Access to property and citizenship: Marginalisation in a context of legal pluralism

TY - CHAP

T1 - Access to property and citizenship

T2 - Marginalisation in a context of legal pluralism

AU - Lund, Christian

PY - 2012/1/1

Y1 - 2012/1/1

N2 - What Jesus blatantly fails to appreciate is that it's the meek who are the problem. Monty Python, Life of Brian. Introduction. Few things are more fundamental in social life or politics than what we have and who we are - avoir and etre. Property and citizenship, in the broadest sense, are perhaps the most overt and familiar manifestations of these core dimensions of community life. In poor countries, few entities connect the two facets more intimately than land, where claims to land are partly defined by social identity, and social identity is partly defined through property. Property and citizenship have obvious legal dimensions but are hardly reserved for the legal domain alone. Ultimately, no single institution either fully determines or fully controls all of the issues that surround these two important societal assets. Thus, with regard to property and citizenship, it is important to bear in mind that legal pluralism is embedded in a broader institutional pluralism. In the following, I briefly develop three conceptual considerations and discuss some of their implications in relation to recent research on marginalized groups' access to property and political influence in Niger. In that country, there are examples of both chronic marginalization as well as more successful developments. The conceptual issues can be summarized in the following way: 1) No institution is state as such; rather, “state” is the quality of an institution being able to define and enforce collectively binding decisions on members of society, a quality that is not solely the preserve of government institutions; 2) institutional and normative plurality means not only that people struggle and compete over access to land, but that the legitimate authority to settle conflicts is equally contested. Struggles over property are therefore as much about the scope and constitution of authority as about access to resources; and 3) although legal and institutional pluralism may prevail, access to such institutions in the pursuit of justice is highly unequal. In fact, whereas some have many options, others, particularly women and those at the lowest economic levels, have few or no institutional fallback options.

AB - What Jesus blatantly fails to appreciate is that it's the meek who are the problem. Monty Python, Life of Brian. Introduction. Few things are more fundamental in social life or politics than what we have and who we are - avoir and etre. Property and citizenship, in the broadest sense, are perhaps the most overt and familiar manifestations of these core dimensions of community life. In poor countries, few entities connect the two facets more intimately than land, where claims to land are partly defined by social identity, and social identity is partly defined through property. Property and citizenship have obvious legal dimensions but are hardly reserved for the legal domain alone. Ultimately, no single institution either fully determines or fully controls all of the issues that surround these two important societal assets. Thus, with regard to property and citizenship, it is important to bear in mind that legal pluralism is embedded in a broader institutional pluralism. In the following, I briefly develop three conceptual considerations and discuss some of their implications in relation to recent research on marginalized groups' access to property and political influence in Niger. In that country, there are examples of both chronic marginalization as well as more successful developments. The conceptual issues can be summarized in the following way: 1) No institution is state as such; rather, “state” is the quality of an institution being able to define and enforce collectively binding decisions on members of society, a quality that is not solely the preserve of government institutions; 2) institutional and normative plurality means not only that people struggle and compete over access to land, but that the legitimate authority to settle conflicts is equally contested. Struggles over property are therefore as much about the scope and constitution of authority as about access to resources; and 3) although legal and institutional pluralism may prevail, access to such institutions in the pursuit of justice is highly unequal. In fact, whereas some have many options, others, particularly women and those at the lowest economic levels, have few or no institutional fallback options.

M3 - Book chapter

SN - 978-1-107-01940-9

SP - 197

EP - 214

BT - Legal Pluralism and Development

A2 - Tamanaha, Brian Z.

A2 - Sage, Caroline

A2 - Woolcock, Michael

PB - Cambridge University Press

CY - New York

ER -