ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that land crime – the use of violence or fraud to gain possession of land – has been neglected by criminology and is of central importance in understanding state crime and resistance. In all the countries in the study except Tunisia, it was a major aspect of the state or state-corporate crime with which civil society engaged.
Land crime took different forms in different states. In South-Eastern Turkey, the destruction of villages and displacement of farmers were used as a counter-insurgency tactic. In Papua New Guinea, the illegal acquisition of land was a means to promote agricultural development. In both Colombia and Burma, displacement served both military and economic objectives. In Kenya there were long-standing grievances over the corrupt and chaotic allocation of land rights.
In rural areas where land is a central issue, much of the work of civil society organisations tends to focus on raising awareness of customary land rights and agricultural practices and the threat to the environment and traditional ways of life posed by state policy and corporate interests. Land is also the area where civil society is most likely to take on state and corporate power through the courts. Litigation is not, however, seen as a strategy that can succeed by itself but rather as something that can both raise awareness and, at least temporarily, throw a spanner in the works of corporate and state power.
