Dispossession in the Past and Present Tense

1. Introduction

• One day, we will write.
• about dispossession in the
• past tense. I’ve been
• meaning to take all the
• Breaths I need. I’ve been
• meaning to write something about hyenas.
- Mohammed El-Kurd (Palestinian Poet)

This paper began as a conversation between two of the authors in a Native American Law class taught by Owen in Fall 2025, in which German (auditing the class) noted the uncanny similarities between processes of Native American dispossession and what is happening today across the African continent in the name of so many goods (development, tenure security, women’s empowerment). That begged the question, How similar and persistent are techniques of dispossession over distinctive geographies and temporalities? The paper represents an attempt to answer this question.

Such an undertaking comes at a disheartening but opportune time. As neoliberalism extends the unbridled reach of capitalism into all corners of the globe and all spheres of life (Monbiot & Hutchinson, 2024), dispossession has intensified - divesting humans and other beings of their social and ecological inheritance, destroying intimate relationalities to others and to place, and deepening precarity at the margins.

Dispossession has long featured in colonialism and state-building, not just as an effect but as a constitutive process (Chatterjee, 2023; Prasad & Sanyal, 2025; Tuck & Yang, 2012; Wolfe, 2006). Settler colonialism would not have been possible without the use of violence, treaties and trickery to make way for European settlement, and the extension of European sovereignty over foreign lands and peoples. Operating with a logic of ‘destroying to replace’, Patrick Wolfe identifies territoriality as “settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element” (Wolfe, 2006, p. 388). In postcolonial nations and within imperial nations themselves, state-building has resulted in further dispossessions as central states have long asserted control over territory for development, conservation, security or “improvement” (Anthias & Hoffman, 2021; Levien, 2013; Roy, 2022). This process has recently intensified to the point of named phenomena with planetary contours: the “global land grab” (GRAIN, 2008), “global water grab” (Dell’Angelo et al., 2018) and “green grabbing” (Fairhead et al., 2012). The politics of identity has featured in these processes as a legitimizing tactic, in which the deficiencies of certain groups have long been used to justify the extension of authority over land and territory (Anthias & Hoffman, 2012; Prasad & Sanyal, 2025). It is not an exaggeration to say that the machine of dispossession should be considered as one of the main catalysts of the polycrisis engulfing the planet and its oppressed peoples, animals and other beings (Jørgensen et al., 2023; Richardson et al., 2023).

The primary response to the insecurities resulting from the intensification of extraction, commodification and dispossession is state-sanctioned property rights and improved land governance (Deininger & Feder, 2009; de Schutter, 2011). By extending state recognition to customary tenures, land titling is thought to enhance tenure security in the face of global land grabbing, protect women from discriminatory customs, facilitate access to credit through the use of land as collateral, and alleviate poverty by increasing incentives to invest and thereby increasing agricultural productivity (Deininger & Binswanger, 1999; Lisher, 2018; UN, 2013). Titling is also claimed to render assets visible outside of narrow social circles where people know and trust one another (de Soto, 2000), and increase land rental and sales markets - enhancing economic efficiency and improving livelihoods through “voluntary and welfare- enhancing land transfers” (World Bank, 2010, p.74). This paper draws on the long arc of history to interrogate these claims.

The paper begins with a review of the literature on dispossession and its articulations with identity and property. Case studies from the United States, Sub-Saharan Africa and India are utilized to explore different waves of dispossession and the techniques employed therein. The paper concludes with a discussion of findings and its implications for theory and for emancipatory and life-affirming futures.

2. Dispossession, Identity and Property

Dispossession is a deceptively simple idea. In Western European legal and political thought, dispossession has long been understood simply as unjust expropriation or wrongful seizure of the property and assets – a deprivation of possession of land or chattel (Nichols, 2020). Yet a burgeoning literature on the topic reveals it instead as “a troubling concept” (Butler & Athanassiou, 2013, p.1). By the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the concept expanded from a specific act of illegitimate expropriation by the sovereign to a critique of sovereignty itself as “the effect of a massive act of ‘unjust expropriation’” (Nichols, 2020, p.22). Others expand the scope of dispossession further, marking it out as a more multifaceted and more-than-material phenomenon (Butler & Athanassiou, 2013; Dewan & Nustad, 2024).

Scholars and historians have long debated the origins, nature and role of dispossession in enabling and shaping the extractive ventures of colonialism and capitalism and the crisis manifested as the Capitalocene (Moore, 2016). A large body of scholarship traces the connections between capitalism, colonialism and dispossession historically. Historian Peter Linebaugh traces how the destruction of the English commons through enclosure, criminalization, and violence was an essential precondition for capitalism, removing commoners’ means of subsistence and creating a new class of factory laborers (Linebaugh, 2014). Karl Marx identified this process as ‘primitive accumulation,’ a process by which people were separated from their means of production and forced to sell their labor power to survive, creating the means of capitalist accumulation. This process of expropriation is prior to but goes hand-in-hand with exploitation as twin processes of class robbery establish the basis for capitalist social relations (Linebaugh, 2014; Newfont, 2012). On the other hand, geographer Cole Harris argues that the experienced materiality of colonialism is grounded in the dispossession and repossession of land. While the impetus to dispossess derived from the interest of capital and of settlers, the ability to dispossess rested primarily on physical power and a monopoly over violence, which was later legitimized and morally justified through the discourse of civilization/savagery (Harris, 2004).

Primitive accumulation played an important role in the emergence of settler colonialism, which sought to eliminate Native people and replace them with settler populations who could be subjected to the tyranny of the market (Coulthard, 2014). Settler colonialism “destroys to replace,” involving a suite of actions to dissolve native societies and erect “a new colonial society on the expropriated land base” (Wolfe, 2006, p.388). However, it is not just the elimination of Native peoples that settler colonialism seeks. Writing in the context of Palestinian dispossession by settlers, Sai Englert argues that elimination does not fully define the logic of settler colonialism everywhere. Settler colonial states and movements continue to mobilize a wide variety of policies, including exploitation of labor - highlighting the importance of attending to the specificities of the social relations through which settlers participate in dispossession (Englert, 2020, p.1663).

Settler colonial states deploy various techniques of dispossession. Treaty making has featured prominently in the early stages of colonization. As a nation-to-nation relationship, it affirms Native sovereignty while also dispossessing through the cession of Native territory in exchange for various promises and setting the stage for future dispossession (Saunt, 2020). It has often involved the subsequent extension of ultimate title to the land to European colonial powers by the courts (Pappas, 2017) and the extinguishment of precolonial and future claims based on imposed forms of property (Blomley, 2014), further limiting Native sovereignty. “In the process of settler colonialism, land is remade into property and human relationships to land are restricted to the relationship of the owner to his property. Epistemological, ontological, and cosmological relationships to land are interred, indeed made savage and backward” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p.5). Techniques have also included the imposition of individual fee simple1 titles, which diminish Indigenous systems of land tenure (Bhandar, 2018); turn customary relations with the land into proprietary ones (Kapila, 2022); and erode or erase aboriginal rights (Blomley, 2014). This is, in Bromley’s words, ‘an attempt to stabilize or remake the very reality of property and space’ (Bromley, 2014, p.1295). Brenna Bhandar, in her book Colonial Lives of Property, argues that property law played a role in the formation of racial subjects and the development of racial capitalism in the settler colonies of Canada, Australia and Palestine, where the colonial appropriation of Indigenous lands was enabled by narratives of European racial superiority that equated civilization with English property constructs. Populations that “did not cultivate their lands for the purposes of commercial trade and marketized exchange … were by definition uncivilized and could be disposed of, cast out of the borders of political citizenship” (Bhandar, 2018). The actual geographical possession of land is what empire, in the final analysis, is all about (Said, 1994, p. 78).

