Thomas Sikor & Christian Lund 
The Politics of Possession 
Property, Authority, and Access to Natural Resources

The Politics of Possession investigates how struggles over
access to resources and political power constitute property and
authority recursively. Such dynamics are integral to state
formation in societies characterized by normative and legal
pluralism.

* Includes some of the latest theoretical work on the dynamics of
access and property and how they are joined to questions of power
and authority

* Explores how access to resources is often contested and rife
with conflict, particularly in post-colonial and post-socialist
countries

* Offers a thought-provoking approach to the study of everyday
processes of state formation

* Shows how the process of seeking authorization for property
claims works to legitimize the authorizers, and the efforts
undertaken by politico-legal institutions to gain legitimacy
underpin and undermine various claims of access and property

* Contributors explore from a wide empirical compass of original
research spanning Latin America, Africa, South-East Asia, and
Eastern Europe

Table of Content

Notes on Contributors.

1. Access and Property: A Question of Power and Authority
(Thomas Sikor, University of East Anglia and Christian Lund,
Roskilde University, Denmark).

2. Property, Authority and Citizenship: Land Claims, Politics
and the Dynamics of Social Division in West Africa (Sara Berry,
Johns Hopkins University).

3. Rubber Erasures, Rubber Producing Rights: Making Racialized
Territories in West Kalimantan, Indonesia (Nancy Lee Peluso,
University of California, Berkeley).

4. Ruling by Record: The Meaning of Rights, Rules and
Registration in an Andean Comunidad (Monique Nuijten, Wageningen
University and David Lorenzo, Roskilde University,
Denmark).

5. Authority over Forests: Empowerment and Subordination in
Senegal’s Democratic Decentralization (Jesse C. Ribot,
University of Illinois).

6. Recategorizing ‘Public’ and ‘Private’
Property in Ghana (Christian Lund, Roskilde University,
Denmark).

7. Land Access and Titling in Nicaragua (Rikke B. Broegaard,
Danish Institute for International Studies).

8. Negotiating Post-Socialist Property and State: Struggles over
Forests in Albania and Romania (Thomas Sikor, University of East
Anglia; Johannes Stahl, University of California, Berkeley; and
Stefan Dorondel, Humboldt University Berlin).

9. Property and Authority in a Migrant Society: Balinese
Irrigators in Sulawesi, Indonesia (Dik Roth, Wageningen
University).

Index.

About the author

Thomas Sikor is Senior Lecturer in the School of Development
Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. His research focuses
on rural property and resource governance, with a geographical
emphasis on post-socialist countries. He has authored more than 30
journal articles, is the editor of Public and Private in Natural
Resource Governance (2008) and has guest-edited special issues
of World Development (2009), Development and Change
(2009), Forest Policy and Economics (2006) and
Conservation and Society (2004).

Christian Lund is Professor in International Development
Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark. He is the author of
Local Politics and the Dynamics of Property in Africa (2008)
and Law, Power, and Politics in Niger – Land Struggles and the
Rural Code (1998). He is the editor and co-editor of
Twilight Institutions: Public Authority and Local Politics in
Africa (2007), and Negotiating Property in Africa
(2002).