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Forced Migration, Land and Sovereignty1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Finn Stepputat
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Abstract

Land is a key issue in the aftermath of wars. The return or resettlement of displaced populations accentuates land-related problems, and international support seeks to strengthen the state's administration of land. This article explores ethnographically a land conflict in Guatemala between returning refugees and former members of a civil defence patrol, including the intervention of state and international institutions. In dialogue with Carl Schmitt's idea that land appropriation, first measurements and division are constitutive of the order and orientation of political community, the analysis suggests that bodily presence at the land, potential use of violence and negotiated measurement, continue to be features of post-colonial states despite attempts to solve land problems once and for all.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , 2008 , pp. 337 - 357
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2008.

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Footnotes

1

I am grateful to my colleagues at the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University, and in particular to Richard Khernaghan and Liza Grandia, for their encouraging and insightful comments during the conception and writing of this article. Also thanks to Eva-Lotta Hedman and an anonymous referee for their comments and questions.

References

2 See, for example, Land and Equity Movement, Land Matters in Displacement, Kampala, CSOPNU, 2004; John Bruce, Drawing a Line Under the Crisis: Reconciling Returnee Land Access and Security in Post-Conflict Rwanda, HPG Working Paper, London, Overseas Development Institute June 2007; odi/hpg research project, land tenure in conflict and post-conflict situations, available at http://odi.org.uk/hpg/land.html. On forced migration emergencies, see Susan F. Martin et al., The Uprooted: Improving Humanitarian Responses to Forced Migration, Oxford, Lexington Books, 2005.Google Scholar

3 See in particular Finn Stepputat, ‘Repatriation and Everyday Forms of State Formation in Guatemala’, in Richard Black and Khaled Koser (eds), The End of the Refugee Cycle?, Oxford, Berghahn Books, 1999, pp. 210–26.Google Scholar

4 Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum, New York, Telos Press Publishing, 2006, first published 1950.Google Scholar

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7 On the basis of nomos it would be interesting to explore how the foundation of the international refugee and human rights regime after the two World Wars was influenced by an international system which, in Schmitt's interpretation, was characterized by the ascending American dominion and the disintegration of the international law of jus publicus Europaeum that had kept some kind of order in Europe for three centuries. But this is beyond the aim of this articleGoogle Scholar

8 Schmitt, The Nomos, p. 48.Google Scholar

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12 See in particular J. C. Cambranes (ed.), 500 Años de Lucha por la Tierra, Guatemala, FLACSO, 1985; and David McCreery, Rural Guatemala 1760–1940, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1994.Google Scholar

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14 The concept of fincas de mozos refers to private estates in the highland that were not productive in terms other than providing workforce for coffee plantations at the lower altitudes. See McGreery, Rural Guatemala.Google Scholar

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17 From a petition for land credit to FONAPAZ from the communities of Guaxacaná and Trinidad, March 1995. UNHCR archive, Nentón.Google Scholar

18 As such, the return programme became a pilot project for the later implementation of a market-based land reform in other areas of Guatemala, in particular the Petén. See Liza Grandia, ‘Unsettling: Recurring Dispossessions of the Q'eqchi' Maya and New Frontiers of Enclosure’, manuscript under review. 2007.Google Scholar

19 See for example Craib, Cartographic Mexico; and Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995.Google Scholar

20 Acuerdo Final, 19 September 1994.Google Scholar

21 It should be mentioned also that the government of Guatemala had a particular interest in this return because it was the first made by a group that had separated from the left-leaning anti-statist organization of refugees, the Permanent Commissions, who had negotiated the accord on return.Google Scholar

22 See Redfield, Robert, ‘Primitive Merchants of Guatemala’, Quarterly Journal of Inter-American Relations, 1: 4 (1939), pp. 42–56.Google Scholar See also Georg Simmel, ‘The Stranger’, in D. N. Levine (ed.), Georg Simmel. On Individuality and Social Forms. Selected Writings, Chicago, Chicago University Press 1971, pp. 143–9.

23 As suggested by Jan de Vos, Las Fronteras de la Frontera Sur. Reseña de los proyectos de expansion que figuraron la frontera entre Mexico y Centroamerica, Villahermosa, Mexico, Universidad Juarez Autónoma de Tabasco, 1993.Google Scholar

24 As Anderson noted, shapes of national territories have become icons of the nation-states, but in this case it could be the other way round. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London, Verso, 1983.Google Scholar

25 The lack of confidence in the methods and intentions behind the fixing of the border resulted in Guatemalan complaints of having lost much more territory and population than the Mexicans due to a misinterpretation of the names of the rivers in the Petén. It took 13 years of renegotiations before the issue was finally settled in 1895.Google Scholar

26 Craib, Cartographic Mexico, p. 107.Google Scholar

27 Craib, Cartographic Mexico.Google Scholar

28 As members of Jehovah's Witness they were entirely against the use of violence and had successfully resisted the demand to organize a civil patrol.Google Scholar

29 For example, Yoltún has no electricity yet, despite the fact that the infrastructure has been installed. But the mozos colonos are in control of the supply line running through their village, and the returnees have not been able to deliver on their economic demands.Google Scholar

30 Schmitt, Carl. The Nomos, p. 48.Google Scholar