Post-colonial nation states have continued to mobilize different forms of power and techniques such as domination, legitimization, pacification and deceit to marginalize Aboriginal spaces and dispossess Native peoples (Pratichi, 2023). Property law was one of these. The aforementioned techniques of Native dispossession became the foundation of American law concerning property rights, which were then exported around the globe (Nagle, 2024). In post-colonial nation states like India, property is entangled with notions of citizenship and property is the key notion through which ideas of belonging are made and remade. In India, interventions in property law were weaponized to create a racialized other as a threat (Prasad & Sanyal, 2025). Property relations are not simply economic arrangements but are embedded in the history of power, identity and domination, which are weaponized as a mechanism through which dispossession is legitimized (Turner, 2017). Property regimes do not just commodify land as an abstraction to be exploited, but work as an idea, concept, relation, practice and a legal institution producing rationales for specific legal regimes of ownership and processes of dispossession. For example, Kriti Kapil argues that the reforms introduced by the post-colonial Indian state fundamentally changed principles of kinship, relationality, and descent through a universal order of landholding and possession. She examines how the legality of proprietary relationships generated a particular kind of dispossession, turning the Gaddis’ relationship with the land and landscape into a proprietary one (Kapila, 2022).

Formalization of customary land relations through state-sanctioned property rights has been proposed as a solution of such injustices and to the precarities induced by dispossession. Questioning this logic, Bromley argues that there is a need to make a distinction between possession and ownership, where having physical control of something does not mean you own it in any recognized sense. Ownership is a social fact and exists as a shared idea which is collectively recognized and enforced, and is not just a physical reality. Ownership is a reasoned, constructed legal and social concept, while possession is intuitive, immediate and embodied. Formalization of titles then does not automatically convert the possessor into an owner, because it does not take this social recognition or the hierarchies that condition the meanings of ownership and possession into account. Contrastingly, formalization erodes the social networks that actually protect the poor; informal tenure is embedded in community relations that provide real security, and formalization dismantles these while claiming to help (Bromley, 2009).

The property rights school of new institutional economics posits that land rights will inevitably evolve towards increasing privatization as land becomes scarcer (Platteau, 2000). While often left unacknowledged by its proponents, a series of underlying assumptions provides the backdrop to these ideas - from the individual as a rational, selfish and purely economic agent, to the endogeneity of these institutional shifts. The basic idea advanced by neoclassical economists is that private property rights are central to economic efficiency and progress, vesting the rights to decide what, when and how to produce in individuals (Migot-Adholla et al., 1991; Stein et al., 2024). Robert Nichols re-theorizes property as theft through a close reading of arguments by Indigenous scholars and activists, showing how systematic theft is the mechanism through which property relations are generated by transforming “nonproprietary relations into proprietary ones while, at the same time, systematically transferring control and title of this (newly formed) property” (Nichols, 2020, p. 8). Through this process, commodification and theft are merged into a single moment, and theft becomes “the mechanism and means by which property is generated” (p. 9).

More recent writers link dispossession, commodification and privatization as continued, ongoing and entwined processes - with primitive accumulation perpetuating itself by turning use values into exchange values (Greco, 2013; Harvey, 2003). Harvey advances the notion of “accumulation by dispossession” to explain the process of transforming existing wealth from the public or marginalized groups into the hands of economic elites. Its mechanisms include privatization, financial speculation and predatory lending, the commodification of nature and state-backed seizures of land and property (Harvey, 2004). He argues that this has become the dominant mode of capitalist accumulation since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s, replacing expanded reproduction (the making and reinvestment of surplus value), and calls it the ‘hallmark of the new imperialism’ (Harvey, 2004, p. 82). The rise of neoliberalism has also introduced new pathways of dispossession. Social scientists, for example, have noted the rise of “green grabbing,” a new form of appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends involving “novel forms of valuation, commodification and markets for pieces and aspects of nature, and an extraordinary new range of actors and alliances” (Fairhead et al., 2012). It has also involved conservation-induced dispossession (Kabra, 2007) and the circulation of ‘liquid nature’ which produces nature as a commodity in the service of capital (Buscher, 2013, p. 22).

These newer forms of dispossession have led scholars to highlight new dimensions of dispossession. Dewan and Nustad, for example, point to more-than-economic forms of dispossession that emanate from capitalist extractive activities, such as the loss of intangible cultural heritage and generational knowledge transmission, emotional distress, loss of health, the rupturing of multispecies relations and local care practices, and disruption of affective and spiritual relations to place (Dewan & Nustad, 2024). In so doing, dispossession encompasses more intangible processes and a multiplicity of manifestations. Dispossession can then broadly be defined as,

processes and ideologies by which persons are disowned and abjected by normative and normalizing powers that define cultural intelligibility and that regulate the distribution of vulnerability: loss of land and community; ownership of one’s living body by another person, as in histories of slavery; subjection to military, imperial, and economic violence; poverty, securitarian regimes, biopolitical subjectivation, liberal possessive individualism, neoliberal governmentality, and precaritization.

(Butler & Athanassiou, 2013, p. 2)

processes and ideologies by which persons are disowned and abjected by normative and normalizing powers that define cultural intelligibility and that regulate the distribution of vulnerability: loss of land and community; ownership of one’s living body by another person, as in histories of slavery; subjection to military, imperial, and economic violence; poverty, securitarian regimes, biopolitical subjectivation, liberal possessive individualism, neoliberal governmentality, and precaritization. (Butler & Athanassiou, 2013, p. 2)

Nichols cautions us not to think of dispossession as the absence of possession, as this reinforces ideas of property. Rather, there is a need to think beyond the logic of property and possession altogether. Struggles over land are often less about property or territory than about the meaning of the relationship between humans and the wider ecological worlds that they are a part of. Struggles over land thus call for struggles over the terms of debate - a “collective resignification of the basic terms of political order” (Nichols, 2020, p.158).

