Postwar Land Dispute Resolution: Land Tenure and the Peace Process in Mozambique

Land tenure issues are fundamentally important to a peace process and agricultural recovery. Disputes over land resources between participants in formal versus customary tenure systems, and the inability of the two to connect in terms of how such disputes are resolved in ways that are viewed as secure and legitimate (and therefore respected) can have especially serious repercussions in periods of recovery from armed conflict. The lack of legitimate adjudication institutions able to resolve disputes between tenure systems has, as the fundamental problem, the existence of evidence relevant to a claim that is available and legitimate within tenure systems, but not between systems. The present work considers the constraints and opportunities for land tenure dispute resolution for groups belonging to customary and migrant tenure systems and formal tenure systems in critical resource (agronomically endowed) areas of postwar Mozambique. From a social survey carried out on 521 households in two provinces of northern Mozambique, the research focused on aspects of postwar customary tenure systems for potential utility as evidence in land dispute resolution within the formal tenure system. Following a brief discussion of the role of land tenure in a peace process, and the land tenure dynamic following civil conflict, the paper looks at critical resources within the landscape of agricultural recovery, and the role of evidence in land dispute resolution. The analysis examines differences between two critical resource areas, and between these and a control, with regard to: evidence type, evidence response to land conflict, and relationships of conflict resolution. The paper ends with look at policy implications.