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Case Studies and Comparative Projects: In this
section of the seminar series, we will examine the historical circumstances
underlying these new property arrangements, as well as the implications
for state-society relations, economic development, and household
survival strategies. The case study countries, particularly Brazil,
China, Hungary, South Africa, the United States, and France, provide
an excellent basis for comparison as they are all undergoing transformations
in rural property rights, but of substantively different natures.
In Brazil, a state-led agrarian reform initiated through grassroots
struggle from 1985 to the present has overseen the largest re-distribution
of property in the country’s history. And in South Africa,
the road past apartheid was thought to depend on the return of land,
but the pace of reform has been slow. In both countries, state-led
programs have been countered with private market-based programs
funded by the World Bank. The two models of land distribution are
fundamentally different: one being based on a corporatist model
of state inclusion and the other on an individual model of market
efficiency. In Eastern Europe, property rights are being restituted
to former owners due to the decline of overarching communist state
regimes and ideologies, and in China, individual property rights
in land have been gradually strengthened since the Household Reforms
of 1978. Privatizing and liberalizing the land market has been a
key part of China’s move towards a mixed economy and is politically
very important given the peasant nature of the Maoist path to development.
At the same time, popular movements demanding reforms in inheritance
laws have led to legislative victories in India for women, increasing
their generational rights to land and property within the household.
In the United States, the astonishing rise in eminent domain cases
over the past 25 years is testament to the legal and cultural changes
in popular understandings of property relations and rights. And
in France, discussions about state subsidies have challenged the
cultural and political position of small farmers in a country built
on the national imaginary of a flourishing farm sector.
Across all of these countries, there is a similar
logic at work: if self-interested maximizing land users are given
title to their land without state intervention, they will respond
rationally by improving their land and more efficiently allocating
resources to work it. In all of the cases to be compared, historical
and cultural relationships between people and their land have to
be understood as key to the nature of contemporary developments.
In this section of the
seminar, we will bring together people and readings
from Geography, Anthropology, Law, History, Sociology,
Political Science, Economics and Literature. Potential
local speakers and participants in this section include:
Carole Crumley (Anthropology, UNC), (Joseph Kalo (Law,
UNC), Anthony Oberschall (Sociology, UNC), John Pickles
(UNC Geography), and Wendy Wolford (Geography UNC);
Kathryn Burns (History, UNC); Jan French (Cultural Anthropology,
Duke University); and Robert Healy (Nicholas School
of the Environment, Duke University).
Theme leader:
Professor Joseph Kalo, Graham Kenan Professor of Law, UNC
Chapel Hill Law School
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