3. Case Studies

3.1. Cherokee Sovereignty: Dispossession, Citizenship and Generations of Resistance

Tribal sovereignty and tribal land tenure in the United States are often framed as gifts of the federal government, an egregious misunderstanding of the long history of Native American dispossession, tribal resistance, and inherent sovereignty that predates the US. Prior to European colonization, Cherokees sustained complex relationships with the plants, animals, and landscape of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Cultural practices integrated spiritual and empirical knowledge accumulated over generations, grounding ethical standards of responsibility and reciprocity to human and non-human community members living on shared land (Lefler & Belt, 2022; Smith, 2021; Altman & Belt, 2009). In 1492, Cherokees held sway over 100,000 square miles of territory centered on the Southern Appalachian Mountains (Nagle, 2024; Smithers, 2015). Through 36 treaties, the US secured land cessions, new territorial boundaries, and myriad conditional requirements geared toward cultural assimilation (Prucha, 1994). Despite organized resistance, Cherokees lost access to land with each treaty and were incrementally dispossessed of full political autonomy and self-determination, while being drawn into a system of property enclosure and ownership (Nagle, 2024; see also Wolfe 2006).

US federal state-making was built on the seizure of Native American land and assertions of legal authority over Native peoples. In the second Treaty of Long Island on the Holston (1781), US negotiators affirmed previous Cherokee cessions to competing British colonies and exacted a cession of additional territory as punishment for Cherokees’ previous alliance with the British King. By claiming authority to secure new territory for the US, the Continental Congress enacted a federal power that had not existed prior to the American Revolution. United States sovereignty was based on concepts articulated in the Law of Nations (1758) and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (Paine, 1776) which argued that territorial control and economic might equaled sovereign power. The Continental Congress thus sought to acquire a new land base over which a sovereign federal power that was paramount to state governments might be constructed (Calloway, 1995). The US strengthened sovereignty through the negotiation of treaties with Native Americans inhabiting land in the Northwest Territory and trans-Appalachian west, beyond the jurisdiction of individual states (Crepelle, 2021; Wilkins & Lomawaima, 2001). Treating tacitly, almost accidentally, acknowledged the inherent sovereignty of the signing tribes as well (Greene, 2022; Nagle, 2024; Wolfe, 2006).

After 1780, dispossession permeated treaty-making. Native Nations coalesced as Tribal leadership centralized to interact with and resist US federal power and expanding settler colonial populations (Nagle, 2024; Wilkinson, 2005; Calloway, 1995). Treaty negotiations were conducted between white men, who refused to deal with Native women, and Native men, undermining matrilineal leadership traditions and assuming united Cherokee leadership (Nagle, 2024; Perdue,1998). As the Chickamauga Cherokees continued their war with the US, state militias retaliated against all Cherokee, leading many Cherokee leaders to realize the value of political centralization. The traditional autonomous Cherokee town councils that included women, peace chiefs, and war chiefs consequently adapted to male leadership and a perpetual state of militant tension. A national assembly of town headmen gained authority in the 1790s (Nagle, 2024; Perdue, 1998; McLoughlin, 1990). When the Chickamauga finally ceased their war in 1794, a Cherokee national identity had emerged, although struggles to unite all the towns continued. Territorial boundaries with the US states and neighboring Tribes took on new significance (Calloway, 1995; Perdue, 1998).

Seven treaties between 1785 and 1806 secured more cessions of Cherokee territory and formalized boundaries with neighboring tribes. Claiming an inability to control illegal frontier settlers, the US repeatedly proposed ever-shrinking new boundaries to protect Cherokees from lawless Americans (Prucha, 1994; Nagle, 2024; Wolfe, 2006). Cherokees advanced an astute strategy of political centralization. At the same time, an elite class with increasing capitalist engagement through plantation slavery emerged among Tribal leaders. By 1801 the assembly of headmen evolved into a National Council and approved the first Christian mission school in the Cherokee Nation (Miles, 2010; McClinton, 2007; Miles, 2005). In 1808 the National Council passed the first written laws that, among many other acts, divided their remaining territory into 8 administrative districts, and set a penalty of execution for anyone attempting to cede land to Americans without the National Council’s approval. Cherokee political developments unified Tribal identity, although some headmen still resisted the centralization of authority (Prucha, 1994; Laws of the Cherokee Nation, 1852).

Centralized Cherokee authority was increasingly crucial in navigating the questionable “protections” of the US. After the War of 1812, in which hundreds of Cherokee warriors fought as US allies, Cherokee sovereign space was bounded by US state territory on every side. The National Council began earnest efforts to demonstrate their high level of “civilization” (Smithers, 2015; McClinton, 2007; McLoughlin, 1990), and political and economic pressures mandated the need for English language education and blacksmithing skills. The Cherokee Council approved a second mission school in 1815 and ceded land where illegal white settlements existed in South Carolina and Alabama in 1816 (Nagle, 2024).

The US then enacted new tactics designed to disrupt Cherokee unity and erode tribal identity. Treaties in 1817 and 1819 offered an “equal exchange” of land west of the Mississippi to spur voluntary Cherokee emigration. The 1817 Treaty of the Cherokee Agency divided the Upper Towns, who intended to remain in the east, from the Lower Towns, whose inhabitants were more likely to move. It also provided the option of US citizenship and titled land reserves for those who chose to stay (Finger, 1984; Greene, 2022; Prucha, 1994). Speaking to a delegation of voluntary immigrants to Arkansas, President Monroe promised the new western lands “as long as water flows, or grass grows upon the earth,” assuring permanent tenure and federal protection. Under the 1819 treaty, Yonaguska and over fifty Cherokee families chose to accept US citizenship in exchange for titled reserves on their ceded homelands and were soon enclosed by a rush of new frontier settlers, while the “lawless rabble” who had lived there prior to the treaty became landowning neighbors (Wolfe, 2006; Finger, 1984). The US Congress also passed the Civilization Fund Act that year for organizations that established institutions working for the “civilization of Indians” (An Act Making Provision for the Civilization of the Indian Tribes Adjoining the Frontier Settlements, March 3, 1819).

Cherokees sought to unite against insidious mechanisms of cultural assimilation while accepting beneficial innovations (Nagle, 2024; Greene, 2022; McClinton, 2007; Finger, 1984). In 1819, the National Council established the Cherokee capital at New Echota in Georgia. A third mission school was approved among the most traditionalist towns of the mountainous Cherokee heartland. Despite helpful intentions, missionaries fomented division by teaching Cherokee children that their traditions were sinful. The mission schools’ reports on students, parents, cultural practices, and relationships to land also facilitated Cherokee legibility to federal authorities (McLoughlin, 1990; McClinton, 2007; Miles, 2010; Wimberly, 2017; Cushman, 2011). Sequoyah introduced his ingenious syllabary for writing Cherokee language in 1821 and Cherokee literacy rapidly outpaced colonizers’ literacy in English, appropriating a civilized art to solidify Cherokee national identity (Cushman, 2011; McLoughlin, 1990; Owen, 2012). Arguments against centralized government were subsumed by growing threats of assimilation and forced emigration. The Cherokee Constitution was ratified at New Echota in 1827 (Cushman, 2011; Nagle, 2024; McLoughlin, 1990).

