This section elaborates how informal, or customary land tenure systems function “on the ground” in post-conflict scenarios, and the intersection between this reality and the reduced capacity of the formal system. Because the sustainable livelihoods approach focuses on smallholders, an understanding of the tenurial realities faced by rural producers is important to exploring how the sustainable livelihoods approach would be able to contribute to resolving the problems associated with land access in post-conflict environments. The idea here is to provide insight into smallholder post-conflict land tenure fundamentals that can then be dealt with from a sustainable livelihoods perspective (section 4 below).
Because of the spatial nature of both armed conflict and land tenure, the result can be profound within the context of a delicate and incipient peace. The importance of land and property rights issues during and subsequent to civil conflict is reflected in the significant role that agrarian reform has played in many insurgent and revolutionary agendas. Managing such issues in an effective manner in a peace process is not only important to avoiding disenfranchisement of local populations from land rights, a primary factor contributing to instability (Hutchinson 1994), but also to the secure re-engagement of populations in familiar land uses and the resulting agricultural production, food security, and trade opportunities important to recovery. There are three primary sets of land tenure issues in a peace process: 1) those that may have contributed to the initial cause and conduct of the conflict, 2) those - usually volatile - land and property issues that emerged during a conflict, and 3) a set of tenure related issues necessary for effective recovery.
For considerable numbers of people who find themselves in conflict scenarios, identity can be, or can become intricately bound up in land occupation, access, or perceived rights to specific lands in very powerful ways. In many cases the existence of ethnic, religious, geographic, or other identities to which primary attachments persist, can be based on connections to land, home area, or territory (Unruh 1998). Smith (1998) notes that if local identity-based groups do not have a relationship with the state that involves attachment and loyalty and ultimately provides for an acceptance of state authority as legitimate, then the state and group identities will be in competition. In pre-conflict settings this becomes relevant when coupled with land-related grievances against the state.
Pre-conflict ideas of the unjustness in the way the state dealt with land rights for portions of the population can constitute an important aggregate force in pursuing violent means to deal with perceived wrongs. Such ideas can range from simple disappointment in, or distrust of the state and its ability, willingness, or bias in handling land issues, to the perception of the state as the enemy. In El Salvador grievances toward the landed elite and the state were at the core of the country’s problems since the colonial era, and a primary cause of the conflict in the 1980s. This was also the case in Zimbabwe’s liberation war due to land expropriations by the Rhodesian state, and in Mozambique’s RENAMO war and Ethiopia’s Derg war as a result of government villagization programs. Variants of such conditions also prevail for problems in southern Mexico, and in the way the land issue has been handled over the course of the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis. In the latter example, land confiscation for Israeli settlement-building and the resulting Palestinian grievances has been a significant feature of the overall conflict (Unruh 2003).
Pre-conflict ideas of injustice regarding land and property can become especially problematic if they merge with other issues not necessarily related to land, serving to further decrease the state’s influence. This is a fundamental part of the situation in Somalia, where disputes over access to grazing and water resources quickly merged with a history of perceived wrongs done to clans and subclans on issues not directly about land (Unruh 1995a). Animosities tied to historical events also have played a fundamental role in perceptions about who has legitimate access to what lands and properties in the Balkans (Holbrooke 1998). The social fluidity of conflict then allows for the opportunity to act, with outcomes resulting in a very different tenure situation than what existed prior to a conflict. This is one avenue toward legal pluralism whereby there are different sets of legalities (and often formal laws) for different peoples.
An accumulation of land-related grievances against the state can be brought on by land alienation and discrimination, corruption, state intervention in agricultural production, dislocating agricultural and/or population programs, and heavy-handed approaches to enforcement of state decisions and prescriptions regarding land issues. In aggregate, this can result in what Ranger (1985) calls a “historical consciousness of grievances” with regard to land rights issues. In such cases plural normative orders, once developed, can persist with considerable tenacity, justifying themselves by appeals to perceived historical wrongs done to certain groups (Merry 1988; Korf 2002).
In pre-conflict settings formal land dispute resolution employed by the state can favor claimants in possession of some form of documentation as evidence for a claim and often ignore customary evidence. Those not participating in the state land tenure system can use a selection of customary evidence that connects them to a community and lineage, and to community land, with history of occupation and physical signs of occupation playing a significant role in this connection. Similarly commercial or “outside” land interests do not have access to local customary evidence. And while documents are admissible forms of evidence in formal law, oral testimony and corroboration usually are not. Thus based on admissible forms of evidence, formal dispute resolution decisions can be made in favor of documentation. Such an inequitable arrangement, operating in aggregate, carries serious risks toward instability, impoverization, land degradation, and rural exodus (Unruh 2004).
