Spatial Inequalities and Land Politics Projects
The Land Politics Working Group has been meeting since 2014. It brings together faculty and students at all levels from across the London institutions to read and discuss issues revolving around the commodification of land. We consider land as an asset (values, speculation, impact of shifting patterns of control on accumulation and inequality); land politics as making and unmaking state-recognized citizen groups and other collectivities; and land and state-building (-decay?) processes that revolve around territorial boundaries, projection of state power, division of territories and related political opportunity (political demobilization) structures, accumulation strategies, and class formation (non-formation). Alexandra Hartman of UCL is co-organizer.
Since 2020, the seminar series has been linked to the DSA Study Group on Land. Here is the link to the programme for the 2025 seminar series held at the LSE (and virtually):
2025__winter_term__land_politics_seminar.docx
Our handbook for planners and stakeholders, Mapping Settlement Schemes in Kenya, produced by Fibian Lukalo (National Land Commission) and Robert Wayumba (Technical University of Kenya) was published by the National Land Commission in Kenya in 2020. [link].
The Spatial Inequalities in African Political Economy Project, a four-year project funded by LSE's an ESRC Research Grant, ended in July 2023.
https://www.africa-spatial-inequalities.net. We published our datasets on Harvard Dataverse. The book project to emerge from this work came out with CUP in 2024: Inequality and Political Cleavage in Africa: Regionalism by Design.
Read our 2021 paper on land politics in Kenya in Political Geography (also available open access in PG).
This project developed new theory, new data, and innovative empirical analysis to show that existing empirical studies have missed the level of analysis most appropriate for understanding patterns of cleavage and competition that drive electoral struggles, development policy disputes, and civil conflict within African countries: the sub-national, regional level.
Collaborators were Michael Wahman, Fibian Lukalo of Kenya's NLC, Leigh Gardner, and Andrew Linke. Others working on the project between Fall 2019 and Fall 2021 were PhD students Jennifer Kohler, Yohan Iddawela, and Cristin Fergus at the LSE, Sandra Joireman at the Univ. of Richmond and the Spatial Analysis Lab team at UR (including Griffen Walsh, Lauren Scheffey, and Meg Carroll and Nina Mauney, pictured at right) and Paddy Makene, Shiela Pamba, and Maureen Jerono of the NLC. Our Côte d'Ivoire team was made up of Dr. Brice Bado, Aristide Dion, and Irigo Zibo. Dr. Stephan Kyburz (PhD, Econ, Bern 2016) and Juliette Crespin-Boucaud, Paris School of Economics (PhD 2022) worked as post-doctoral researchers. LSE IR undergraduate Eva Richer did data analysis. LSE MSc student in Data Science Jonathan Karl worked as data analyst in Oct. 2020-May 2021.
Read some of our blog posts:
- Customary land claims are at stake in northern Uganda (2020)
- Do Socio-Economic cleavages matter for development in African countries? (2019)
- Multi-methods research across continents: Land in Kenya (2018)
- Refocusing scholarly attention on Kenya's smallholder settlement schemes is long overdue (2018)
- What Land Governance in Uganda can teach us about #PublicAuthority (2018)
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The "Vie sociale du certificat foncier" project in Côte d'Ivoire in collaboration with Dr. P. Brice Bado at CERAP in Abidjan. Originally funded as a LSE STICERD pilot study, this continues as part of the Center for Public Authority research program at the LSE (CPAID) and is substantively linked to the "Preferences for Titling" stream of the Spatial Inequality project.
This research has produced two open-access articles on land registration in CI: "Shifting visions of property under competing political regimes: Changing uses of Côte d'Ivoire 1998 land law," Journal of Modern African Studies 56/2 (2018) (link to article) and "Push, Pull, and Push-Back: Regional Tensions in Ivoirian Land Certification," Journal of Modern African Studies 59/3 (2021)[link] with Brice Bado, Aristide Dion, and Zibo Irigo. Read our blog post and working paper
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(L-R) Ismael Sonogo, Aristide Dion, Irigo Zibo