In 1828 gold was discovered by white intruders on Cherokee land in Georgia, setting off a new American invasion. In tandem with the potential cotton wealth that could be grown in the rich black soil of southern Tribes’ land, the gold of the Cherokee Nation ignited American support for forced removal (Saunt, 2020; Nagle, 2024). Cherokee Principal Chief John Ross’s Party led a steadfast resistance, while the opposing Treaty Party favored removal as the only means of Cherokee survival (Wilkins, 1984, Nagle, 2024; McLoughlin, 1990). Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830. Soon after, Georgia unconstitutionally extended state laws over the section of the Cherokee Nation within the state’s boundaries, divvying out plots of land to white settlers in a series of lotteries (Wolfe, 2006; Wilkins; Lomawaima, 2001; Saunt, 2020; Nagle, 2024). President Jackson’s administration refused to follow through with federal protections, and violence and lawlessness ensued. Cherokees moved their capital from New Echota to Red Clay in Tennessee and initiated a legal battle against the US (Nagle, 2024; Saunt, 2020).

Three Supreme Court cases, two of which involved the Cherokee, were affirmations of Tribal sovereignty and tools of dispossession. In Johnson v McIntosh (1823), Chief Justice John Marshall applied the 1493 Doctrine of Discovery to demolish Indigenous claims to communal land-ownership (Wilkinson, 2005; Nagle, 2024; McLoughlin, 1990). American fee simple land title, Marshall argued, was based in the trail of treaty agreements and land cessions going back to original European “discoveries” and New World territorial claims. Because Tribes had no legal documentation of ownership, and had not claimed to own the land themselves, they were deemed to hold only “aboriginal title” - a restricted right to occupancy (Wilkins and Lomawaima, 2001). The other two Marshall Trilogy cases, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832), acknowledged Tribes’ inherent sovereignty that predated US states’ jurisdiction, while declaring Tribes “domestic dependent nations” under the protection of the federal government. President Jackson refused to enforce the decisions (Nagle, 2024; Saunt, 2020; Wilkins, 1984; Lomawaima, 2001). In 1835, the Cherokee removal treaty was signed by the Treaty Party without the National Council’s consent. The Treaty of New Echota ceded the entire Cherokee Nation, home to 17,000 people living on one-tenth of their original territory, in exchange for territory in what would become Oklahoma.

By the 1840s, Cherokees were fractured, with no claims to aboriginal title in the west, and no tribal territory in the east, grounding Cherokee identity in culture, treaty rights, and legal concepts of sovereignty rather than life on ancestral territory. The “old settlers” who had emigrated between 1817 and 1828 had established the Cherokee Nation West through US treaties and resisted governance by the forcibly removed “latecomers’.” Treaty Party supporters presented another division, fomenting violent political conflicts that ravaged western Cherokee territory, not to mention a fourth group that had settled in the Republic of Texas. All were on the homelands of Osage, Quapaw, Apache, and other tribes. Violence spilled into civil war, which tore Indian Territory apart. In their last treaty in 1868, the Cherokee were forced to recognize their formerly enslaved people as Tribal citizens, further undermining tribal self-determination (Wilkinson, 2005; Nagle, 2024; Wolfe, 2006).

In 1887, Congress passed the Dawes Act, a new phase of dispossession that subdivided tribal lands in Oklahoma that had been guaranteed federal protection into individual allotments, and assigned to male heads of household with fee simple title. The “surplus” land, what was left after all individual men were enrolled for allotments, was opened to white settlement. Allotments held by tribal citizens were subject to complicated restrictions on use, coerced purchases, leases, and fraudulent land deals. Ushered through a corrupt court system, Native Americans, especially young women heirs, were often placed under guardianship to agents of oil companies and mining operations (Debo, 1941; Nagle, 2024). Between 1887 and 1934, allotment in Oklahoma led to a checkerboard of land held by tribal citizens among plots owned by white colonizers. Hundreds of thousands of acres of land promised to tribes for “as long as waters run” were seized.

Another insidious mechanism of dispossession was introduced by the Dawes Act. When tribal members’ names were listed in allotment rolls, their degree of Native American ancestry – their “blood quantum” – was recorded. The Dawes Rolls and blood quantum came to define eligibility for tribal citizenship, establishing a means of “statistical extermination” intended to breed out Native identity (Jaimes, 1992, p. 137). Blood quantum was further embedded in federal recognition and tribal citizenship policies in the 1934 Indian New Deal, deepening dispossession of formal tribal identity. Both federally recognized Cherokee tribes in Oklahoma today apply ancestral lineage from Dawes Rolls enrollees as the basis for tribal citizenship (Wilkinson, 2005; Nagle, 2024). Cherokees in the eastern homelands placed their titled land in the shared Qualla Boundary trust in 1876. The Qualla Boundary was consolidated in 1889 and was not subject to allotment because Cherokee purchasers had accepted US citizenship. In 1924, the Qualla Boundary and tracts of Cherokee-owned land in North Carolina were transferred to federal “in trust” status when Native Americans were granted US citizenship (Wilkins and Lomawaima, 2001; Indian Citizenship Act, 1924). Qualla Boundary property holders were listed in the Baker Roll for US citizenship; this, along with a minimum 1/16 blood quantum, established the basis for Eastern Band of Cherokee Indian (EBCI) membership. Qualla Boundary “possessory holdings,” can be owned, sold and purchased only by enrolled EBCI members and are not alienable from the community (Finger, 1984). The EBCI has also worked to expand trust land through fee-to-trust expansion, converting newly acquired lands under fee simple into trust land.2 While this has provided a modicum of security against further dispossession, the multiple techniques and mechanisms applied in Cherokee dispossession - coerced assimilation, removals, land titles, special reserves, citizenship as identity, and limited sovereignty - was subsequently applied to US tribes and been adapted and exported across the world (Wilkinson, 2005; Nagle, 2024).

3.2. The Accumulation of Dispossession and the Continuity of Technique: Historicizing African “Land Grabbing”

The primitive accumulation of capital is not only a prelude to capitalism; it is a process fed by the continuing accumulation of dispossession of marginalized rural areas.

(Bush et al., 2011, p. 191)

The mid-2000 outcry over “global land grabbing” by civil society raised global awareness of a sharp rise in interest in farmland in low- and middle-income countries as a new investment frontier for global capital (GRAIN, 2008). Academic scholarship on the phenomenon ballooned in its wake, seeking to identify the scale and characteristics of the phenomenon – from target countries and regions, to the determinants of investment decisions, origins and characteristics of the “land grabbers” and its consequences for rural communities (Anseeuw et al., 2012; Borras et al., 2011). For most authors, the drivers were located in the early 21st Century: the food price crisis of 2007-08 and speculation on long-term price rises for land and agricultural products (Anseeuw et al., 2012); the convergence of global food, energy, finance, and environmental crises that was revaluing land ownership (Borras et al., 2011); and the growing financialization of farmland as agricultural prices began to climb and investors sought more secure investment destinations (Fairbairn, 2014). Yet as Sam Moyo and colleagues point out, ahistoric interpretations of the late 2000s land rush have ignored the systemic roots of this latest scramble for African land and resources. They point instead to a continuous process of primitive accumulation fueled ideologically by “a racialized global culture woven over centuries of European expansion” that yielded an enduring hierarchy of peoples and both contempt and paternalism towards Africa (Moyo et al., 2019, p.6). Others see accumulation by dispossession as a “continuous feature of Africa’s uneven and combined incorporation into the world economy” (Bush et al. 2011, p.191). This case study seeks to trace this longer trajectory of dispossession on the continent and the continuity of specific techniques that made it possible.