National land legislation often takes precedence over customary tenure regimes, and can be formulated to give advantage to state enterprises and mechanized agricultural schemes; with limited rights accorded to smallholders, and at times no rights given to marginalized groups such as pastoralists, those with questionable citizenship, or migrants, other than those included in government sponsored cooperatives and associations. Sections of the 1973 Unified Civil Code in Somalia abolished traditional clan and lineage rights of use and access over land and water resources (Hooglund 1993). In Bosnia discriminatory land and property legislation was enacted before the conflict in order to pursue what became legal forms of ethnic cleansing (Cox and Garlick 2003). And in Latin America pre-conflict inequity regarding land was frequently a fundamental part of revolutionary aspirations. Nicaragua (Barquero 2004) is one example, as was the situation in El Salvador and Guatemala (Bailliet 2003).
Pre-conflict differential awareness of and access to the means for becoming involved in the state system, results in many instances of both multiple claims to land, and disadvantage for those without access to the state system. While there are frequently steps within national registration programmes intended to avoid this, namely by notifying population centers proximate to the land in question that a party was interested in registration, and by inviting all other claimants (with documented title or not) to come forward and contest the claim, this and other procedures can be frequently sidestepped. Land tenure dispute resolution mechanisms are often inadequate to resolve many competing claims, and can, where they exist, embrace a variety of means of mediation that can be in jurisdictional conflict (e.g. Unruh 1996).
Attempting to address only pre-conflict territory, land, and property issues in a peace process (especially in a peace accord) can miss the very volatile tenurial issues on the ground which develop during conflict, and which are most operative at the close of a conflict. While such issues can build upon pre-conflict tenure problems, they nonetheless act to thrust the post-conflict lands situation in new directions. This is primarily because the social and spatial repercussions of violence, dislocation, destruction of property, battlefield victory and loss, and food insecurity, together with the breakdown of administrative, enforcement, and other property-related institutions and norms, significantly alter ongoing relationships between people(s), land uses, production systems, and population patterns. Armed conflict and its repercussions reconfigure the network of social relations upon which all land tenure systems depend (Unruh 2004a).
There are two broad processes by which this reconfiguring happens in a dislocation context. First, dislocation of people from established home areas and ways of land use and tenure, can be the first and most dramatic step toward the development of a changed (enhanced) approach to land rights. Physical separation changes, terminates, or puts on hold prevailing rights and obligations among people regarding land and property, especially where actual occupation, or social position forms the basis or a significant aspect of claim. In Guatemala dislocation meant a changed approach to land rights for disadvantaged groups within communities, such as women and those of lower socio-economic strata (Krznaric 1997).
Second, once dislocated, people seek land elsewhere - especially for agricultural populations in pursuit of food security - but with an approach to access, claim, and disputing now different from what prevailed in a home area. This comes about with a change in status as people who were once community members become dislocatees, migrants, squatters, female-headed households, and refugees in new locations. Many African populations rely on relatives and other community members for security of person and property. Such a network is an effective rule making and sanction-applying construct. In dislocation due to conflict however, many variables serve to rework this construct, especially if the new area has little or no community entry. Affected populations (both arriving and receiving) can fairly quickly move to establish alternative land tenure arrangements that follow newly emerging situations, or pursue variations of old arrangements which work under prevailing circumstances. The direction that this takes and how rapidly it occurs can depend to a significant degree on wartime and dislocation experiences. In Mozambique the dislocating effects of the war led to concentrations of migrants, largeholders, and local customary groups in agronomically valuable areas, all pursuing very different approaches to land access, claim, and use. In this case significant incompatibilities in these approaches created problems for the peace process in these locations (Unruh 1997).
The Middle East provides an important grievance-based example. Land confiscation and the way it occurs for Israeli settlement-building drives legal and normative rules regarding land into separate fields or domains, as they are applied to and are pursued by the Palestinians, Israelis, and subgroups, with the boundaries of such domains defined in large part by issues inherent in the conflict (Cohen 1993). The overall effect is the fairly rapid derivation or resurgence of a variety of alternative forms of land and property rights reactions during conflict, with the speed and direction of such change dependent on the character of the grievance felt by a particular group and how this intersects with preferred ways of land tenure. One of the more acute examples to emerge during the conflict in this regard is again in the Middle East among Palestinians themselves, with those caught selling land to Israelis now facing a potential death sentence (Greenberg 1997).
