L Land Politics and Conflict Katarina Kušić The Center for Advanced Studies of Southeastern Europe, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia Synonyms Environmental peacebuilding; Land rights; Land tenure; Land use Definitions and Issues A successful transition to peace necessarily involves establishing tenure security, where ten- ure refers to a set of social relations that govern the access, use, and claims to land. Tenure security is the predictability of property rights that allows people to rebuild their personal, economic, social, and political lives. Conflicts reorder social rela- tions dramatically: population patterns change; state power is less effective; identities shift as people move locations and their relations to land; and legitimacy and authority that are used to claim land, property, and territory are chal- lenged (Unruh 2003). This entry examines land as a cause of conflict, a dimension of violence, and a key aspect of post-conflict reconstruction. Ways of using, accessing, and owning land pose particular issues, within and outside conflict. The particularities emerge from the fact that land is, in Tania Li’ s(2014b) words, a “strange object.” First, its “substance” is dependent on particular relations. For some, it is a source of food, for others a basis of tax revenue, and elsewhere it might be shelter or a foundation of ethnic identity. Second, it is peculiarly material in that it is not movable as other “possessions” are, and its use depends on exclusion of others from it. And third, it depends on “inscription devices”: whether crops, ploughs, ancestral graves, or cadasters, a whole variety of devices are employed to give land meaning and assemble it as a resource. All these dimensions of land are challenged in times of conflict: a forest that was a source of food can become a battle ground; revenues from crops and mines can be (re)directed into weapons; radically different orders of exclusion are enacted as terri- torial lines shift; and instead of through titling deeds and ploughs, plots might be known through landmines. Tenure often exists in in the form of legal pluralism: the existence of “different sets of rights and obligations concerning land and prop- erty” that “reside within multiple social fields or normative orders” (Unruh 2003, p. 355). Multi- ple governing orders can coexist at the same time: traditional (historical arrangements that may or may not be still in effect), indigenous (attached to specific groups, often related to tra- ditional or customary rights), and customary (provisions that are still in effect and are non- statutory) (Unruh and Williams 2013a, p. 2). In these discussions, land rights and property © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 O. Richmond, G. Visoka (eds.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11795-5_180-1