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Land Politics and Conflict

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The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies
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Environmental peacebuilding; Land rights; Land tenure; Land use

Definitions and Issues

A successful transition to peace necessarily involves establishing tenure security, where tenure refers to a set of social relations that govern the access, use, and claims to land. Tenure security is the predictability of property rights that allows people to rebuild their personal, economic, social, and political lives. Conflicts reorder social relations dramatically: population patterns change; state power is less effective; identities shift as people move locations and their relations to land; and legitimacy and authority that are used to claim land, property, and territory are challenged (Unruh 2003). This entry examines land as a cause of conflict, a dimension of violence, and a key aspect of post-conflict reconstruction.

Ways of using, accessing, and owning land pose particular issues, within and outside conflict. The particularities emerge from the fact that land is, in Tania Li’s (2014b...

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Correspondence to Katarina Kušić .

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© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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Kušić, K. (2021). Land Politics and Conflict. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11795-5_180-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11795-5_180-1

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-11795-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-11795-5

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