Civil conflict necessarily results in a reduction in the power and penetration of state law, with the overall effect spatially variable. Early in a conflict the state's land administration institutions in affected areas of the country can be rendered crippled or inoperable, and rules unenforceable. This comes about due to general insecurity, areas occupied by opposition groups or populations sympathetic to them, diversion of resources, and the destruction of the physical components of the lands system such as local registries and other records. The absence of employees to carry out administrative functions, along with people who previously engaged the state for administrative services, further undermines the functioning of formal property rights institutions. While such effects may be most pronounced in areas directly involved in conflict or taken over by opposition groups, or where state enforcement or concern was historically weakest, the federal land and property administration can, as a conflict continues over time, experience an overall national reduction in capacity as specific influences become mutually reinforcing. These can include: (1) the state’s financial resources are diverted to a war effort and elsewhere, (2) administrative and technical personnel become unwilling or unable to travel due to general security concerns, (3) significant sectors of the national population begin to question the legitimacy of state institutions, (4) records pertinent to non-affected areas of the country become outdated as land and property transactions take place and go unrecorded, (5) a general recognition emerges of the unworkability of lands and property administration as a national institutional endeavour, and (6) increasing numbers of people abandon the state tenure system in favor of alternatives, which then act to further subtract adherents to state law in a “momentum effect” (Unruh 2003). In East Timor the land and property building was among the first destroyed by militia activity along with most property rights records (Marqhart et al 2002). In Rwanda much of the national geodetic system was destroyed, along with most official records, especially at the district level (Huggins 2004). As civil conflict grew in Somalia in the early 1990s, a reduced state capacity contributed to certain areas of the country being claimed by nomadic pastoralists under clan transient-access rights arrangements, by small-scale agriculturalists, by large scale-land interests accessing lands through the instruments of the crumbling state, and by heavily armed interests seeking access and control over lands by force (Unruh 1995a). Also in Somalia, land registries for the valuable irrigated areas in the central part of the country were largely destroyed and will lead to significant problems once a central government and peace prevail (Unruh 1996).
As well, forms of land tenure may be created which are directly connected to the opposition or insurgency which is made legitimate by direct military occupation and military strength (Unruh 2003). And there can be a reaction to the combination of insecurity generated during conflict, reduced capacity of the state, and the desire for the return of some form of order in society. The emergence of Shari’a courts in Somalia is one example of this, as is, arguably, the emergence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Both were able to field their own mechanisms of enforcement for a variety of institutions, including land tenure (Unruh 1993). In Mozambique, because local rivalries between communities were caught up in the war, the result in some areas was a checkerboard effect of community-level alliances with Renamo and Frelimo with proximate communities’ electing to side with the opposite of their neighbors (Hanlon 1991). The two sides in Mozambique’s war employed quite different approaches to local communities and land administration, which in several ways were purposefully different from the opposition. This checkerboard effect (also observed in East Timor), together with the presence of land mines, highlight that even conflicts that did not initially have a land component can come to experience tenure problems in a peace process due to the spatial nature of conflict and land access.
Land mine presence deserves particular mention in a land access context during conflict. While traditional land mine use primarily focuses on defensive purposes and route denial, in the developing world they are used as an offensive weapon. This is because the relative lack of resources that characterize insurgent groups, militaries, and militias, mean that combatants need to provide for themselves by obtaining what they can from local farms and fields while on the march. In this regard an important objective in mine laying is to deny access to land based resources by both farmers and one’s opponents, thus denying food supplies to the enemy (Unruh et al 2003). Of course as lines of control move back and forth across the landscape during the course of a conflict, waves of mine-laying over large areas can take place with little or no record keeping. And, the general social disruption associated with landmine presence can be advantageous for a variety of reasons to both sides involved in a conflict, and as a result can encourage the further use of mines (Ascherio et al 1995).
