"When and why do countries redistribute land to the landless? What political purposes does land reform serve, and what place does it have in today's world? A long-standing literature dating back to Aristotle and echoed in important recent works holds that redistribution should b…
"In the late 1830s an uprising of mestizos and Maya destroyed Guatemala's Liberal government for imposing reforms aimed at expanding the state, assimilating indigenous peoples, and encouraging commercial agriculture. Liberal partisans were unable to retake the state until 1871, …
In the late 1830s, an uprising of mestizos and Maya destroyed Guatemala's Liberal government. Liberal partisans were unable to retake the state until 1871. In contrast to the late 1830s, they met only sporadic resistance. This work confronts this paradox of Guatemala's nineteent…
"As oil-rich countries in the Middle East are increasingly associated with soaring skyscrapers and modern architecture, attention is being diverted away from the pervasive struggles of social housing in those same urban settings. Social Housing in the Middle East traces the hist…
"As formerly community-owned land and natural resources are privatized and titling schemes proliferate, Property Rights from Below questions the trend towards treating land as a commodity and explores alternatives to the Western model."
"Land economics is grossly neglected in developing countries, including India. The disconnect between land use planning through master plans and land economics is glaring. Master planning has led to an acute scarcity of serviced land and floor space for economic growth and affor…
"In the last 200 years, the earth has increasingly become the private property of a few classes, races, transnational corporations, and nations. Repeated claims about the “tragedy of the commons” and the “crisis of capitalism” have done little to explain this concentration of la…
Land is one of the world's most emotionally resonant resources, and control over it is fundamental to almost all human activity. From the local level to the global, we are often in conflict over the ground beneath our feet. But because human relationships to land are so complex,…
