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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Whose soil and sons - land(less) in Lofa County, Libera and Nord-Kivu, DRC
| Panel |
61. Autochtony, citizenship and exclusion - struggles over resources and belonging
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| Paper ID | 196 |
| Author(s) |
Boas, Morten
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | Conflicts over land and belonging are hallmarks of the conflict in Nord-Kivu, DRC and similar issues also plays an important role in Lofa County, Liberia. The purpose of this paper is to offer a first analysis of how people in these two places use or contest claims of autochthony in the framing of land rights conflicts. The paper therefore seeks to improve our knowledge about 1) the basis for households' rights to land, or lack of such; 2) How people understand established practices concerning the relationship between different groups with different claims to land; and 3) how people foresee (or not) new compromises concerning land rights issues.
The empirical basis for this paper is fieldwork in Lofa County (May 2006) and Nord-Kivu (November and December 2006), where a household survey was used in combination with qualitative approaches (focus group sessions and life-history approaches). More than 750 households were interviewed in the survey part of the fieldwork, and these households were randomly drawn from compact cluster sampling in each case. Land rights issues are at the centre of the analysis, but it is not possible to understand the situation in Lofa County or Nord-Kivu without also taking the relationship between identity and land rights into consideration. The distinction made in both places between tree crops and food crops is not only made to protect certain economic interests, but also to underwrite the belonging the lineage has to a certain area, and to exclude others from making similar arguments. |
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