With armed conflict underway, some groups will seize the opportunity to advance the goals of substate self determination, especially with regard to land. The result can involve land claim justification based on historical occupation. Such justification can gain renewed strength during conflict, and the pursuit of a “return” to historical lands or territory from which groups were expelled or departed, recently or long ago, can become a priority in a peace process - the Middle East again being a notable example. And as the identities of those involved in armed conflict develop to take on significant enmity with an opposing group or groups, approaches to land issues will reflect this and can become a prominent feature in the conflict and subsequent peace process. The difference between Palestinian and Israeli approaches to land and land tenure, are in a number of ways grounded in identity. Identity for Palestinians especially, has developed to a significant degree to mean opposition to Israel, Israelis, and Israel’s approach to land administration (Unruh 2003).
Decisions about where government and donors locate concentrations of refugees and IDPs are rarely made with local community consultation, compensation, or coordination, especially with regard to how land is accessed for this purpose. Land access for migrants in such a situation is often derived from the presence of a government or international entity seeking to service concentrations of refugees or IDPs via the formal tenure system (McGregor, 1994). Meanwhile local communities often continue with customary tenure. Differences in tenure security between local and dislocated communities in such a case can be significant.
As well, coordination between donors and government is often difficult to come by. There are differences in definitions and interpretations of international human rights norms and how these intersect with the priorities of post-conflict land access, and there can be competition and overlap between donors over responsibility of aspects of the national land question or important issues (restitution, resettlement, policy assistance, etc.). There can be disagreements between donors as to the direction that the development of the property rights system should take after a conflict, with differences often tied to the economic and foreign policies of the donor countries involved. Thus post-conflict situations can be seen as opportunities by some bilateral donors seeking to reconfigure property rights along the lines of their own economic, political, or ideological preferences. This is especially the case with regard to private property vs. more communal property arrangements. In Rwanda there emerged strained relationships between a group of donors and the government, partly over the issue of the government feeling that it was abandoned during the genocide, and partly for questions raised by donors over aspects of the resettlement program, and the progress of land policy and legislation (Huggins 2004).
Land mine presence continues to play a significant role in affecting land access subsequent to the end of a conflict. Large areas of prime agricultural land can remained uninhabitable or problematic for long periods due to mines (McGregor 1995; Ascherio et al 1995; UNOHAC 1994). One study in Mozambique estimates that as many as 500,000 landmines exist primarily in the most fertile areas (HRWAP 1994). At the same time, rural households are attempting to expand areas under cultivation after the war with each successive season, as farmers attempt to bring areas long under fallow due to war back into cultivation (USAID 1996), thereby increasing the likelihood of mine encounters. As a result, land access remains one of the most fraught issues in Mozambique, and landmines play a significant role in determining access (Mather 2002).
The fate of evidence (proof) of rights to land and property subsequent to armed conflict is a particularly acute recovery problem. Claims to properties, lands, and territories have as their defining feature evidence that is regarded as legitimate by members of a certain “community” (broadly defined). Control over what is or becomes recognized as evidence, makes legitimate or not an array of rights definition. Competition and confrontation (especially formal vs. informal) over who exercises this control (definition of legal evidence) with regard to specific land(s) and properties can result in problems, as some claimants find themselves with evidence different from that considered legitimate or possessed by others as post-conflict scenarios develop. The decision by the international community to allow the Bosnian Serbs to keep lands seized from Bosnia and Herzegovina meant that virtually no evidence other than ethnicity was legitimate subsequent to the conflict. Property holders who were “cleansed” from certain areas were no longer able to use what were once legitimate titles or other documents as evidence for possession of property (Holbrooke 1998). Changes in evidence can also manifest itself in a more nuanced fashion as the relative value of pre-conflict evidence can shift to reflect changed circumstances. This was the case in Mozambique, where “social” customary evidence such as testimony, community and lineage membership, and history of occupation were significantly devalued due to widespread dislocation. At the same time, the existence of permanent, physical investments in land, such as agroforestry trees, greatly increased in value as evidence (Unruh 2002a). Outright victory in a conflict can result in profound change in legitimate evidence, particularly as pursued by the state. Such was the fate of many land documents in Ethiopia when the Derg military regime took power in the mid 1970s, and again a decade and a half later when the Tigrayan-Eritrean forces took over.
The post-conflict tenurial environment embodies a particular time dilemma with regard to the interaction of informal tenure (moving quickly) and formal state tenure (re-established slowly). Much of what has been described above with regard to conflict and post-conflict customary tenure moves quite quickly compared to the reconstruction of the state tenure apparatus (including organizations, institutions, and laws). In many post-conflict situations a land rush can occur after a conflict, which very quickly outruns the ability of a re-establishing formal tenure system, and the best intentions of government and donors to manage. This can take community and household land tenure, resettlement, eviction, restitution, and disputing in directions that are largely outside of the control of a slowly reformulating formal tenure system.
