Christian Lund

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Copenhagen

Treating the ‘state’ as a finished product gets in the way of understanding it. The state is always in the making. This article, which acts as the Introduction to a special issue, argues that political authority is (re-)produced through the process of successfully defining and enforcing rights to community membership and rights of access to importa...

Recent land occupations by peasant movements in Indonesia have done more than challenge the existing ownership of plantations and forests. They have restructured local property and authority relations by stimulating a strategic critique of public authority and governance practice within the peasant movement. ‘Plantation’ and ‘forest’ are structured...

The old aphorism “possession is nine-tenths of the law” is particularly relevant in Indonesia, which has seen a string of regime changes and a shifting legal landscape for property claims. Ordinary people struggle to legalize their possessions and claim rights in competition with different branches of government, as well as police, army, and privat...

Land rights are uneven in Indonesia as they favour government over citizens as rights subjects. Moreover, legal complexity and social inequality make legal knowledge about land rights rather inaccessible to small-scale farmers and the urban rank and file. Finally, the presumption of legality enables government institutions to acquire land and estab...

Institutions and frontier dynamics describe apparent opposites, yet they are mutually constitutive. While institutions are characterized by rules, regulation, and order, frontier dynamics represent destruction of existing rules, the elimination of established authorities, and the active redacting of prior social contracts. We argue that frontier dy...

Anmeldelse af Mikkel Bunkenborg, Morten Nielsen & Morten Axel Pedersens 'Collaborative Damage - An Experimental Ethnography of Chinese Globalization'

The racket we know as 'the state' has bedevilled political science, anthropology , geography and sociology for as long as these disciplines have been around. It is, therefore, no small gesture of audacity to make a new and original contribution to the literature. It is, nonetheless, what Tobias Hagmann and Finn Stepputat set out to do with Trade Ma...

This is a book review

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

An institutional perspective should consider the fundamental dynamics among public authority, property, and citizenship. Yet treating any of these elements in isolation or as finished product gets in the way of understanding them. They come about through each other; one always invokes the others, and they are always in the making. Hence, we need to...

In the first year of the journal of Legal Pluralism’s existence, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann’s article Forum shopping and shopping forums. Dispute processing in a Minangkabau village in West Sumatra was published. Christian Lund reflects on the continued theoretical and methodological relevance of the article for the social scientific study of law an...

A social science text has topography. Idea, concepts, and data are structured in a narrative form and the writer faces three challenges: 1) how to deal with the complexity of knowledge in a linear form of writing, 2) how to transform experience and the wealth of data you needed to know to write, into focused and lean writing that the reader needs t...

This chapter argues that if possession is nine-tenths of the law — of property — then legalization is the last tenth: the persuasion that the possession is legal. This persuasion depends on legal posturing to produce an air of legality to make claims pass as legal. Legalization is about meaning and social contract. Dismissing law and property as a...

This chapter describes the specific configuration of the political and agrarian structure in Aceh during the civil war and after. It presents two analysis. The first is an analysis of the general land politics in Aceh during and after the war, tracing the Free Aceh Movement's ( Gerakan Aceh Merdeka , GAM) development from a rebel movement with a na...

This chapter examines the longue durée reproduction of the material agrarian structure and the violently and radically changing political regimes. It operates at two levels. First, on the large scale of time and space, the chapter shows how the political contexts over time have supported and undermined various land claims at different junctures — f...

This chapter evaluates the impact of the declaration of Mount Halimun-Salak as a national park by the Indonesian government on the property and citizenship of the local population. It analyzes government–citizen encounters in West Java and the dynamics of recognition in the fields of government territorialization, taxation, local organization, and...

This chapter analyzes struggles over urban space in Bandung, a city of some two-and-a-half million inhabitants. It focuses on a particular piece of land, a strip alongside a now inoperative railway line. As infrastructure, it falls within the ambit of government spatial control. Yet the area has become a settlement for ordinary people through an in...

This chapter studies three neighborhoods in Medan to map out the contentious patterns of legalization of urbanizing land. The city's expansion has largely taken place on land that was once under plantation leases. People and developers have not always waited for the land to be legally released for other purposes, and when leases finally lapsed, new...

This chapter discusses the relationship between law and property. The old aphorism that “possession is nine-tenths of the law” suggests that property rights are not merely about legal rights, but, more importantly, about social relations and the political and physical capacity to hold things of value: land, in particular. For many people in Indones...

This chapter assesses the processes through which property, citizenship, and authority are produced, fabricated, or sometimes conjured up, and the dynamics through which they are reproduced, challenged, undermined, and possibly eliminated. It analyzes how governing institutions in Indonesia have dispossessed different groups of people, and how the...

