Land Access and Dispossession In Africa, Asia and Swana: Old Ways, New Forms of Post-Colonial Land Dynamics

Land dispossession has been central to the making and unmaking of space and life in SWANA. We conceptualise dispossession not as an outcome/event but rather as a structural force shaped by authoritarian practices, colonial legacies, continued colonial settlements, and neoliberal transformations. Within these broad processes, land remains a key site through which power is exercised, contested and reconfigured.

Across the region, land dispossession followed various modes that overlap, intersect or operate separately. Their patterns highlight a shared logic but also variations that merit exploring historical and context-specific techniques in which land is appropriated, regulated, and contested.

Within the somewhat shared macro-processes of colonialism/colonisation and neoliberalisation and in their continuities, what local stories can we learn on and from the dispossessed?

By asking this question, we not only aim to understand the interplay between global and local dynamics but also to put agency and everyday practices of resistance back in the discussion amidst the turbulent times and bleak forecasts for the region.

We welcome contributions that look at land dispossession as a historically grounded process through its moments of violence and rupture/wars but also through the slower everyday processes across urban and rural contexts in SWANA (all Arab countries in addition to Turkey and Iran). We welcome theoretical as well as empirically grounded research that addresses these sub-themes and/or the interplay between them, such as the following (but not limited to):

• legal status-property nexus
• tenure and land access
• bureaucratic infrastructure
• agency and negotiation
• colonial continuities/ruptures in land regime
• state land grabbing