ABSTRACT
The rural land conflicts between villages in North-West Cameroon are rooted mainly in the recent economic transformations and developmental endeavors due to globalization within the last two decades. The expansion of the global market into North-West Cameroon was a gradual process that intensified only during the European colonization of the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, first by the Germans in 1884 and later—with the defeat of Germany in the First World War—by the British from 1916 onward. In the last two decades, the pace of globalization has heightened, as capitalistic ventures now spread their tentacles over all of rural North-West Cameroon, facilitated in part by improved means of transport and communication. This chapter explores that the shrinkage of distance, population increase, rising unemployment, and rapidly expanding markets, among others things, have heightened conflict over land between rural communities in North-West Cameroon.