The book argues that while possession may be nine-tenths of the law, the last tenth of legalizing land claims still matters a great deal. As Indonesia’s modern history is a string of regime changes in a context of deep agrarian conflict, legalization is crucial as it promises to take land claims safely through times of changing fortunes as rights....

This paper examines how a local community has tried to legalise its possession of land in the outskirts of the city of Medan, Indonesia. In the absence of accessible legal pathways and in the face of state and gang violence, the community has resorted to an imaginative mimicry of legal land access procedures. This paper argues that law-making does...

This concluding synthesis argues that practices of legitimation can empirically deconstruct any given energy transitions case to identify mechanisms that constrain or enable accountability to decarbonisation with social equity enhancement. The versatile analytical application of these practices can advance environmental governance research on steer...

Accountability is a form of communication between people and institutions where one is held to account by the other. Parts of the scholarship distinguish between upward and downward accountability. Upward accountability would involve acknowledgement of an authority to sanction or validate operations or claims, whereas downward accountability refers...

Cities are growing in numbers and size all over the globe, and the shelves of books on cities are weighed aslope. As theatres of politics, government planning, resistance, and the leading edge of modernity, civility, decay, and violence, cities are concentrations of opportunity, danger, and transformation. 1 This review essay will reflect a particu...

Assemblages have gained currency as an object of study as well as a method of inquiry. There is something intuitively appealing about looking at the world as assemblages. The transition from observation to analysis is not like passing through the green gate in an airport with 'Nothing to Declare'. We always travel with our epistemology, our concept...

This chapter examines the period of colonial rule in Northern Ghana and investigates how at various stages local administrators in their pragmatic efforts to deal with a number of dilemmas in effect made dramatic decisions on the land tenure system. Having explored the motivations for, and the challenges of, the colonial government’s land policies...

The end of the civil war in Aceh brought peace, but it has been of a predatory nature. As a moment of rupture, the peace revealed interests, powers and dynamics, and it offered an opportunity for their reconfiguration. When unrest ceased, old agrarian conflicts between smallholders and planters resumed. Peace held promise of land reform. Yet old pa...

Policy Brief based on Special Issue of Development and Change

Treating the “state” as a finished product gets in the way of understanding it. The state is always in the making. This article, which acts as the Introduction to a special issue, argues that political authority is (re-)produced through the process of successfully defining and enforcing rights to community membership and rights of access to importa...

Governance trends in large-scale informal urban settlements in Africa

Old Fadama in Accra, Ghana, is a vast informal settlement. A legalistic approach by successive governments has meant a near-absence of statutory institutions and the emergence of alternative public authorities. These endeavour to provide the area with a range of basic public services to solve the area's serious developmental challenges. Through pro...

The history of land control in Indonesia is overwhelmingly one of colonial conquest, government enclosure and expropriation of traditional property rights. However, beneath these great transformations, counter-currents also flow. Encroachment on state land and its gradual privatization by ordinary people sometimes gnaw at government property. Throu...

Case studies are often presented as self-evident. However, of what the material is a case is actually less evident. It is argued in this article that the analytical movements of generalization, specification, abstraction and concretization can make us more conscious of what our work might be a case, and that the same data have the potential to make...

This research note is part of the thematic section, Practical Realities of Giving Back, in the special issue titled “Giving Back in Field Research,” published as Volume 10, Issue 2 in the Journal of Research Practice.

Land issues are often not about land only. Rather, they invoke issues of property more broadly, implicating social and political relationships in the widest sense. Struggles over property may therefore be as much about the scope and structure of authority as about access to resources, with land claims being tightly wrapped in questions of authority...

The contemporary construction of the past is crucial for the successful vindication of political rights in Africa. Often, however, more than a single past proves potentially valid as a claim to land and office. When arguments of the past, furthermore, intertwine with competing projections of legitimate forms of land control, complex combinations of...

Public authority does not always fall within the exclusive realm of government institutions; in some contexts, institutional competition is intense and a range of ostensibly apolitical situations become actively politicized. Africa has no shortage of institutions which attempt to exercise public authority: not only are multiple layers and branches...

The Politics of Property Rights Institutions in Africa. By OnomaAto Kwamena. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 246p. $86.00. - Volume 10 Issue 2 - Christian Lund

Previous efforts at legal development have focused almost exclusively on state legal systems, many of which have shown little improvement over time. Recently, organizations engaged in legal development activities have begun to pay greater attention to the implications of local, informal, indigenous, religious and village courts or tribunals, which...

