Ethnic Politics and Land Grabbing

The role of land in capital accumulation has gained prominence over the past two decades, primarily in the wake of the unprecedented expansion of highly contested large-scale “land grabs” or “land investments” across the global South. This chapter argues that the phenomenon of land grabbing has impacted the social relations regulating land access and livelihoods, including by heightening ethnic tensions. This is even more the case in multiethnic settings where different groups have distinct land claims and access to and competition for land and power are deeply contested and often have an interethnic character. Land-related conflicts, particularly in the context of contemporary land grabs, have increasingly taken the form of politicized ethnic conflicts, pitching majority Indigenous ethnic groups against ethnic minorities. The chapter shows that the ethnicization of land politics and conflict at local and national levels is often linked to the broader political economy on a global scale. The dynamics of global land-based accumulation are simultaneously shaped and constituted by national accumulation trajectories and how the state facilitates them, resulting in uneven development among ethnic homelands and groups. Such accumulation dynamics on a global scale often intersect with, and
further reinforce, the salience of ethnic-based land politics at the local level. Ethnicity is certainly a key determining factor in land access, but it is not the only one. The convergence between ethnicity and class that unfolds within state-society interactions is particularly fundamental to contemporary
land politics and, thus, to land conflict.