Professor Catherine Boone interview: Land rights and conflict in Africa

Catherine Boone, Professor of Comparative Politics and African Political Economy, was interviewed by The Washington Post about her latest book, Property and Political Order in Africa: Land Rights and the Structure of Politics

Catherine Boone wins 2016 Luebbert Book Award for ‘Property and Political Order in Africa’

Professor Catherine Boone’s latest book, ‘Property and Political Order in Africa,’ has won the American Political Science Association’s ‘Gregory Luebbert Book Award’ for the best book in Comparative Politics published in the last two years. She tells us about the book and her ongoing research

The Tentative Developmental State in Rwanda: From Anti-Manufacturing to Recapturing the Domestic Market

Professor Catherine Boone’s book, Property and Political Order in Africa (Cambridge, 2014), has been announced as co-winner of the Luebbert Best Book Award from the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA). It has also won Best Book from the APSA-ASA African Politics Conference Group, and Honorable Mention for the African Studies Association’s Herskovitz Best Book Award. Below is the award citation

The Unexpected Rhetoric of Professional & Technical Writing

Professional Writing & Rhetoric: A compilation of work on research about website usability, ethics, and an editing portfolio and new teacher manua

Legal empowerment of the poor through property rights reform: Tensions and trade-offs of land registration and titling in sub-Saharan Africa

Land registration and titling in Africa has been seen as a means of legal empowerment of the poor that can protect smallholders' and pastoralists' rights of access to land and other land-based resources. Land registration is also on the ethnojustice agenda in parts of Africa and beyond. Yet legal empowerment via registration and titling is also advocated by those who push for the market-enhancing and aggregate growth-promoting commodification of property rights, whereby market forces will transfer land out of the hands of smallholders and into the hands of 'those who can make most efficient or productive use of it'. This paper contrasts these different visions of legal empowerment, showing that each one, rather than offering a straight and clear path to pro-poor outcomes, entails powerful tensions and trade-offs. Registration and titling often have powerful redistributive implications. This helps to explain why debates over land law reform in general, and over registration and titling in particular, have been divisive in some African countries. The analysis highlights some of the broader political, institutional, and economic forces that shape the design and outcomes of land law reforms that may be undertaken (in part) to promote legal empowerment of the poor

Professor Catherine Boone’s book wins award

Professor Catherine Boone’s book, Property and Political Order in Africa (Cambridge, 2014), has been announced as co-winner of the Luebbert Best Book Award from the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA). It has also won Best Book from the APSA-ASA African Politics Conference Group, and Honorable Mention for the African Studies Association’s Herskovitz Best Book Award. Below is the award citation

Rural bias in African electoral systems: legacies of unequal representation in African democracies

Although electoral malapportionment is a recurrent theme in monitoring reports on African elections, few researchers have tackled this issue. Here we theorize the meaning and broader implications of malapportionment in eight African countries with Single Member District (SMD) electoral systems. Using a new dataset on registered voters and constituency level election results, we study malapportionment's magnitude, persistence over time, and electoral consequences. The analysis reveals that patterns of apportionment institutionalized in the pre-1990 era established a long-lasting bias in favor of rural voters. This "rural bias" has been strikingly stable in the post-1990 era, even where the ancien regime has been voted out of power. These findings underscore the importance of the urban-rural distinction in explaining electoral outcomes in Africa

#Zambia Presidential Elections: Why is it so hard to predict a potential winner?

Ahead of Zambia’s presidential by-election, LSE’s Catherine Boone and Michael Wahman look at reasons why incumbent political parties find it so hard to maintain their support in urban areas. This post is part of our African Elections series

Land institutions and political ethnicity in Africa: evidence from Tanzania

Existing work on land politics in Africa suggests that governments, by creating and upholding neocustomary land tenure regimes, create powerful incentives for individuals to embrace state-recognized ethnic identities. This paper strengthens this argument about the institutional determinants of ethnicity's high political salience through the use of contrasting evidence from Tanzania. In Tanzania, non-neocustomary land tenure institutions prevail, and the political salience of ethnic identity is low. Even in a hard-test region of high in-migration and high competition for farmland, the political salience of ethnic identity in land politics is low. The findings suggest that political science needs to take seriously the role of state institutions in producing politically-salient ethnic identities in Africa

Kenya’s devolved land administration marks the start of a new phase of political struggle over land control

Catherine Boone and Ambreena Manji examine whether long-awaited land law reform in Kenya has resolved longstanding land grievances