People, Place and Property Rights: A Political Ethnography of Land in Molo, Kenya (Routledge Complex Real Property Rights Series) - Hardcover

Waaranperä, Ulrika Kolben

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0367559935 ISBN 13: 9780367559939

Publisher: Routledge, 2021

Synopsis

For more than a century, property rights to land in Molo in the Kenyan highlands have been subjected to diverse reforms and desires. Colonial and independent state administrations have restructured land tenure systems to establish and maintain authority or alleviate landlessness. Meanwhile, people on the ground have developed their own ideas about property rights, place, and people. Via a detailed political ethnography, Ulrika Kolben Waaranperä uncovers the heterodox notion of property rights that has emerged as land has been redistributed, settlement schemes established, electricity lines drawn, and electoral violence mobilized.

The book makes an important contribution to the study of land and politics in Kenya and beyond by drawing attention to how conceptions of property rights are shaped by and constitutive of relations of belonging and authority. This relational view challenges the universal definition of property rights undergirding most contemporary land reforms. Instead, property rights are situated within the political and rendered legible for both definitional and distributional debates. In effect, land reform is posited as a fundamentally political undertaking.

About this title

About the Author

Ulrika Kolben Waaranperä is a Postdoctoral fellow in Global Politics at Malmö University, Sweden.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0367559935
• ISBN 13: 9780367559939
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 142