Nicole Kligerman’s research while affiliated with Macalester College and other places

In the 2000s, Bolivia and Ecuador were marked by battles over natural resources in which mass mobilizations challenged the neoliberal privatization of resources such as water and natural gas. In El Alto and Quito, these mobilizations boosted the public standing of women whose frontline militancy helped confront privatization and build momentum for the election of women to top leadership. Although gender discrimination persisted, women’s activism in these resource battles demonstrated to men their capacity to lead in arenas other than health, family, and education. In the wake of these conflicts, variations in women’s voice—the power to speak, set agendas, and dictate discourse—on the executive councils of popular organizations prove to be determined by societal sexism, leadership and training opportunities for women, the presence of more women on the executive council, the status of the council seats won by women, and the particular organization’s decision-making process.

This project analyzes the relationship between land privatization and violence in societies that previously employed non-capitalist land tenure systems. Exploring the cases of the Dakota in Minnesota, the Acholi in Northern Uganda, and indigenous communities in southern Mexico, I examine how the state forcibly incorporated collective land systems into capitalism through a combination of physical, structural, and intra-community violences. This results in the disintegration of previous means of agricultural production and the accompanying community-based cultural systems. Communities resist this process, however, as they battle for natural resource sovereignty and sustainable peace in their homelands.

This paper addresses the complex intricacies of homosexuality in Islam by exploring Qur'anic notions of sexuality, theoretical perceptions of homosexuality in the Muslim world, the effect of Western influences on sexuality, and human rights abuses inflicted upon Muslim gays today.

This paper presents the various dynamics, causes, and consequences of land conflicts in Acholiland. In order to comprehensively address these complex issues, this paper analyzes land conflict in connection to the Northern Uganda war, explaining the military strategies that resulted in widespread displacement and alienation from the land. This paper further explores changing Acholi cosmology and customary land law in connection to land alienation. Additionally, I examine local land conflicts as well as three privatization and “development” plans in relationship to preexisting land displacement issues. This paper highlights the opinions of my fieldwork participants regarding the importance of land to Acholi people, customary land law, and the future for Acholis if widespread land alienation continues. In order to explore these complex and intertwined conflicts, I carried out in-depth interviews with nine informants in the Laroo Division of Gulu District. Additionally, interviews were held with local experts in field related to my research, including a local politician, an NGO worker, a professor at Gulu University, and the executive committee of the Gulu Concerned Land Owners Association. To complement this fieldwork, I reviewed academic literature related to land issues, the armed conflict, and current privatization plans. Through my research, I argue that the consequences of pending land privatization schemes will have the same result as the armed conflict on the Acholi people: alienation from the land, homelessness, poverty, malnutrition, and death. Acholis rely on their customary land as the privatization as the primary source for economic and cosmological survival; in the opinion of the majority of my interview participants, displacement from their land will result in the widespread inability to support current and future generations of Acholis and, ultimately, the potential decimation of the population.