Land Grabbing and the Perplexities of Territorial Sovereignty

• DOI: 10.1177/00905917211008591
• Published date: 01 February 2022
• Date: 01 February 2022
• Author: Anna Jurkevics
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211008591

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(1) 32 –58

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917211008591

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Article

Land Grabbing and the

Perplexities of Territorial

Sovereignty

Anna Jurkevics1

Abstract

The recent phenomenon of land grabbing—that is, the large-scale acquisition of

private land rights by foreign investors—is an effect of increasing global demand

for farmland, resources, and development opportunities. In 2008–2010 alone,

land grabs covered approximately 56 million hectares of land, dispossessing

and displacing inhabitants. This article proposes a philosophical framework for

evaluating land grabbing as a practice of territorial alienation, whereby the private

purchase of land can, under certain conditions, lead to a de facto alienation of

territorial sovereignty. If land grabs alienate territorial sovereignty, it follows

that inhabitants can claim a violation of the people’s right to “permanent

sovereignty over natural resources.” However, because sovereignty is entangled

in the historical and contemporary causes of land dispossession, I cast doubt on

this strategy. Territorially sovereign regimes often undermine democratic land

governance by obstructing participation in activities such as zoning, land use,

property regulation, and environmental stewardship. These activities, which I

theorize as practices of “world-building,” are key to democracy because they

give occupants a say in the shape of their common home. The perplexities of

sovereignty in matters of land governance suggest that establishing democratic

participation in rule over land requires fracturing sovereignty.

Keywords

land grabbing, sovereignty, territory, property, democracy, permanent

sovereignty over natural resources, Locke, Kant, Arendt

1Assistant Professor, Political Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Corresponding Author:

Anna Jurkevics, University of British Columbia, 1866 Main Mall – C308, Vancouver, BC V6T

1Z1, Canada.

Email: anna.jurkevics@ubc.ca

1008591PTXXXX10.1177/00905917211008591Political TheoryJurkevics

research-article2021

Jurkevics 33

Today in Indonesia, more than 11 million hectares of land (approximately

42,500 square miles) are devoted to oil palm harvesting, most of which takes

place on plantations. Tania Murray Li, who conducted field research in the

province of West Kalimantan from 2010–2015, describes the world of the

palm oil plantation:

Plantations in Indonesia . . . are intended to transform so-called underutilized

land, held by millions of villagers under customary forms of tenure, into spaces

of productivity. . . . Plantations begin with the production of a tabula rasa.

Bulldozers (and sometimes fire) remove all tree cover, carve terraces into

hillsides, and obliterate signs of former land use. . . . Material transformation

extends to human settlements, as plantation concessions are seldom empty of

prior habitation. . . . Smaller hamlets, rice fields, rubber and mango trees, and

grave sites are destroyed. The new built forms are overwhelmingly linear:

plantation roads are laid out in straight lines, carving plantations into regular

blocks. The roads have no signposts, and no names, merely numbers written in

code. Social relations are deliberately thinned out. Blocks of worker housing

are isolated from each other, tucked away in the middle of the sea of palms. . .

. On some plantations workers line up in rows for morning roll call. . . .

Plantations have jurisdiction over workers’ conduct, and small misdemeanors

are handled “in house.”1

This description of plantation life in a contemporary private agribusiness

venture is remarkable yet unexceptional. It describes but one of many worlds

created by increasing global demand for food, biofuels, and resources.

Indeed, the number of large-scale agribusiness and extraction sites is sharply

increasing in Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, South America, and even

parts of the global North.

The large-scale capture and monopolization of land is by no means a new

phenomenon; human history is rife with examples of dispossession via con-

quest, settlement, enclosure, and private acquisition. However, the 2007–

2008 financial crisis and concomitant spike in world food prices caused a

transformation in global land markets that led to the sharp increase in land

deals we are seeing today. Land markets in the global south have been

expanding at such a rapid pace that a new designation has emerged: “land

grabbing,” which refers to the large-scale (>10,000 hectares) private acquisi-

tion of land rights. In 2010, the World Bank reported that land grabs covering

approximately 56 million hectares of land had been announced or transacted

in 2008–2009, compared to an average 4 million hectares in previous years.2

As a point of reference, 56 million hectares of land is larger than France.

Land grabs often cover hundreds, even thousands, of square miles of land.3

Many purchases are made by the sovereign wealth funds of net food