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Kazakhstan has followed a foreign policy of multivector diplomacy since its independence from the former Soviet Union. While multivectorism was a strategy of necessity in its early years, it has evolved to empower Kazakhstan to effectively protect its independence and negotiate its relationship with the great powers on its borders and further afield. After the 2014 Russian seizure of Crimea it is noteworthy that Kazakhstan has maintained positive relations with Russia while asserting its sovereignty and independent foreign policy. In this article we investigate how Kazakhstan has negotiated the rise of China, taking advantage of the economic opportunities it presents. We trace the foreign policy of Kazakhstan from independence forward, examining its relationships with its Great Power neighbours and its role in international organizations and negotiations. We posit that multivectorism is similar to the strategy of omni-enmeshment and complex balancing seen in south-east Asia. Both are effective methods for secondary powers to protect their sovereignty and to coexist with Great Powers without becoming their client states. Kazakhstan's approach to foreign policy is an exemplar for secondary states. This article contributes to the literature on the strategic decision-making of secondary powers and to the theoretical analysis of the foreign policy of Kazakhstan during a critical moment of transition from the long-time rule of Nursultan Nazarbayev to the presidency of Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foreign direct investment (FDI) can deliver benefits beyond the provision of capital, such as efficiency gains. We argue that the theorised positive effects of economic linkage are reduced when linkages are based on natural resources. Domestic elite coalitions supporting reform are also weaker in countries with extensive natural resources. Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan have high-value natural resources and significant FDI, making them most likely cases for reform. Kyrgyzstan is a contrasting case as it has few natural resources. We find that the institutional reforms we would anticipate because of linkages have not occurred and those that exist are often cosmetic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The property rights of children is an understudied area that straddles the development/humanitarian divide. Access to assets is important to the livelihood choices and economic well-being of adults. Yet, adults' ability to claim property can be significantly impaired by humanitarian emergencies that occurred in their youth. We typically do not think of children as economic actors because of their age; their property rights are future rights not yet realized. This paper addresses the future rights to property held by children and examines how fragile environments, characterized by conflict, displacement and disease, can undermine their ability to claim those rights when they become adults, thus depriving them of assets. We identify two types of responses that can begin to address this problem: (1) legal changes to protect children's assets when guardianship is lost; and (2) actions that can be taken by humanitarian organizations to identify children's assets and protect them through conflict and displacement. This is a particularly salient topic at the current time when the numbers of displaced people are higher than any time previously recorded, and half of the displaced are children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• There is a misalignment between guidelines on post-conflict property restitution and claims under customary law. • Restitution strategies are problematic in areas with incomplete population return and without records of land boundaries, occupation and value. • The willingness of refugees and IDPs to return to pre-conflict communities should not be assumed. • We observe three post-conflict trajectories of change of customary land tenure systems: erosion; adaptation; and replacement. • Further research is required around the erosion and adaptation of post-conflict customary tenure systems. Since the 1990s a body of soft international law and public policy has developed around property restitution after conflict. The Pinheiro Principles and the Voluntary Guidelines for the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (VGGT) both proffer remedies for property losses experienced due to violent conflict and forced displacement. These international guidelines for remediating harm caused by property loss or damage in conflict at best only partially address losses in customary tenure systems. This article has two goals: first, to delineate where the international guidelines are out of step with the nature of customary tenure; and second, to identify trajectories of change for customary land tenure systems after violent conflict. These two issues are fundamentally linked. The characteristics of post-conflict environments– contested authority structures, displaced and returning populations, and contentious land relations – make customary land vulnerable to expropriation and elevate the threat of asset loss for customary rights holders. This challenges the assumption that people can always return to rural agricultural livelihoods when displaced from customary land; that is only true if those customary land systems function the way they did before the violence. This article draws on a socio-legal analysis of secondary sources and qualitative data gathered by the authors through focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews in rural communities in Burundi, Liberia, and Uganda over the past decade. Because customary land tenure systems are prevalent over much of the territory currently affected by violent conflict in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, the absence of specific restitution policies for customary tenure systems is a significant gap in international public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forced migration has become commonplace in the international political landscape. In 2015, 60 million people were displaced by violence, more than ever before recorded ( UNHCR, 2015). While we know that violence leads to displacement, we know little about return migration after conflict - who comes back and where they settle. This article seeks to engage and supplement the literature on return migration after conflict, advocating for a broader understanding of the security choices made by displaced people. Emphasized here is the importance of a local understanding of safety and the role played by enclave communities in providing a secure context in which people can enjoy the society of their co-ethnics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Mass displacement of people due to violence poses a unique set of challenges for property restitution when people return to their homes after a long absence. This is particularly evident in rural areas where the dominant form of land holding is customary tenure. Violence-induced displacement, unlike voluntary migration, challenges both customary and public legal-administrative structures. The lack of written documentation of customary holdings and the importance of the support of community leaders means that incorporating returnees back into a community can be easier for those who choose to return, while reclaiming property without physical return is nearly impossible. This article seeks to make three contributions: 1) to note the diversity of return processes after long displacements in terms of timing and demographics; 2) to demonstrate that the nature of the claims people can make on customary tenure systems is at odds with international legal norms on property restitution after displacement; and 3) to introduce a set of observations and questions on how conflict can change customary law. The article is based on fieldwork conducted in Uganda, Liberia and Timor-Leste, all countries with extended displacement where most of the rural land is held via customary claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kosovo is one of several Western Balkan countries that are part of the next round of accession to the EU. Like Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia, it is also a country in which the history of conflict is recent and the benefits of EU membership ought to be a strong economic and political enticement to meet the standards necessary for membership. Yet, instead of major transformation of the post-conflict society towards democratization, economic development, and a robust human rights regime, the prospect of European Union membership appears to be leading to