Christian Lund

Regimes of possession are constituted by rules of property. This includes the asset, rights subjects, and institutions of public authority. They are all coded in specific ways, and they connect to each other. When governments engage with land, they recode the constituent parts of the regime, engaging in property, subject, and even state formation. Yet, in a context of legal and institutional pluralism, many institutions and actors with varying degrees of relative autonomy and legitimacy make up the field of land struggle. All engage in coding of possession. Governments, claim to act within the law when they grant or dispossess citizens of land. Likewise, people aim to legitimate land claims through reference to law in creative ways. Examples show how different repertoires of legalization conspire with efforts to recode different constituent elements of possession into dispossession.

Institutions and frontier dynamics describe apparent opposites, yet they are mutually constitutive. While institutions are characterized by rules, regulation, and order, frontier dynamics represent destruction of existing rules, the elimination of established authorities, and the active redacting of prior social contracts. We argue that frontier dynamics are characterized by a rupture of scale, which breaks down local institutional arrangements and dislocates power and decision-making. The new resources emerging in frontiers are relevant, valuable, and commodified outside of their original locales. The scalar disjuncture between the physical resource and its institutional control effectively enables the dispossession of local communities, producing frontier spaces by reshaping the visibility of rights subjects, redrawing the boundaries between property and theft, and re-embedding places in narratives of progress and development. We look at three constitutive elements of the institutionalization of resource access and control by examining performative representation, discussing the drawing of jurisdictional boundaries, and engaging the languages of legalization and legitimation. We develop the argument through the cases of fracking in Argentina and palm oil plantations in Indonesia.

Space is materially crafted and constructed, and it is imagined and believed. And, not or. But whereas physical space is finite, ideas about what it could be, tend to tilt toward infinity. Ideas ab...

Space is materially crafted and constructed, and it is imagined and believed. And, not or. But whereas physical space is finite, ideas about what it could be, tend to tilt toward infinity. Ideas ab...

SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthropology, sociology, and history.

Land rights are uneven in Indonesia as they favor government over citizens as rights subjects. Moreover, legal complexity and social inequality make legal knowledge about land rights rather inaccessible to small-scale farmers and the urban rank and file. Finally, the presumption of legality enables government institutions to acquire land and establish land control even if juridical settlements have been made against it. Despite these three forms of rightlessness, law and legalization are important for ordinary people who experiment and improvise to legalize their claims. And, crucially, such manufacture and persuasion of legality can have the effect of law.

In the current postcolonial setting, which looks an awful lot like a past colonial one, Palestinians are not allowed to dream about a future. Time collapses into anachronistic contemporaneity in So...