‘People want their property rights defended and they will seek the means to have them enforced.’ The quote captures the essence of Sandra Joireman’s ambition as she investigates how property rights are defined and defended in contexts where government is failing to do it, or not doing it adequately. She raises the fundamental question of whose prop...

People's efforts to secure land and water rights in Africa follow many different paths, and the literature on African land tenure documents varied and shifting strategies. The centrality of land, water and other natural resources in peoples' livelihoods has also meant that such resources have enjoyed the keen attention of the state - whether coloni...

Contribution to the Debate on Property and Land Rights in Africa Spectrum.

Land reform, land politics and resettlement in Laos have changed people's land access and livelihoods. But these reforms have also transformed political subjectivity and landed property into matters for government to a degree hitherto unknown in Laos. The control over people, land and space has consolidated sovereignty in ways that make government...

Land questions have invigorated agrarian studies and economic history, with particular emphases on its control, since Marx. Words such as ‘exclusion’, ‘alienation’, ‘expropriation’, ‘dispossession’, and ‘violence’ describe processes that animate land histories and those of resources, property rights, and territories created, extracted, produced, or...

The going has gotten tough in 'God's Own State'. While the licence plate slogan in Abia State in south-eastern Nigeria hints at the profusion of religious denominations, it is, in fact, only one of many forms of networks criss-crossing - or constituting - society. In her study Kate Meagher unravels the social, economic and political networks that r...

Few things are more fundamental in social life or politics than what we have and who we are. Property and social identity, in the broadest sense, are perhaps the most overt and familiar manifestations of these core dimensions. Few issues in Africa connect the two aspects more intimately than land, where claims to land are defined partly by social i...

The Politics of Possession investigates how struggles over access to resources and political power constitute property and authority recursively. Such dynamics are integral to state formation in societies characterized by normative and legal pluralism. •Includes some of the latest theoretical work on the dynamics of access and property and how they...

Development studies navigate between policy and social science; between directed progress and change. However, the relative propinquity of social science and policy languages sometimes masks the difference between the two. This article discusses the relationship between development as social change and as a craft and argues for the necessity of rec...

In this paper, we review four African experiences with property formalisation in order to examine whether they conform to hypothesised mainstream effects. First, the demand for formalised rights must be deconstructed, taking into account the interests of local groups. No formalisation effort is likely to be embraced by all. Second, formalisation re...

Summaries The land tenure situation in rural Africa is often described as uncertain and insecure, and recent reforms have addressed this issue. Consequently, it is a paradox that measures taken to reduce the insecurity that rural people face every day in fact often increase uncertainty, or at least reconfigure it. Responses to this by local people...

In the course of political struggle in northern Ghana, the classification of land and resources has shifted between the two ‘master categories’ of public and private. Despite the fact that master categories may be wholly inadequate in accounting for the actual complexity of property objects, social units and rights, they are not divorced from the a...

In this introduction we argue that access and property regarding natural resources are intimately bound up with the exercise of power and authority. The process of seeking authorizations for property claims also has the effect of granting authority to the authorizing politico-legal institution. In consequence, struggles over natural resources in an...

In this paper, we re-interpret three cases of research previously carried out in Mali, Niger and South Africa in light of the recent debate about formalisation of land rights that has emerged since the publication of Hernando de Soto's ‘Mystery of Capital’. The Malian case shows that lack of broad access to formalisation processes in high-pressure...

Access to land and property is vital to people's livelihoods in rural, peri-urban, and urban areas in Africa. People exert tremendous energy to have land claims recognized as rights with a variety of political, administrative, and legal institutions. This book provides a detailed analysis of how public authority and the state are formed through deb...

Special issue. Incl. abstracts and bibl. references Literature on the state in developing societies, and in particular in Africa, generally has a hard time specifying what is "state" and what is not. It seems that the closer one gets to a particular political landscape, the more apparent it becomes that many institutions have a twilight caracter, t...

Decentralization of natural resource management is often presented as a novelty. However, successive attempts to decentralize authority were undertaken during the development of forest policy in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast Colony between the 1930s and 1950s. From 1960, however, this was rolled back. Forest policy was thenceforth char...

Forest reserves are a political creation of frontiers between the uninhabited and the inhabited based on the idea that reservation is necessary for the protection of the integrity of natural resources. Forest policy in post-Independence Ghana has been characterised by centralisation, exclusion and restrictive legislation. However, the lands seized...

This article analyses a longstanding ethno-political conflict between Kusasis and Mamprusis in Bawku in north-east Ghana. A double argument is pursued. First, while communal conflict and violence challenge the state and expose its incapacity, the conflicts (played out over chieftaincy, party politics, land, markets, names of places etc.) at the sam...