superficial legal changes without enforcement. This article investigates the tensions between internal challenges to legal change and external pressures for reform, adding to the literature on the decoupling of Europeanization and domestic change in candidate countries. A short analysis of one policy area, women’s property rights, illuminates the gaps between legal change and enforcement processes. The article also considers how and when a change in law can lead to social change. It is argued here that legal change in response to EU conditionalities may begin superficially, but creates an opportunity for collective action that can eventually lead to democratic change and a more robust enforcement of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Customary law is an alternative legal framework to statute or public law. In the past, the existence of customary law was viewed as problematic due to the uncertainty which accompanies legal pluralism. Increasingly, scholars are recognizing legal pluralism as simply a reality to be negotiated, rather than a problem. One frequently proposed solution to the difficulties posed by the existence of customary law is to write it down, or ascertain it, in order to provide for legal certainty. This article addresses this goal in three parts. The first part describes customary law and how it functions in its uncodified form in post-colonial settings, specifically in Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia. While customary law thrived under colonization, it merely survived socialism where it was often explicitly undermined. The second part of the article details the reasons why scholars and public officials have often suggested writing customary law down as a solution, and situates these arguments within the contemporary debate on legal pluralism. In the third section, a specific case of written customary law, the Albanian Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini, is analyzed with a focus on its modem usage in a post-socialist context. The paper concludes noting that ascertainment does not bring legal certainty to customary law in the ways that are anticipated. Writing down an oral tradition or a practice may produce a document for reference, but this does not limit its use nor necessarily increases the predictability of its application. The article also emphasizes the role of customary law in defining group identity in post-socialist settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is currently in international law an overstatement of the tie between property and identity. International conventions have folded property into a set of immutable human rights. There needs to be greater flexibility and nuance in this perspective. In this article, we identify two approaches to property rights: the first, which argues that property and identity are necessarily bundled together and considers property to be a human right; and the second, which understands them as explicitly separate and views property as a commodity. Empirically, we observe a transition between these two competing ideas. We posit that this transition happens voluntarily, with market development, or involuntarily through displacement due to conflict and disaster. The relationship between property and identity changes based on time, circumstance, and individual choice. Rights-based norms regarding property, and more specifically the restitution of property after displacement, need to be sufficiently flexible to encompass changes in identity and context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: After decades of civil conflict leading to massive internal displacement of people, Northern Uganda is peaceful again and hundreds of thousands of displaced people have returned to the area. Using data from maps and satellite imagery, we examine the placement of homes before, during and after the conflict. Examining two study sites, one that experienced a great deal of violence over an extended period of time and one where the experience of violence was more limited, we observe the clustering of home placement in the post-conflict period. As resettlement occurs, there is also evidence of increased location of homes in close proximity to roads at the site with high levels of violence. This research informs what we presently know about the choices of returnees and has implications for service provision and the reclamation of property rights after conflict. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Scholars have argued that economic efficiency requires a clear definition of the rights of ownership, contract, and transfer of land. Ambiguity in the definition or enforcement of any of these rights leads to an increase in transaction costs in the exchange and transfer of land as well as a residual uncertainty after any land contract. In Kenya, government efforts at establishing clearly defined property rights and adjudication mechanisms have been plagued by the existence of alternative processes for the adjudication of disputes. Customary dispute resolution has been praised as an inexpensive alternative to official judicial processes in a legally pluralistic environment. However, our research demonstrates that customary processes may also carry a monetary cost that puts them beyond the means of many citizens. This article compares the costs and processes of the formal and informal methods of property rights adjudication for women in the Kisii region of Kenya. The research results suggest that women have weak property rights overall, they have limited access to formal dispute resolution systems because of costs involved, and even the informal systems of conflict resolution are beyond the means of many citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many sub-Saharan African countries are embarking on major changes in their property fights law with the goal of achieving more vigorous economic growth and alleviating poverty. Uganda has been at the forefront of these changes with constitutional change and a new land law. The Ugandan land law encapsulates recent efforts to formalize existing informal property fights. Implementation and enforcement of the 1998 Land Act are examined through paired case studies. There have been three major impediments to implementation: lack of capacity, corruption, and customary law. While the new land law has been necessary to change property fights, it has faced obstacles in its implementation that undermine secure property fights to land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smallholder settlement schemes have played a prominent role in Kenya's contested history of state-building, land politics, and electoral mobilization. This paper presents the first georeferenced dataset documenting scheme location, boundaries, and attributes of Kenya's 533 official settlement schemes, as well as the first systematic data on scheme creation since 1980. The data show that almost half of all government schemes were created after 1980, as official rural development rationales for state-sponsored settlement gave way to more explicitly welfarist and electoralist objectives. Even so, logics of state territorialization to fix ethnicized, partisan constituencies to state-defined territorial units pervade the history of scheme creation over the entire 1962–2016 period, as theorized in classic political geography works on state territorialization. While these "geopolitics" of regime construction are fueled by patronage politics, they also sustain practices of land allocation that affirm the moral and political legitimacy of grievance-backed claims for land. This fuels on-going contestation around political representation and acute, if socially-fragmented, demands for state-recognition of land rights. Our findings are consistent with recent political geography and interdisciplinary work on rural peoples' demands for state recognition of land rights and access to natural resources. Kenya's history of settlement scheme creation shows that even in the country's core agricultural districts, where the reach of formal state authority is undisputed, the territorial politics of power-consolidation and resource allocation continues to be shaped by social demands and pressures from below. • New georeferenced data tracks Kenyan settlement schemes since 1962. • Data over more than five decades suggests changing purpose of land settlement schemes. • State territorialization strategies through land allocation are a constant over time. • Land hunger and societal demands for land shape state practices and policies. • Current policy debates call for new research on settlement, land allocation, and agriculture in Kenya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]