Property and Citizenship: Conceptually Connecting Land Rights and Belonging in Africa

Few things are more fundamental in social life or politics than what we have and who we are. Property and citizenship, in the broadest sense, are perhaps the most overt and familiar manifestations of these core dimensions. ¹ Property and citizenship are intimately related in their constitution. The core element of both is recognition. The processes of recognition of political identity as belonging and of claims to land and other resources as property simultaneously work to imbue the institution that provides such recognition with the legitimation and recognition of its authority to do so. These are the “contracts”, so to speak, that link citizenship and property to political authority in society. Struggles over citizenship and property are, therefore, as much about the scope and constitution of authority as about access to membership and resources. Yet, the groups of people who are entitled to seek entitlements are not set in stone. Groups can slide out of a given category while others enter it and entrench themselves.

Land, more than most issues in Africa, connects the two aspects intimately: Claims to land are partly defined by social identity, and social identity is partly defined through property rights to land (Sikor and Lund 2009). In fact, I suggest that this dynamic connection is valid for postcolonial societies in general – and it is a rewarding analytical entry point to the analysis of power in any society (see Engerman and Metzer 2004). Land is immediately important for the livelihoods of large populations – rural and urban alike – in Africa and other postcolonial societies, and it forms an integral part of the social and economic development of society. Growing pressure on land resources, land-related conflicts, and political mobilisation make land rights a crucial political issue.

Property is about relationships among social actors with regard to objects of value. Property is essentially distinguished from mere momentary possession or longer-term access by virtue of being recognised by others, through enforcement by society or government, and by custom, convention, or law (MacPherson 1978; Rose 1994; Sikor and Lund 2009). Property relations involve different kinds of social actors, including individuals and collectivities, and take the form of enforceable claims sanctioned by some form of public authority. Property relations therefore exist at the level of laws and regulations, cultural norms and social values, social relationships, and property practices. How people acquire and secure land rights might seem a straightforward process. However, it becomes complicated when we realise that more often than not, several competing normative orders may be brought to bear to legitimise a specific claim, and several groups and institutions may compete over who has the jurisdiction to settle disputes and set norms by precedent.

Property relations in postcolonial and specifically African settings are often ambiguous because of the multiplicity of institutions competing to sanction and validate rival claims in attempts to gain authority for themselves. Increasingly, the argument of belonging has been brought to bear by different groups as a claim to both resources and jurisdictions in Africa and elsewhere. Obviously, this also produces a broad array of processes – ranging from informal everyday negotiations to full-scale political and legal conflicts – in which people may engage in order to pursue their interests. In this sense, the issue of land is not unique, but rather one of a range of issues where political and legal struggles intertwine, where local powers and less localised power structures interact, and where political and cultural symbols of power and authority are brought into play. We often talk about such conflicts as “land conflicts”, but, as indicated, there is always more at stake. It is never merely a question of land but rather also a question of property, and of social and political relationships in a very broad sense. The relationship between people and specific political institutions invokes the concept of citizenship.

Political subjectivity – or citizenship – is collective and relational. It designates a mutual, reciprocal recognition of categories of persons and institutions of authority (Honneth 1995). ² For example, an ethnic group is a collective, and members are recognised as such by their institutions of authority and other groups; citizens of one country form a collective recognised as such by their national governments, other citizens, etc. The strength of the political institution relative to that of its political subjects varies tremendously. It ranges from the subjugation of subjects by despotic institutions to citizens holding governing bodies accountable. As with the aforementioned case of property, rights – gained through recognition as a political subject – may be limited or extensive, but for the purpose of the present argument, what is important is how and by whom these rights are guaranteed.

Citizenship is generally – though not always – organised as a relationship between individuals and an institution of public authority, but it does not exclusively refer to national citizenship – this is just one of several configurations. It is basically shorthand for people's political subjectivity and agency, meaning that citizenship denotes through which political institution a person derives rights of membership to that community. In Africa, land is a resource to which access is ensured not merely by membership of a national community – local citizenship and status are often just as important or even more so. Just as multiple sets of rules prevail and several institutions compete to exercise authority over the allocation of rights, belonging is also layered in most African societies. Jacob and Le Meur (2010) discuss and develop the concept of citizenship in relation to property in Africa, stating that while people have a national citizenship that endows them with certain rights, it is not the only significant form of belonging to a political community and the only source of rights. One distinction that seems to be invoked increasingly in African and other societies is what we could term “national” and “local” citizenship. While people may share national citizenship, the idea of autochthony – first arrival – is often invoked as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion. Citizenship – or political membership – implies rights to have rights, so to speak.

“Belonging” would appear to be an almost generic feature of land rights conflicts in contemporary Africa. In recent conflicts over land in Côte d'Ivoire, for example, belonging – or autochthony – was instrumentalised to exclude large groups from rights. In some areas, however, such as Southern Nigeria, local communities have failed dismally at excluding government and foreign commercial interests from what they consider to be their areas. In essence, the “utility” of belonging in land claims depends on how powerful an intervening central government is when recognising, dismantling or overseeing claims for rights and how much is left for local actors to sort out, and whether instrumentalising different forms of citizenship takes place nationally as well as locally. Deliberate simplification of a complex composite tenure system can be instrumentalised for exclusionary purposes. Much research documents that a narrowing definition of belonging is one of the key dynamics in the differentiation of land rights and access to resources (Peters 2009).

Social identity, membership, and status therefore do not automatically entail rights, but they can legitimise claiming them. Conversely, not belonging, i.e. not being a local citizen, may outright deny the person a legitimate opportunity to stake a claim. In a broad sense, one can view citizenship as layered according to more than seniority in a place. Gender and caste are other distinctions that run like deep structures through most systems of land rights. While national citizenship rarely – if at all – formally discriminates between groups, or between men and women, local citizenships are often segmented to the detriment of certain categories of people. In many societies, women are considered legal or civic minors whose land may be in their possession but not their property; women landholders are often considered to hold the land in trust for their sons and cannot engage in transactions on the same footing as men.

In nuce, citizenship and property are closely connected in most African societies. Citizenship and belonging can be avenues to secure property, and property may bolster claims of belonging and citizenship. But acquired rights are not necessarily acquired for good. They are the – essentially provisory – results of constant efforts at consolidating and entrenching claims, competing against efforts at unmaking and replacing them (Moore 1978). Social actors thus struggle over the very categories and relationships that constitute property and citizenship. This dynamic configures differently depending on the context and the concrete issue at stake.

The dynamic I have outlined has profound theoretical implications. Property and citizenship are central gate-keeping functions of any state; they engage the questions of who can have rights, and what rights can they have. In developing societies, these questions are particularly illuminating. In most post-colonial societies, no single institution unilaterally determines the content, extent or limits of property or citizenship. Hence, in practice, no single institution is the state as such; “state” is, rather, the quality of an institution being able to define and enforce collectively binding decisions on members of society. Thus, institutions that are able to define and enforce collectively binding decisions on members of society have state quality. When different institutions attempt to govern with state quality, competing processes of consolidation and erosion of institutions of political authority; of formalisation and informalisation of rules; and dynamics of exclusion and inclusion of people unfold. These processes deserve our keenest attention and critique.