The first wave of dispossession occurred during the late 19th Century colonial expansion across the continent. Its precise forms vary according to different modes of capitalist accumulation, with mass displacement of peasants in areas of prime farmland and favorable climate to make way for White settlers, and mining and agricultural enclaves in the ‘concessionary’ economies of Central Africa (Moyo et al., 2019). This first wave, lasting until the mid-1900s, involved land alienation, displacement of the peasantry, and the extra-economic coercion of labor (Arrighi, 1973). Variable techniques set the stage for this first wave of dispossession. These included the “scramble for Africa,” where European powers divvied up the continent in “a scramble for mastery of the land and its resources” that marked the shift from informal imperialism to direct rule (Schreuder, 2009; Shillington, 2005); and “sovereignty-cum-land laws” enacted between 1896 and 1918 to establish European heads of state as the ultimate owners of all lands and resources within a colony (Alden Wily, 2013, p.52). These processes were also profoundly shaped by treaties between European governments and African rulers,3 which were subsequently used to justify claims to particular territories under partition (Inyang & Bassey 2014; Trouval, 1966). Once European rule was unilaterally instituted, institutions of property became a key instrument of both dispossession and control. The newly established sovereigns soon imported laws from Europe, and by the late 1800s laws and ordinances for the compulsory acquisition of land for “public service” or “public purpose” (definitions of which were quickly broadened) entrenched the principle and practice of eminent domain (Dunning, 1968). “Real property”4 then came into being through the creation of colonial state registers describing the parcel and the new owner backed by documents linked to formal land grants by local governors (as absolute title, permits or concessions) and past purchases from natives (in coastal enclaves or mission areas).

Identity mattered not just in the power to claim and formalize entitlements, but in legal distinctions differentiating the nature of entitlements for African majorities (who “could at most obtain permits to lawfully occupy and use land”) and European settlers (Alden & Wily, 2013). In the British colonies, spatial and political divisions differentiated crown lands (areas most appropriate for settlement by European “citizens” and lands known to contain mineral resources) with freehold and leasehold tenures governed by common law, and spatially distinct communal lands occupied by “subjects” (Mamdani, 1996; see also Alden & Wily 2013). Identity also played a role in those targeted for reform, with pastoralists targeted for their primitive, irrational, uneconomical and anachronistic ways and their most favorable dry season lands appropriated for European farmers through treaties (Blewett, 1995).

A second wave of dispossessory techniques took root in the post-WWII period, in which European and U.S. enterprises were allocated lands for commercial plantations through either the tightening of existing laws or their revision with stronger limitations on African land rights (Alden & Wily, 2013). Land grants and concessions to French, American and British companies and White settlement expanded dramatically. The East Africa Royal Commission of 1953–1955 further “sealed the fate of customary tenure in establishing any form of communal jurisdiction or landholding as an impediment to agricultural growth. The plan was that this should speedily give way to individual English freehold entitlements, to be engineered through compulsory adjudication and titling of smallholders’ farms” (Alden Wily 2013, p. 53, emphasis in original). The Commission was the brainchild of Sir Philip Mitchell, Governor of Kenya from 1944-1952, who had argued that Africans had been “mired in poverty, ignorance, and superstition, a people without history who had been offered a chance at improvement only with the establishment of colonial rule” (Hood1997, as cited in Mitchell, 1954). The commission produced a wide-ranging, 500-page document exploring how to foster rapid economic development in East Africa. It reveals a surprising level of granularity in the description of African livelihoods and their environmental adaptations and social functions, yet frames these as precarious, environmentally damaging and impoverishing.

Population pressure and competition over land among Africans are said to result in “the antithesis of that economic productivity upon which the future of East Africa depends” (p. 279). Development through the commercialization of the indigenous agricultural systems, reorganizing factors of production (land, labor, capital) “so they can yield an increased money income” (291). The report was critiqued on the left, “as a free-market tract that proposed exposing Africans to the full blast of an agricultural and industrial revolution, similar to that which had inflicted suffering upon British workers in the nineteenth century, without attempting to cushion the effects” (Hood, 1997, p.3).

The early post-colonial period is viewed by some scholars as another key wave of dispossession. With most post-colonial land laws leaving untitled lands the property of the state, they were “vulnerable to reallocation in the name of development, including to members of government itself and aligned elites” (Alden & Wily, 2013, p.55). In fact, state-driven commercialization schemes involving millions of hectares were launched across the continent. New legislation was introduced to affirm the legality of such takings and extinguish extant occupancy and use rights, while benefits to local elites secured support for land alienation. In Kenya as elsewhere, land control came to be at the center of class domination by the politically connected elite (Kanyinga et al., 2008). Pastoralist reserves in southern Kenya were further subdivided into individual tenures, provoking rangeland degradation and widespread impoverishment as the best lands were captured by elites and the resulting landholdings were far too small to enable the mobility so essential to both livestock survival and rangeland regeneration (Galaty, 1994).

An additional wave of dispossession occurred in the 1990s on the heels of World Bank-mediated structural adjustment reforms, when market-based land tenure reforms were initiated as one of the conditions of debt relief and “consolidated the position of local and foreign capitalists” (Moyo et al., 2019;10; see also Brown, 2005). While the resulting policy reforms varied due to the political process involved, two features were widespread: the conversion of land held under customary tenure into private property through land titling; and the creation of legal means to alienate large landholdings from the customary domain and allocate secure tenures for the benefit of foreign and domestic firms. While critiques of the latter were widespread, many saw the former as a genuine effort to finally alleviate the threat of land loss through state-sanctioned recognition: “Removing the suppression of indigenous land rights has usually arisen only as a sop to stronger intentions to free up the market in land, as not just urged for decades but ultimately required by World Bank-led structural adjustment terms” (Wily 2012, pp. 56-57).

This frames land titling in unambiguously protectionist terms. As co-author German (2022) notes in the book Power/Knowledge/Land: Contested Ontologies of Land and its Governance in Africa, individual titling produced more losers than winners as complex entitlement structures were simplified. It also fundamentally changed African tenures by converting land into a commodity that could be sold outside of landholding lineages and used as collateral. This finally achieved what colonial officials long sought to achieve – the extraction of land from the landholding lineages that were recognized as evolving “to give security” to its members, but which were thought to ‘deliberately stifle individual initiative’ by ensuring accountability to the group (East Africa Royal Commission, 1955, p.14). This accountability often extended to the living, their ancestors and the unborn, and welcomed exchange but not alienation by extending membership to strangers but forbidding alienation (German, 2022). While group title has increasingly been written into land laws across the continent, this, too, has turned customary tenures into a commodity and one that can often be more easily alienated – coupling titling with consultation processes through which collectively-held lands may be alienated; formalizing boundaries and group representatives to clarify who has the right to negotiate on behalf of the group and the territory over which they have jurisdiction; and viewing these tenures as an intermediate step towards - and enabler of - individual tenures (German, 2022). In some instances, it has also formalized non-exclusive collective tenures so they are vulnerable to private capture, or made rights conditional on “effective use” (generally, permanent agriculture). At the same time, bilateral trade and investment treaties and domestic investment promotion and business climate reforms were at work to provide investors more favorable legal protections and investment conditions overseas (Cotula, 2017).

