This chapter focuses on the development of Kakabona, a series of peri-urban settlements just outside Honiara, the national capital. Drawing on a series of disputes that came before chiefs and courts during the 1980s and 1990s, in part due to rapid urbanisation, it demonstrates that the juridical construction and regulation of property prompts the delineation of boundaries between people and on the ground, often in palpably exclusionary ways. Thus rather than ‘securing’ people’s rights and reducing conflict, legal recognition has generated increased social fragmentation and stratification. In Kakabona as elsewhere in Solomon Islands, these processes are now strongly tied to the idea of masculine ‘chiefs’; however, they are also informed by culturally specific meanings attached to land. The chapter demonstrates that paying attention to the emotional or affective dimensions of land disputes, in particular the multifaceted danger they pose, casts light on the emergence of land disputes as crucial sites for the performance of idealised models of masculinity. Moreover, these processes simultaneously reproduce peri-urban areas as sites of insecurity and the state as a masculine domain.

This chapter focuses on the reconfiguration of land tenure and authority in Marovo Lagoon, a rural area subject to widespread and destructive industrial logging. Women as a social group are known to be largely excluded from formal negotiations regarding logging, and this chapter considers the extent to which this can be traced to a flawed legislative framework, to patriarchal kastom or the erosion of women’s rights by colonisation. Drawing on archival and ethnographic work, it demonstrates that missionaries and colonial officials recognised some idealisations of masculine authority while disregarding other forms of influence, facilitating a simplification of the land tenure system that has enabled some male leaders to consolidate their control over resources. The reproduction of particular idealisations of masculine authority over land continues today, and simultaneously constitutes land control as a masculine domain. While contemporary inequalities can be partially traced to the structural features of the property system, they also emerge from long-term processes of colonial intrusion, capitalist development and the erosion of important aspects of gendered attachments to land.

The uses and transformations of the concept of land use, occupation, and possession in West Central Africa from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century are examined. Rather than stressing the concept of wealth in people, this chapter explores how people exercised land rights and control and displayed wealth. In West Central Africa, as elsewhere in the continent, claims over land, people, and things were based on and shaped by notions of kinship, community membership, and the broader social context. The distinction between the public and the private was blurred. Recognition of claims and rights was the result of political and economic competition among rulers, subjects, and neighbors. All actors, some with more power than others, engaged in the definition of land use, rights, occupation, and inheritance, retaining control of goods and wealth that could be expressed in a variety of ways. With the arrival of Europeans in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, more actors engaged in the principle of territorial occupation and subjugation to make bold claims of sovereignty based on the idea that land was unused or unoccupied. Since different ideas of possession and jurisdiction were at the center of these interactions, clashes between conceptions of land use, access, and occupation are analyzed.

Chapter 7 shifts focus to the citizen level in both countries, identifying how customary institutions impact smallholder land titling. It shows that titling is not an economic decision alone; it is also a strategic choice between engaging with the customary institution or the state. This updates conventional approaches to land titling, which assume that all citizens want state titles but are constrained by a lack of financial resources. The chapter elaborates the argument that institutions impact demand for state property rights by establishing different levels of customary privilege within a community. It then reveals common patterns within the diverse customary institutions in Zambia and Senegal, that smallholders with customary privilege are less likely to have titles. Two potential mechanisms are considered: increased tenure security and concern for collective costs. These findings suggest that customary institutions shape citizens’ engagement with the state through access to titles and privilege within the community.

The first chapter of the book introduces readers to the salience of land as a window into how political authority is constructed and negotiated in modern states. It previews the book’s central argument and situates it within scholarship on historical institutions, state building, and state–society relations. In addition, Chapter 1 presents the central cases and mixed methods empirical approach.

