PluriLand: Theorizing Conflict and Contestation in Plural Land Rights Regimes

The PluriLand project aims to theorize land rights claiming in plural legal regimes through cross-regional investigation of conflicts over land and territory affecting the land rights of vulnerable communities. Despite the protection of Indigenous, traditional and/or communal land rights in many legal systems, such conflicts have rapidly escalated across the globe and are often highly transnational. Yet our knowledge about the mobilization and traction of protective land regimes remains fragmented, localized and weakly theorized.

PluriLand builds on and extends current theoretical knowledge about sociolegal mobilization over land claims, determining: how this is related to different kinds of threats; the impacts of different legal sites and frames on processes of judicialization; and the importance of context in sociolegal mobilization. The project involves the interdisciplinary study of plural land claims and legal regimes and their effects across five countries – South Africa, India, Brazil, Guatemala, and Colombia.

The primary objective of the project is therefore to develop new theorizations of land claiming. A secondary objective is to analyze the effects of different processes of land claiming for the claimants.