Property and Political Order in Africa: Land Rights and the Structure of Politics

In sub-Saharan Africa, property relationships around land and access to natural resources vary across localities, districts, and farming regions. These differences produce patterned variations in relationships between individuals, communities, and the state. This book captures these patterns in an analysis of structure and variation in rural land tenure regimes. In most farming areas, state authority is deeply embedded in land regimes, drawing farmers, ethnic insiders and outsiders, lineages, villages, and communities into direct and indirect relationships with political authorities at different levels of the state apparatus. The analysis shows how property institutions - institutions that define political authority and hierarchy around land - shape dynamics of great interest to scholars of politics, including the dynamics of land-related competition and conflict, territorial conflict, patron-client relations, electoral cleavage and mobilization, ethnic politics, rural rebellion, and the localization and "nationalization" of political competition.

Author: Catherine Boone
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 02/17/2014
Pages: 438
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9781107649934

About the Author
Boone, Catherine: - Catherine Boone is Professor of Government at the University of Texas, Austin. Boone has been a member of the Board of Directors of the African Studies Association, the Executive Council of the American Political Science Association (APSA) and the Executive Committee of the Comparative Politics Section of APSA, as well as of review boards for the National Science Foundation, Fulbright, and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). She was a member of the Africa Regional Advisory Panel of the SSRC and was Secretary of the African Politics Conference Group, an APSA- and ISA-affiliated research network. Boone was Treasurer and then President of the West Africa Research Association (2005-8), which oversees the West African Research Center in Dakar, Senegal. With Archon Fung, she is Program Co-Chair for the 2013 APSA Annual Meeting. She is a member of the advisory committee of APSA's Africa Workshops Program. She is author of Merchant Capital and the Roots of State Power in Senegal, 1930-1985 (Cambridge, 1992), which was a finalist for the Herskovitz award in 1993, and Political Topographies of the African State: Rural Authority and Institutional Choice (Cambridge, 2003), which was a finalist for the Herskovitz award in 2004, a runner-up for the Luebbert Award in 2004, and winner of the Society for Comparative Research Mattei Dogan Award in 2005.