By the time global political economic forces aligned to actually take an interest in African farmland as an investment destination and speculative asset, the conditions were such that investors could acquire secure tenure through leasehold (the vast majority of deals – with leases often 99-year renewable, another holdover from colonial-era concessions) or outright purchase. Based on data from the Land Matrix, international land acquisitions totaled an estimated 43.6 million hectares from 2000 to 2016, with a dramatic spike in both the number of deals and the acreage following the 2007 financial crisis (Nolte et al., 2016). The outcry over global land grabbing brought into being a discursive and ideological battle over the meaning of these trends for African land futures. Proponents of this latest wave of dispossession used the language of “yield gaps” and vast tracts of “uncultivated land” (Deininger et al., 2011); framed the 600 million-hectare Guinea Savannah zone as a “one of the largest underused land reserves” (less than 10 percent of which was designated as “cropped”) (World Bank, 2009b); and argued that the steep rise in food and agricultural commodity prices presented an opportunity “for countries that are endowed with the land, labor, and other resources needed to respond to the growing demand for food and biofuels feedstocks” and for commercial agriculture, “a powerful driver of growth” (World Bank, 2009a). Threats to small-scale farmers and pastoralists were used discursively not to suggest land grabbing by large corporations should be curtailed, but to breathe wind into the sails of systematic titling in the name of “tenure security.”

This case study suggests a number of continuities in techniques of dispossession across time periods, largely corroborating Bush’s argument that accumulation by dispossession is a continuous feature of Africa’s integration into the global economy since colonialism - an “accumulation of dispossession” (Bush et al., 2011). Colonialism/imperialism appears as a feature conditioning this entire history, establishing relations of domination and paternalism between Western Europe (and more recently the US) and Africa. Property law, and property itself (reshaping the relationship between people and land to one of individual rights and entitlement), are also an enduring feature of these dispossessory processes and key to extracting land from the customary tenure systems that ensured the continuous attachment of people to place. Developmentalist arguments framing African livelihoods as backwards and its production factors as underutilized are used repeatedly to justify these legal shifts, as well as the dual track of large-scale land alienation to foreign companies and customary land subdivision/privatization/commodification they instantiate.

3.3. Of Erasures and Dispossessions: Kol Adivasis in Manikpur, India

The scholarly literature on Adivasis in India is populated with narratives of dispossession. Adivasi dispossession and land alienation are widely traced back to the unequal terms of their incorporation into colonial and postcolonial economies. This began with colonial agrarian land settlements which turned customary land relations into property and with colonial forest enclosures, whereby tribes were criminalized in the process of classifying forests as ‘reserved’ and ‘protected’ (Rangarajan, 1996; Savyasaachi, 1998; Prasad, 2003). The post-colonial India state retained these epistemic and material exclusions, setting stage for waves of dispossession. State-induced mass dispossession has been a characteristic feature across colonial, post-colonial and neoliberal regimes, managing and transforming laboring bodies of the dispossessed for colonial, imperial and state-making process. While the colonial state absorbed the labor of its dispossessed for imperial gains, post-colonial and neoliberal regimes have produced dispossessed populations without their reabsorption into production processes (Roy, 2023). Adivasis in India have thus been subjected to tripartite forms of structural violence, namely colonial, post-colonial and conservation-induced (Vaidya, 2018).

Kol Adivasis living in the villages of Manikpur, a sub-district in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), have been subjected to multiple waves of dispossession and attribute their present state of landlessness and dispossession to their mis-classification as a Scheduled Caste. Kol Adivasis living in the neighboring state of Madhya Pradesh with whom many in Manikpur share kith-kin relations are classified as Scheduled Tribes.5 The Indian state provides various constitutional provisions to safeguard the rights of STs, such as Article 342 of the Indian Constitution, which designates specific communities as STs, promotes their social, economic and educational interest, establishes quotas for government employment, prohibits their trafficking and forced labor, and establishes scheduled areas as a measure to protect their interests with regards to land, forest access and other social issues. Scholars and activists have documented how the wrongful classification of Kols as a scheduled caste in UP has resulted in poverty, lack of rights and identity crisis, and highlight the need for recognition as a Scheduled Tribe (Verma, 2016). The question of categorization, or darza in Hindi (which roughly translates to status), is considered a denial of their constitutional rights that grants constitutional and legal protection and land rights to scheduled tribes.

The terms “Scheduled Caste” (SC) and “Scheduled Tribe” (ST) are legal designations established during British colonial rule. The category of Scheduled Caste was adopted in 1935, when the British listed the lowest-ranking Hindu castes in a schedule appended to the Government of India Act for purposes of statutory safeguards and other benefits. The concept “Scheduled Castes” is relevant only in a context of statutory provisions, government programs and politics (Dushkin, 1967, p. 626). Similarly, a Scheduled Tribe is an administrative legal category established in the same Act. It includes tribal or “Adivasi” communities perceived to be living in isolation and identified variously by the colonial state as ‘‘Animist’’, ‘‘Tribal Animists’’ or ‘‘people following tribal religion’’, ‘‘Hill and Forest Tribes’’, ‘‘Primitive Tribes’’, ‘‘Backward Tribes’’ or simply ‘‘Tribes.’’ Following independence, a debate was held in the Constituent Assembly on the use of the term ‘‘ST’’, with tribal representatives favoring the use of the term ‘‘Adivasis’’ (Ambagudia, 2011, p. 34). The term Scheduled Tribe was ultimately unanimously accepted because the term ST already had a fixed legal meaning (Saksena, 1981). To this day, the Indian state classifies its marginalized peoples as Scheduled Tribes, Scheduled Castes and “Other Backward Classes,” the last of these denoting other socially and educationally disadvantaged groups.

These colonial practices of classification and categorization of people led to the disappearance of Kol Adivasis from the scheduling list, which became the basis for their mis-classification as Scheduled Caste in post-colonial India. One historian describes the attitude of colonial officers as follows:

These simple but backward people should not be exposed to the risks of electioneering turmoil and intrigue’. They would be ‘easily swayed by agitators and would easily fall victims to their wiles.’ … ‘It was best to exclude south Mirzapur from the provisions for the special representation of the Depressed Classes altogether.’

(Duncan, 2005, p.9)

These seemingly abstract mis-classifications have material consequences, as they constitute and create the condition of the first wave of dispossession. The colonial officers’ perception of Kols as being too naive to be touched with representative mechanisms led to their exclusion from consideration for any legal protections. The definition of a “Scheduled Tribe” and determination of who is recognized as belonging to one is not simply a matter of academic and historical interest; it is critical to the application of human rights standards and specific constitutional protection (Kalpana, 2016, p.93). In the case of Uttar Pradesh, where Kols reside, until 1970, there was no recognition of any existing tribal group and yet they are estimated to account for up to eight percent of the total population (Verma, 2013). The exclusion of Kol Adivasis from legal personhood, through the un-making of their identity, was a precondition that excluded Kols from land protection and enabled further dispossession in post-colonial India.

