Institutional aspects of resolving land disputes in post-conflict societies

The international humanitarian and peacebuilding community’s engagement with post-conflict land disputes—and with land issues more broadly—has grown considerably since the end of the Cold War, and especially since the Yugoslav conflicts of the 1990s. ¹ Although interventions have mostly focused on conflicts that were accompanied by large-scale forced population movements, the notion that building a lasting peace often requires engagement with land issues is no longer as alien as it was ten or fifteen years ago (Leckie 2009; Moore 2010). Indicators of this greater recognition include an increase in normative work within the international community since that period, ² as well as a growing number of handbooks, guidelines, and trainings that the international community continues to develop to assist its professionals in dealing with post-conflict and post-disaster land issues (Pons-Vignon and Lecomte 2004; UN-HABITAT 2007, 2010; Wehrmann 2008). This chapter is a modest contribution to wider efforts to improve knowledge sharing and integration of lessons learned from experiences in post-crisis land programming and other interventions. ³