On Skye and the Promised Land, 1914–2014: Personal History and Highland Land Politics

This article is a hybrid of various forms of prose, conventional historical narrative, memoir, and family history. It links World War I land agitation in the Scottish Highlands with later imaginings and rememberings of the region's land use politics, and with their enduring significance. At its heart is one small croft on the Isle of Skye and one Skye family. These are anchored in one of the many land raids of the Great War era and through it they connect with other crofting families, with the longer history of the region's land politics, and with the Highland Diaspora.

Filtered violence: Human rights law, forced displacement and land politics in Colombia

How does human rights law arbitrate the spatial dimensions of violence? This paper broaches this question from a “critical geographies of human rights” standpoint to grapple with how human rights law defines the spatial dimensions of the very violence it sets out to confront. Through a focus on Colombia’s 2011 “Victims’ and Land Restitution Law” (the Victims’ Law), I demonstrate how human rights law does not just attempt to ameliorate legacies of violence, but that it circumscribes the spatial valences of violence in particular ways. Colombia has one of the world’s largest displaced populations and since 2011 has managed an extensive restitution program designed to restore land title to conflict victims who lost or sold property due to armed conflict. In this case, human rights law is productive of a “juridical gaze” that illuminates the spatial dynamics of forced displacement in a manner that obscures or only indirectly addresses the relationship between forced displacement and inequality in land ownership. Drawing on contemporary debates concerning the relationship between human rights and neoliberal inequality, I argue that that human rights law produces spatial renderings of violence that reflect the underlying degree to which human rights projects recognize or eschew material inequality and its relationship to violence.

“I am Sapelo”: Racialized uneven development and land politics within the Gullah Geechee Corridor

The history of land struggles in the United States demonstrates how ongoing patterns of uneven development depend upon and codify the legacies of white supremacy. In this article, we show how the histories of white supremacy continue to be embedded and institutionalized into contemporary land and property politics through the processes of racialized uneven development using the case of Sapelo Island, Georgia. We trace the history of property relations on Sapelo over four periods (covering 1802–2020) to reveal how Black, Saltwater Geechee descendants’ presence on the island has persisted despite manifold attempts to manipulate, control, and dispossess families of their land. We re-interpret Sapelo’s history through the lens of abolition ecology to articulate how the struggle for life through land consistently runs up against state-sanctioned racial violence, which perpetuates and institutionalizes systemic racialized uneven development. We argue that the “racial state” is facilitating the dispossession of Geechee cultural heritage, which lies in having access to and ownership of the land and requires new political imaginaries to combat the persistence of these tactics.

Predatory Peace

This chapter describes the specific configuration of the political and agrarian structure in Aceh during the civil war and after. It presents two analysis. The first is an analysis of the general land politics in Aceh during and after the war, tracing the Free Aceh Movement's (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, GAM) development from a rebel movement with a nationalist and popular base to a political party with a rent-seeking practice and an interest in the palm oil economy. The second is an analysis of the institutional mechanisms of dispossession through land-lease allocations. Empirical documentation from two different locations in Aceh illustrates the smallholder plantation land conflicts. By turning space into a frontier under weak claims, new actors were able to seize it through violence, political power, and the paperwork of legalization.

Towards a modern history of Gondwanaland

Gondwanaland was a southern mega-continent that began to break up 180 million years ago. This article explores Gondwanaland�s modern history, its unexpected political and cultural purchase since the 1880s. Originating with geological and palaeontological research in the Gond region of Central India, �Gondwana� has become recognisable and useful, especially in settler colonial contexts. This prospectus sets out a program for a highly unusual �transnational� project, involving scholars of India, Australia, Antarctica, southern Africa and South America. Unpredictably across the five continents of former Gondwanaland, the term itself signals depth of time and place across the spectrum of Indigenous land politics, coal-based extractive politics, and, paradoxically, nationalist environmental politics. All kinds of once-living Gondwanaland biota deliver us fossil fuels today � the �gifts of Gondwana� some geologists call southern hemisphere coal, gas, petroleum � and so the modern history of Gondwanaland is also a substantive history of the Anthropocene.