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• 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]

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]

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]