The second wave of dispossession of Kol Adivasi started in the post-colonial Indian state under the powerful caste-state nexus (Vishwanath, 2014). For example, Roma Malik, an activist working in this region, writes that due to the lack of legal protective measures, 700 acres of land allotted for Kols was allocated to the Hindalco company for afforestation (Malik, 2022). Additionally, Malik (2022) has noted a systematic land alienation/dispossession process of Kols by other caste groups, the Forest Department, and bureaucratic officers over the years. This has resulted in the present state of landlessness and extreme poverty. Chandra notes that the bureaucratic figure of Lekhpal6 has been a constant source in transferring land from Adivasi to caste groups, mostly to Thakurs and Brahmins. In her reports, Malik notes that the UP government took 18 years to implement the Land Distribution Act of 1950, during which time hundreds of acres of land were illegally confiscated by the Thakur and registered in the name of their faraway kith-kin and their cows, buffaloes and dogs (Malik, 2022). There are also numerous instances of Thakur and Brahmin caste members’ forceful confiscation of land in collusion with the Forest Department once it is cleared and made suitable for agricultural use. The important part of this story of gradual confiscation is that the Kol Adivasis have been gradually cornered into the rocky terrains (uplands) of the landscape, leaving them with no arable land to cultivate. Even the legal pattas (titles) allotted under Land Distribution Act were located in these rocky, uncultivable lands. In such a landscape, formalization of titles as a means of poverty alleviation and a tool of justice is misleading (Bromley, 2009).

There is an assumption that once you formalize rights, the possessor becomes owner, but this is not how it works in practice, where caste is the central mediator in Indian land struggles. Caste and land modulate each other, even as political economies re-shape them, where caste is strategically articulated by groups seeking land claims (Nielsen, 2019). “Caste is essential to understanding how flows of pecuniary advantage are inflected after dispossession, both as coping strategies and as farce after tragedy” (p. 691). The gradual dispossession and confiscation of land have left Kols with no other option but to resort to everyday illegality, as other lands controlled by Thakur/Brahmans and other caste groups cannot be claimed without risking their lives. On the other hand, official records and working plans of the Forest Department (FD) are filled with stories of the gradual but ever-increasing hold of the FD over territory. For example, one of the working plans notes that, at present, 22,725.30 hectares of government land (also the lands of Gram Sabha, or village assembly)7 have come under the FD control. Records also demonstrate the tension between the competing cartographic imaginations of landscape of the Revenue and Forest Departments, resulting in fuzzy classificatory territorial boundaries, a confusion which is ultimately weaponized as a tactic of dispossession by confusion (Oskarson, 2022). Titles allotted to Adivasis on lands deemed uncultivable become the grounds for framing Adivasis who engage in agriculture on lands under the control of the FD as encroachers, creating grounds for further dispossession.

The year 2006 marked a significant milestone with the enactment of the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, known colloquially as the Forest Rights Act (FRA). The Act recognizes the historical injustices done to Scheduled Tribes and forest dwellers, including Scheduled Castes like Kols, and allows for the granting of individual and community title.8 The FRA grants individual land rights to communities classified as Scheduled Tribes and collective rights to other forest-dwelling communities (which includes different caste groups and Kol Adivasi in this context since they are not recognized as ST). Yet Kols face a challenge in gaining land rights under the Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (OTFD) categorization, due to the evidentiary barrier involved in proving that they have been living and depending on these forest areas for at least three generations or 75 years. This puts the burden of proof on historically marginalized forest-dwelling communities. Scheduled Caste forest-dwelling communities who have historically struggled to gain access to land now find themselves excluded from accessing forest land under the FRA due to their inability to produce such evidence. Such distinctions perpetuate cycles of violence by entangling individuals within a bureaucratic and constitutional maze (Kutty et al., 2019) and perpetuating further forms of material and cultural dispossession.

The scholarship on the FRA, hailed as a liberatory law with a promise of undoing historical injustices (Hebbar, 2022), is dominated of the narrative of implementation failures and the bureaucratic maze designed to create a strangle hold on the communities’ right to claim lands (Kutty et al., 2019). Scholars have noted the complexities of implementing community rights which are understood by the FD as a direct attack on forest resources. Hence collective land claims are largely rejected. Moreover, Ashok Choudhary writes that in the state of Uttar Pradesh, the Social Welfare Department has been made a nodal agency for FRA implementation, and there is no separate scheme for scheduled tribes (Chaudhary, Malik & Gambhir, 2020, p. 11). After decades of failure of the FRA to undo injustices, Kol land claims draw on multiple temporalities, such descent and aboriginality and labor on the land. Arpitha Kodivery (2016) explores the practice of land reclamation as ‘scripts of resistance’ among Kol Adivasi. Land reclamation is a forceful clearing of forest land that historically belonged to the community, and using this as proof of evidentiary bias based on the premise of the FRA. In the case of Manikpur, land has to be brought into existence by clearing forests, which is labor-intensive work that invites various illegalities.9 The Kol demand for recognition as a Scheduled Tribe speaks to these pressing demands imposed by the state and its legalizations, where the status of Scheduled Tribe could have provided a stronger claim on land and resources, and resistance to multiple waves of dispossession.

In another anticipated wave of dispossession, in 2022 the government declared a planned opening of Ranipur Tiger Reserve in Manikpur by re-developing the existing wildlife sanctuary and expanding the area from 230 to 630 sq km, posing an imminent threat of eviction and displacement. The project is the result of the disastrous Ken-Betwa river linking project. The construction of this ambitious project is slated to flood the critical tiger habitat of the Panna Tiger Reserve situated in the neighboring state of Madhya Pradesh, and result in the migration of tigers, for which Ranipur Tiger Reserve serves as a corridor. In August 2024, the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) issued a notification to expedite the eviction of nearly 400,000 people from tiger reserves across India, including 45,000 people from Manikpur. The coming of tiger reserve in the villages of Manikpur is a form of “green grabbing” that represent the latest wave of dispossession (Kabra, 2009, 2020; see also Adams & Hutton, 2007), constituting a politico-ontological environmental conflict (Blaser, 2013) and territorial contestation in which villagers will experience further conservation-induced dispossession. It is also one manifestation of the continual reconfiguration, redefinition, and reimagination of land by the Indian state highlighted by Nikita Sud, which has rendered the status of land in Indian society as ‘unfixed’ (Sud, 2021). This raises the specter of dispossessions yet to come.

