Rodima-Taylor Co-Edits African Studies Review Special Forum
Daivi Rodima-Taylor, Senior Researcher at the African Studies Center at Boston University, is the guest editor of the new African Studies Review Forum “Land Disputes and Displacement in Post-Conflict Africa,” along with Lotte Meinert of Aarhus University.
Conflict-related displacement is increasingly central in shaping land claims, property relations, and modes of belonging in the African continent. The special forum explores territoriality, belonging and boundary making in plural sites of public authority in African communities that have become particularly pronounced in conflict-affected environments.
The discussions in the special forum reveal how political authority and norms of belonging are constituted and reproduced in conflict-related settings by establishing and exercising rights of resource access as well as community governance. The articles investigate the ways in which issues of land conflict impact structures and practices of authority at different levels of social interaction. Ethnographic and historical studies from Uganda, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire and South Africa analyze the consequences of various forms of forced mobility such as mass displacement, resettlement, and land restitution, and explore their impact on local land use, social hierarchy, political authority, kinship, and personhood.
With its attention on people occupying new spaces between countries, institutions, and social and material boundaries, the special forum advances new perspectives on African displacement economies. The forum is an outcome of a triple panel of the African Studies Association annual meeting (Indianapolis, 2014), co-organized by the guest editors, who continued these discussions at the symposium on Land and Conflict at the Institute of Peace and Strategic Studies, Gulu University (Uganda, 2015). African Studies Review (ASR) is the principal academic and scholarly journal of the African Studies Association. Read more about the Special Forum in the Cambridge University Press blog.
The Boston University Diaspora Studies Initiative (BU DSI) at the African Studies Center has also organized several recent events including the Diaspora Philanthropy Summit that took place on November 2-3, 2017, in Alexandria, Virginia. Catch up on all of the recent BU DSI news.