state, but they may also find the state making unexpected claims on their land and livelihoods. Restitution may be a route to citizenship, but it may engender new or neo-traditional forms of subjection. By exploring these possibilities and pitfalls, the book allows for a critical scrutiny of land restitution: both its "rights" and its "wrongs." Derick Fay is Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Union College, New York. |