Introduction to the special issue: The politics of land – dominant regimes and situated practices

This special issue examines the politics of land focusing on the intersections of dominant land and property regimes and situated land practices that are not characterized by open conflict, but rather mundane everyday negotiations. The selected papers show that the interrelations between landed practices and regimes of land are extremely variegated and complex, shaped by socio-economic factors as well as by their own peculiar geographies and temporalities. Thus, they can be examined most adequately in the specific geographic, socioeconomic and historical context in which they materialize. Structural factors matter, but they are (continuously) challenged by the agency and everyday practices of many different actors, pursuing different and mutable objectives and following varying trajectories, often far away from the established rules. Viewed like this, dominant regimes of land appear to be less overarching and monolithic than commonly understood.