The Politics of Possession: Property, Authority, and Access to Natural Resources

By: Thomas Sikor and Christian Lund

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Synopsis: 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