4. Discussion

Across these cases, the mechanisms through which dispossession takes place shift over time, and yet re-appear both within and across geographies. They include the overarching systems and logics of colonialism/imperialism and state-building that set dispossessory motives and processes in motion. The consolidation of sovereignty played a crucial role in these dynamics, with treaty-making, territorial acquisitions and laws establishing European heads of state as the ultimate owners of all lands within a colony under colonialism; and the assertion of state sovereignty under post-colonial state-building. Dispossession also includes a suite of specific techniques through which it is operationalized. Treaties are a key technique in the early stages of colonial expansion characterized by nation-to-nation diplomacy, albeit under highly unequal relations of power and forged under coercion, trickery, violence and duress. Cataloging the people, places, and resources of a newly bounded territory through surveys, censuses, and classification of peoples along the scale of civilization made them legible to imperial powers, who could then select the most effective tools for control and extraction.

Once sovereign control was consolidated, tactics shifted. They include the practices of eminent domain to expropriate large areas from local control; and the formalization of property rights through the imposition of distinctively Western property constructs of private, exclusive and alienable title. In both the US and African contexts, this fundamentally re-made land relations by turning land into a commodity while undermining people’s inviolable attachments to place. Crucially, it also served to extract land from the social groups that long occupied and stewarded it, undermining both collective identity and tenure and livelihood security in the process. Between 1887 and 1934, when allotment ended, 65 percent of lands in the reservations of eastern Oklahoma had passed to non-Natives. With significantly higher rates of poverty among Native Americans than white Oklahomans, it is doubtful that this transfer was “welfare-enhancing.” In fact, many lost land out of duress, given the inability to pay property taxes once the land was out of trust. In the Indian context, on the other hand, land titling served as a performative process of recognition, doing little to address the livelihood precarity for Kol Adivasi communities. A final wave of enclosures in the name of conservation represents the latest iteration of dispossession for the case of Manikpur.

Another suite of techniques involves the creation and weaponization of identities. Discourses framing local people as deficient are found across all cases, framing Native Americans as “uncivilized”; Africans as “mired in poverty, ignorance, and superstition” and unproductive; and Kols as “simple” and “backward.” Ethnographic knowledge was also weaponized in the African case - producing legibilities, and using that legibility to deny the legitimacy of those very practices. These racializations held within them justifications for dispossession of land, political authority and identity and for re-making lands and subjects in ways aligned with dominant interests. Identity was also deployed in other ways, establishing who is a rightful “Native” in the U.S. (for statistical extermination); denying rights to citizenship and property and, arguably, erasing Kol’s very existence, in the Indian case; and creating legal certainty about who has the authority to negotiate in land (to facilitate its so-called ‘voluntary’ alienation) in the African case. These findings resonate with wider theorizations of racial formation as a contested process (Omi & Winant 2009), and one that reflects one’s role or position in the formation of society (Wolfe, 2006). This suite of tactics creates the pre-condition for dispossession to happen, while helping to legitimate it.

A final technique was shifting the rules of the game, which provided a further means to dispossess should the aforementioned techniques fail to produce the desired outcome. When treaties or newly created entities with the authority to negotiate in land failed to produce its alienation, for example, coercion, eminent domain, divide-and-rule and other tactics were deployed. The failure to acknowledge failure or the reasons for shifting terrain was itself a mode of governance, producing a constant state of uncertainty while ensuring the intended outcome. It also enabled the use of the law as a promise, followed by the violation of those very promises.

This comparative and historical overview of dispossession suggests that the property rights and land governance orthodoxy needs to be interrogated in several respects. First, the assumed evolution towards private property under conditions of land scarcity and competition shows up not as a natural, endogenous process but one that has been imposed as a mechanism for breaking up collective attachments to land and enabling its alienation. This is an imposed move backed by the force of laws contrived by the economic and political elites to deepen their hold over territory. Formalization of individual property rights is as much a continuation of these longstanding dispossessory processes as it is a solution to (largely state-sanctioned) land grabbing.

To further de-naturalize Western property constructs as the solution to the accumulation of dispossession, it’s important to see property “otherwise” - through the variable ways that human communities have framed and enacted relations to place. A review of non-Western ontologies of land, water and biodiversity found, “myriad examples across diverse human cultures [that] place people within intricate webs of relationality, respect, and reciprocity with other living and non-living things” (DePuy et al., 2022, p. 955). Land in non-western societies is variably treated as teacher (Simpson, 2014), an archive of past social relations (Di Giminiani, 2015; Fairhead and Leach, 1996; Lentz, 2006; Sather, 1990) or site of memory (Tsing 2005; Basso, 1996), with relations to land often enshrining responsibilities over rights and framed through kinship, belonging and attachment rather than ownership (Salmon, 2012; Shipton, 2009). It is common to find individual and collective identity inseparable from place (Camacho, 2013; Coggeshall 2018; Fairhead & Leach 1996; Heatherington, 2010; Lentz, 2006; Salmon, 2012; Sather, 1990; Shipton, 2009; Takano, 2005; Unruh, 2008), and customary tenures designed to sustain and defend those connections and the securities they give rise to (Lentz, 2006; Peters, 2018; Schapera, 1970; Unruh, 2008). Possession, the financial value of resources, the legislation of territorial boundaries, and legal efforts to protect those boundaries and properly manage resources within them all rely on very situated, provincial (Euro-centered) ideas and practices that masquerade as universal truths (Blomley, 2017). These contrasts clearly call for thinking beyond possession as an organizing framework and for ‘resignifying the basic terms of political order’ (Nichols 2020, p. 158) through alternative relationships to place that recognize the inherent value of other beings and relationships and duties towards them (Lefler & Belt, 2022).

5. Conclusions

This paper sought to explore the continuity and commonalities of techniques of dispossession over distinctive geographies and temporalities through historicized case studies on three continents. As these case studies reveal, dispossession is an old art, mutating and changing according to the exigencies of imperial and state power, political economy, accumulation dynamics, place and time, and yet with remarkable persistence and commonalities of both motive and technique. As noted by Chatterjee, dispossession can also function as “a self-perpetuating process, where practices of dispossession, developed at a given time, can set precedent for and be reworked into later programs of land dispossession,” as shown in the tendency for reservations (Africa, US) and protected areas (India) to be subsequently sub-divided or re-designated for an “accumulation of dispossession” by the same social groups (Chatterjee, 2023).

The global political order of nations and property rights and fenced boundaries fumbles through like a scrambling toddler when compared with the generations of sophisticated place-based relationships to land that are sustained among the peoples who have been most commonly dispossessed. Listening to the voices of dispossessed peoples and taking their arguments and knowledge seriously is imperative. Through exploring the perspectives of the dispossessed, it would seem that the processes discussed here have sharpened recognition of a more fundamental relationship between land, place, and people which, at the very least, points the way to a broader scope of options. Diné elder David Begay states it succinctly: “when the land is sick, I am sick, and when I am sick, the land is sick” (quoted in Lefler & Belt, 2022, p. 33). As Native American artist Cannupa Hanska Luger writes in his ingenious interdisciplinary art/poetry/social critique book Survival:

With great and continuous effort separation is possible. Every conflict that has ever occurred has been the consequence of maintaining division. The language of dominance is filled and filed by category…However, the world we live in (and life itself) is in constant flux and the form one thing takes is defined by its relationships to everything it touches. The edges blur at every border and the transition of one thing to another becomes transient. Union is the natural order. Reunion is inevitable.

(Luger, 2025, p. 265)