Solomon Islands has often been seen as exemplifying wider concerns regarding customary land tenure, economic development and political instability in the southwest Pacific. Locals express concern regarding inequality in land control at multiple scales, while aid donors urge people to register land as a means to increase legal certainty, build peace and render land more ’marketable’. This chapter situates debates about land in Solomon Islands within wider global debates regarding customary tenure, gender inequality and state regulation. It highlights a long-standing divide in feminist debates, between those who perceive land tenure in terms of a hierarchically ordered and gendered ‘bundle of rights’, and those who perceive land as subject to fluid, negotiable claims. Drawing insights from legal geography, political ecology and feminist scholarship on legal pluralism, it suggests that a focus on the ways in which ‘access’ to resources is transformed into state-sanctioned ‘property’ recognises that property is negotiable while also highlighting factors that contribute to inequality. This approach also directs attention to the role of scholars in the formation of property.

This chapter extends existing literature on property, political authority and state formation by focusing on the gendered aspects of ethno-territorial conflict. From late 1998, Solomon Islands was plunged into a period of conflict, and by 2003, it was regarded as a ‘failed state’. Militants made territorial claims that were grounded in highly gendered notions of culture and ethnicity, and in the aftermath of the conflict, attention has been devoted to consolidating these distinctions via a new constitution adopting a federal system. While ’the Tension’ has often been interpreted as exposing the fragility of state institutions and the tenacity of custom, this chapter argues that it must be understood as emerging from processes of state formation. These processes are profoundly gendered, and reproduce state norms and institutions as a masculine, even hypermasculine, domain. This is highlighted by the widespread gender-based violence perpetrated by militants during the conflict, which was not merely an effect of territorial claims, but constituted them, with devastating consequences for women, children and men who perceived and sought to express themselves differently.

Displacement and genocide, rather than fully eliminating the Haitian presence in Dominican territory, fomented new forms of contestation, tension, and conflict. Refugees’ prolonged patterns of contestation and resistance contributed to tense relations along the border throughout the 1940s. This chapter details ethnic Haitians’ methods of irregular resistance, which included secret farms, livestock-theft, the right of return, and in some rare cases, arson and vandalism. These incidents provide a window into some refugees’ political consciousness surrounding genocide, displacement, lost citizenship, and lost homeland. The chapter argues that ethnic Haitians challenged Trujillo’s territorial sovereignty and Dominicanization through land contestation, arson, and clandestine farming. Of these phenomena, clandestine farming was the most enduring and widespread form of resistance because it was the least dangerous and also functioned as a desperate survival strategy. The genocide continued throughout the 1940s in the form of isolated killings by which Trujillo’s government enforced the parallel policies of a closed border and Dominicanization. This chapter considers the ways in which desperate, irregular social contestation through nighttime farming and cross-border livestock-theft represented disturbing, latter-day echoes of colonial marronage.