Land Conflicts and Land Meanings in Contemporary Africa

Abstract The commodification of land does not go uncontested in contemporary Africa. In this paper, we apply a Polanyian perspective to analyze the role of the non-commodified meanings and understandings of land in conflicts over land use in African countries. We posit that the socially exclusive and ecologically destructive effects of land commodification generate discontent and are therefore in continuous demand for legitimation to counter non-commodified aspirations regarding land use and to counter the rival meanings of land itself. Land means belonging, sacrality, recreation, and soil, and each of these four semantics fills diverse areas of the political space in which peasants, rural movements, intellectuals, epistemic communities, state agencies, and international organisations engage, bringing into play their own visions, ideas, and interests. Drawing on examples from North and Sub-Saharan Africa, we identify the primary conflictual patterns within each understanding of land, their implications for African land politics, and explain why the dominant developmental discourses on land use in Africa are marred by a narrow and harmful discursive focus on the matter.