Chapter 5 examines the influence of customary institutions on land negotiations in Zambia, where chiefs are recognized by the state as custodians of land. The state’s recognition endows individual customary authorities with concentrated power over land titling decisions and gives them incentives to facilitate the state’s projects. However, official chiefs are members of heterogeneous customary institutions; some institutions generate ties of vertical accountability among their chiefs. A comparison of two institutions with hierarchical and nonhierarchical legacies in northern Zambia illustrates this mechanism. Statistical analyses of land titling rates across districts and among smallholder farmers support the argument that strong, hierarchical institutions make it harder to access title in their domains. This chapter shows that the official chieftaincy system did not erase the internal differences among institutions and, as a result, customary institutions continue to impact the expansion of state property rights.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the contemporary context of customary authority and control over land rights in Africa, while situating Zambia and Senegal within broader regional trends. It shows that institutional pluralism in land rights at the local level is widespread and provides necessary background on a key mechanism driving incremental shifts in the control over land: piecemeal land titling. The chapter traces the titling process in Zambia and Senegal, including how customary authorities use unofficial and official channels to exert agency. In addition, Chapter 2 introduces two alternative explanations for the uneven expansion of state control over land. It explains why we need new frameworks that examine the agency of citizens and customary authorities, and the ways in which institutions shape their responses to titling.

This book explores how customary institutions, citizens, and chiefs impact the expansion of state control over land, determining how state capacity grows and why it is spatially uneven. It shows that, by influencing how chiefs and citizens weigh competing incentives in their decisions, customary institutions can divert the outcomes intended by state policy or predicted by market forces. Local power dynamics and the agency of members of customary institutions are thus critical to understanding both the resilience of customary land tenure regimes and the continuing influence of customary institutions in citizens’ lives. Chapter 8 concludes the book by examining the broader implications of these findings for the contemporary role of customary institutions as intermediaries between citizen and state; the political determinants of property rights; and land titling policies.

Chapter 3 introduces a new theoretical model, which highlights the tensions between collective costs and concentrated benefits that make land titling political. Institutions matter because they shape how members perceive and are held accountable to these collective costs, including to the institution’s power base. After elaborating mechanisms by which institutions influence the decisions of chiefs and citizens, the chapter introduces the second element of the framework, that historical legacies impact the contemporary strength of customary institutions in Zambia and Senegal. This theory helps explain why two chiefs would have different responses to the same land deal, as a result of the institutions in which they are embedded. Similarly, it shows why citizens with high or low privilege in an institution would have different evaluations of titling. This framework creates expectations about how institutions impact aggregate patterns of land titling, which are elaborated and tested in Chapters 5, 6, and 7.

Chapter 6 investigates how customary institutions shape property rights in Senegal, where customary authorities have unofficial influence over land. A case study of land negotiations in northern Senegal illustrates how strong institutions, with hierarchical legacies, slow the erosion of customary land tenure by creating horizontal accountability among chiefs. The chapter then turns to the relationship between land titling and customary institutions throughout Senegal. Statistical analyses provide evidence that zones with hierarchical institutions have lower rates of land titling and stronger customary property rights institutions. This chapter provides further evidence that customary institutions contribute to long-term patterns of state building.

This chapter provides an orientation in the people, place and time of the book’s setting. It examines the precolonial history of the kingdom of Burundi, including the parameters of ethnic identity, societal stratification and dynamics of power in the nineteenth century. Through German conquest and transfer to Belgian control after the First World War, it considers the nature of chiefly authority and colonial ethnic policy, brought into focus by civil war and anticolonial rebellion in the early twentieth century. Focusing subsequently on the relationship between a subject peasant population on the border and their imposed chief, Pierre Baranyanka, it explores the chief’s authority of ‘commandement’, and the popular evaluations of his behaviour. While required to perform deference and obedience, the peasant population talked about politics through keen observation of personal behaviour, gossiping about the chief’s attitudes towards the king, and exchanging jokes and parables that expressed political opinion about their social superiors. With the return of the first elite students to study abroad, the chapter ends with the arrival of the ‘time of politics’ in the north of Burundi.