In post-conflict situations the scramble for access to the means of survival and livelihood for large numbers of people, together with the pursuit of land resource opportunities by commercial interests, brings how actors intersect with each other over land resources to the fore very quickly. As well, different political factions that emerge from the war will move ahead with their own agendas, priorities, and ideas (e.g. the insurgency as a political party) in many cases regarding land. In this regard emergent political groups (potentially unhappy with their allotment of a peace dividend) can work to accuse the government of inaction on land issues, opposition to land reforms, etc. Such an effect can take advantage of the comparatively slow progress of formal land policy reform, development of institutional effectiveness, and derivation and passage of legislation, in order to win support from those who consider themselves disadvantaged by the process. This is the case in East Timor, where veterans of the 25 year insurgency against Indonesian occupation presently feel left out of the benefits of peace, including access to land, and have been involved in a number of violent incidents.
In another example from Rwanda, approximately 2.3 million refugees entered the country quite quickly between 1994 and 1997. And the formal re-establishing land tenure system (along with the international community present) was not functionally able to handle the influx and the speed with which it occurred. As a result, the direction that the refugee resettlement took in some areas was little influenced by the state, and included violent property takeovers, and other forms of self-settlement in lands and properties that were abandoned, or held by the remaining Hutu occupants (Huggins 2004). A full draft policy is only now just being completed, long delayed due to the sensitive nature of a number of land issues, and difficulty mustering the needed political will (Huggins 2004).
Significant aspects of the formal system will require substantial time to establish or re-establish. Some of the more important aspects include:
Find and train land tenure personnel (absent due to layoffs and lack of training),
Reconstitute cadastre and formal registry systems,
Locate lost records, decide on a course of action when records are missing or have been destroyed,
Re-construction and re-establishment of the political, structural, and organizational aspects of an emerging government that are responsible for different aspects of the land tenure system, e.g. courts,
Lack of physical aspects of a formal land tenure system: vehicles, maps, surveying equip, computers, office supplies,
Lack of and need to re-establish: salaries, perdiem, and travel allowances,
Lack of interagency and NGO project coordination regarding the land issue, both domestic and international (in Bosnia there were over 100 different agencies involved in the land restitution and return process (Leckie 2003)),
Rebuild the low level of confidence in state institutions and donors among the general population,
Deal with the uncoordinated legislative activity common in jurisdictions, competencies, etc.,
Put a legislative and administration framework together for land tenure issues,
Problems of money for all tenure-related needs,
Deal with unresolved citizenship and nationality issues (people, confiscated and abandoned lands etc),
Need to re-establish or establish effective enforcement powers and mechanisms for land tenure decisions regarding claims, evictions, and dispute resolution.
Time will be needed for government experimentation with different approaches, or correction of mistaken approaches that emerge as unworkable or unrealistic (e.g. registration of all smallholder plots in post-conflict settings - Rwanda),
Respond to pressure from the international community to have international law and human rights norms be consistent with domestic legislation,
Derive and implement approaches to specific, highly sensitive land issues,
Derive the political will to derive workable, legitimate formal institutions and approaches,
Derive and implement effective ways of communication with most of the population for dissemination of aspects of the formal land tenure effort: laws, restitution, claims, community consultations, conflict resolution,
Deal with corruption and abuse in government, and in the government’s land tenure effort.
Apart from these organizational, institutional and financial aspects of reconstruction of formal tenure systems, is the additional problem of legitimacy and capacity. Although a peace process can attempt to reconstitute institutions, the primary difficulty over time, stems more from issues of legitimacy and capacity of institutions to effectively recognize and resolve important tenure issues than from the ability of the government and donors to derive and place institutions within different levels of government (Tanner and Monnerat 1995).
