Contenu du sommaire : Gouverner les hommes et les ressources : légitimités et citoyennetés

Land grabbing has often been analytically related to the weakness of the state in countries of the global South. Yet it is impossible to fully understand this phenomenon without taking into consideration land policies, the paradigms of agrarian development and state-produced visions of the territory. We must acknowledge that the land market is structured by the relations between economic actors – both legal and illegal – and the state. This article seeks to assess, in the case of violent land grabbing in Colombia, the role of the state both as an administrative apparatus and as the place were political power is produced. We will argue that, in spite of the central role played by the state in stripping people from their land, state institutions remain a space of denunciation and mobilization; this conclusion illustrates the power of the state as a reference and its positioning as the central field of the political game.

This paper analyzes the relationship between the Peruvian state and indigenous peasant communities through a long history of recognition, protectionism and dispossession. It focuses on the changes produced by the neoliberal reforms of the nineties and the subsequent economic liberalization of the communal land market that resulted on private investments. By studying different cases of peasant communities from ‘Bosque Seco' in the Peruvian north coast, we show how the convergence of state action, private enterprises and the response of communal governments not only has transformed the social space by changing property and control regulations, but also how the space has been reshaped as an inhabited place, product of an historical process that gives sense and legitimates the communal institution.

This article examines the social relations linked to land regulation in a context marked by a drug-based political economy and repression. The local implementation of the National Certification Program of Land Rights under the Ejido system (Procede) serves to analyze the relationship between local stakes and individual strategies. Using the account of the local population, local archives and direct observations, I analyze the key transformations in the economy of the sierra, the power relations within a regime of communal land use and the experiences of military repression. I argue here that the drug-based political economy which has pushed Badiraguato to the marginality, is inseparable from the state practices of criminalization. This research is based on 18 months of ethnographic studies carried out between November 2013 and June 2015 in the municipality of Badiraguato (Sinaloa, Mexico).

This article addresses the reshaping of the relationships between the Mexican state, local populations, and the different non-governmental actors, focusing on the transitions that affected environmental policies since the 1990s. The analysis takes into account the legal changes that reformed the social property (eijidal) regime in 1992. We show how the formalization of individual and collective property rights, achieved through the implementation of the Certification Program for Ejido Rights and Land Ownership (Certificación de Derechos Ejidales y Titulación de Solares, PROCEDE), favored the proliferation of ecological conservation policies that promote community participation. These processes are evaluated in the light of the experiences of the colonizing populations in the southeast of the Lacandon Jungle, in Chiapas. The article studies the positions and strategies these populations adopted in response to governmental programs, both in the environmental and the agrarian sectors. This also allows us to understand how actions for conservation and management of common property resources in Mexico are conceived, debated and pushed forward at community level.

Historically, the Colombian region of Urabá had been considered an area of agricultural colonization and exploitation of natural resources: the reserve of land seemed unlimited (“baldíos de la Nación”). Since the late 1950s, the central State has been absent from all forms of socio-political and economic regulation in this marginal area, affected by an intense armed and social conflict and a considerable presence of drug trafficking and organized crime. Moreover, Urabá was perceived as a devalued space, doomed to social relegation, while the local peasant population was often stigmatized and accused of supporting guerrillas and drug mafias.Over the past two decades, however, the trend towards the symbolic devaluation of the region was gradually reversed as the central government increased its social anchoring strategies in order to consolidate its legitimacy at the local level. Gradually, Urabá emerged as an area of development, socio-economic modernization and environmental protection. The ethnic and cultural identity of local Afro-Colombian communities has also been gradually rebuilt before being officially recognized in 1993 by the State legislation with the Law 70.From 1997, when the armed conflict went through a particular intense period, several initiatives of resistance to violence emerged. Small farmers who had been internally displaced settled in several protected areas, an initiative thoroughly supported by the Church and by different NGOs. These local strategies of survival and attempts of collective return to the original land led to the development of territorial and political projects located in interstitial spaces. As a result, some local communities have accessed the collective ownership of their land while enhancing traditional methods of agriculture based on mixed-farming and self-sufficiency. They thoroughly challenged the territorial expansion of powerful agribusiness companies (mostly oil palm plantations and cattle-ranching). At the local level, civil society has been gradually constituted and several local community organizations have exercised forms of autonomy, away from local irregular armed groups (guerrillas and paramilitaries) and from the central State.

The objective of this article is to link the political subjectification process with the territorial dynamics of the struggle led by the community of Cherán. Illegal logging and harassment by organized crime led the community to identify a loss of control on its own territory (subalternity) and subsequently to assume the conflict (antagonism). Communal territory was thus turned into a tool for struggle, which offered glimpses of a possible emancipation (autonomy) through the implementation of a government of uses and customs. This work highlights how the community reshapes its own territory, revaluates its historical memory, and remakes its natural bonds for the production of a common desired space.

Border towns were built based on the model of the regular grid or mesh. However, we can identify variations related to their status as border enclaves. Some localities from the first colonization inherited military forts ; others show exceptional cases of subdivision of rural land before the introduction of laws that promoted regular mesh plots ; others were developed in the rigid framework imposed by the territorial grid, as is the case of the territories of Patagonia. This article analyzes cases of border towns in Argentina that show a process of redefinition of territorial forms from the starting regular grid. The study uses mapping and surveying techniques as well as legal documentation. It shows that the production of the territory by the state is the result of traditional practices, normative devices and legal adjustments which together resulted in a fragmentary construction of the territory, despite the unifying effort of the state during the long process of territorialization in the nineteenth century.

The idea of a fractured political voice of post-colonial subjects has been amply debated in the anthropological literature and beyond, and scholars have used a variety of terms to describe this fractured voice, « indecisive » being perhaps the most common. While many observers have assessed this indecisive political behavior in broad negative terms, in this paper we will argue, following the insights of Richard Rosa and Doris Sommer, that it is also possible to reach an interpretation of the colonized subject as an “undecided hero ;” and that the political teachings of 19th century Puerto Rican philosopher/politician Eugenio María de Hostos (himself and “undecided hero”) can help illuminate the argument we wish to put forward : that there is a productive dimension to indecisiveness. At an empirical level, the aim is to shed some light on the political behavior of colonized subjects in two US territorial possessions in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands (USVI) ; particularly as it is played out it status referendums held in their modern history, during the second half of the twentieth century and onward.