The overall time dilemma can mean that in many cases land access or re-access problems at the individual, household, community and commercial levels will operate in a formal system institutional vacuum. The overall property rights arrangement then risks becoming unwieldy, with wider repercussions on agricultural recovery, economic opportunities, food security, and the political problems associated with ideas about “home area”, ethnicity, and areas gained or lost by different groups (Unruh 2002b). On the other hand the aggregate result of the differences in the rates with which change occurs in the formal vs. the informal tenure sectors, means that local authorities (traditional or emerging) will have much increased relative power in the post-conflict tenure setting-and this (in the SLA context) can be an advantage to smallholders in terms of what they do have control over. But such a situation provides for large variation in how land issues are handled. In Rwanda local authorities held much responsibility for resettlement and reallocation of land, in a formal legal and policy vacuum after the conflict (Huggins 2004). How the re-establishing formal tenure institutions and laws deal with such effects when they are implemented will be significantly important if the ultimate objective is to utilize the formal tenure sector for improvements in tenure arrangements in the informal sector.
Legislative change in post-conflict settings, given the time dilemma, can be overlaid onto sets of rights and obligations that are already in existence, very binding, and often much stronger than new or revised laws. In a land tenure context this means that during a peace process, relationships that have been created and maintained during a war to facilitate property, land, and territorial needs and aspirations will predate and can be significantly stronger than any new laws attendant on a fragile peace and a war-weakened state. The effect can be particularly pronounced as mechanisms for disseminating and enforcing new laws (especially with agrarian, semi-literate, war-weary populations) will also be weak or nonexistent. Hence the objective of changing social arrangements in certain ways with legislation frequently can fail or be deflected in a peace process (Unruh 2002b).
While land issues can be at the center of many civil conflicts, in subsequent peace efforts they are frequently addressed in a general framework presented in peace accords. While a peace accord or victory in civil conflicts can to a certain degree resolve a spatial contest in a macro sense, implementation of accords (or new constructs associated with victory) for a population constitutes a local to macro level land and property institutional dilemma not easily overcome. Several problems can emerge from the way the peace accord is carried out in a post-conflict setting. There can be disappointment or disagreement in wording or implementation of the accord among donors as well as with the general population. This can translate into a significant weakening of the accord, and its binding nature on the various sides in the conflict, groups of combatants, and the members of the international community who are obligated to provide assistance in a timely manner (Bailliet 2003). Subsequent to the signing of an accord there can be little confidence in the general population that peace will actually follow (Unruh 2001). This will particularly be the case if there has been repeated attempts at constructing a workable agreement depending on the nature of the conflict. In Mozambique but particularly in Angola, there were repeated attempts at constructing and following through with peace accords, and expectations of peace had been dashed repeatedly. An accord can take significant time to negotiate, and in the meantime there can be a quick development of a variety of tenure situations. As well, certain land-related issues can be left out of an accord if they are too delicate, and there is a risk of compromising the integrity, timing, or participation in the accord.
In Guatemala concerns arose regarding the legally binding nature of the accord (Bailliet 2003); while in Rwanda by the time the Arusha accords were negotiated in 1993 all of the lands set aside for refugees had been occupied already on an informal basis (Jones 2003). Also in Rwanda, there was disagreement between the accord and Rwandan law with regard to the time limits under which returnees could expect to reclaim land (Jones 2003). In Mozambique the issue of eventually dissolving the distinction between Frelimo and Renamo held areas was seen as too delicate to include in the accord, and the issue was left to evolve on its own, which in some cases led to a solidification of the division (Unruh 2001).
Land restitution can be a particularly a difficult component to include in a peace accord. Post-conflict land restitution has gained significant attention in recent years, with the international community increasingly linking this (for both IDPs and refugees) to international human rights standards (Leckie 2003.) The complications attending to restitution issues are complex, and significantly important to solidifying peace. While the trend is laudable, it does add a large complex and at times intractable aspect to post-conflict land tenure. Because land issues will in many cases be one of the reasons for the conflict, pre-conflict ideas about land return and restitution that have been neglected will come to the fore in the post-conflict environment.
Complicating this will be large-scale dislocations of people with little or no documentary evidence as to their claims; principles of adverse possession for those that occupied land during the absence of the original inhabitants; restitution claims pursued by largeholders, foreign and domestic; and the efforts on potentially both (in some cases several) sides in the war to purposefully re-locate people for the purpose of claiming land for a particular group. In a post-conflict environment, it must be appreciated that, there exists an operational tension between the need and desire for restitution on the part of those who feel it is due, and the much reduced capacity of the state in post-conflict scenarios to effectively move ahead with the issue within formal law. As well a new “restitution law” may be required, necessitating quick and effective legislative capacity. The result may be that restitution efforts proceed ahead informally by those who feel that justice is due them, and herein lies an important potential flashpoint for a return to conflict, or to significantly impact the progress of the peace process.
