I’m very happy to announce the forthcoming publication of a volume on Land and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding that I co-edited with Mc Gill Geography professor and land tenure guru Jon Unruh. The volume is the third of six volumes in a series on natural resource management and post-conflict peace building. The books are the fruit of a project initiated by the Environmental Law Institute (ELI), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the University of Tokyo, and McGill University with a view to analyzing experiences and documenting good practice in post-conflict peacebuilding and natural resource management.
As with all the volumes, Jon and mine on land tenure issues is meant to be available exclusively for sale at first, but the chapters will be available for free download on the Environmental Peacebuilding website six months after the official announcement of the book’s publication. For instance, the first volume on high-value natural resources (also announced here on TN) is now available in full here, and the second volume on post-conflict restoration of the natural resource base should be available early next month.
As part of the launch several of the authors in the land volume have kindly agreed to provide guest-postings on TerraNullius updating or elaborating on their chapters. These will included the following:
First out is Douglas Batson, who wrote on the need for a cadastral system that records the array of relationships between people and land in Afghanistan. The chapter discusses the relevance of Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) to record customary land tenures, a theme which he will elaborate on in his guest post.
A second post by Paula Defensor Knack will elaborate on her chapter on “Legal Frameworks and Land Issues in Muslim Mindanao” by describing how the subsequent peace agreement between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) has exacerbated some of the conflict dynamics she describes. Finally, a third post by Arthur “Gill” Green will update his chapter on land tenure and peace-building in Aceh, Indonesia.
I’m very pleased to be able to host these guest postings and hope that some of the other authors may yet be moved to update their excellent chapters. I should probably also do a plug for my own chapters as well – one of which, on Cambodia, will be old hat to readers of this blog, but the other of which, on Bosnia, might provide more novelty.
In the latter chapter, I build on astute analysis by both ESI and Gerard Toal in describing an extraordinarily ambitious, mercifully brief and ultimately shambolic attempt by international officials in Bosnia to control all property transactions in the entire country. A footnote in the history of peace-building, one hopes, although great ambitions never seem to entirely run dry.
Guest posts:
– Paula Defensor Knack, Land and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding: The Peace Deal for Mindanao and its lessons for practitioners of environmental peacebuilding (10 April 2014)
– Dan E. Stigall, Land and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding: The durability of Middle Eastern Civil Codes and durable solutions to displacement (26 September 2013)
– Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, Land and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding: Customary governance, property rights, and state building in Afghanistan (08 May 2013)
– Douglas Batson, Land and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding: A new global standard for land administration (25 April 2013)
Rest in peace Mohamed Al-Sweii
The first time I met Dr. Al-Sweii, in March 2012, he was waiting for us at a beachside cafe in Tripoli’s fashionable Gargaresh district. He received us with a dazzling grin, in big fashionable traffic cop glasses and an immaculate suit. I can’t recall exactly what I made of him at the time but I probably assumed at first he was just another one of the good-time boys cruising around liberated Tripoli in shiny cars and tight Italian t-shirts. My notes from early in the meeting are not without a dose of humanitarian snark in the margins (“not clear if has heard of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement”).
Whatever my first impressions, though, the rest of my notes spoke volumes. As the sun sank red to the Mediterranean, Mohamed walked me through a comprehensive aid delivery program built on the same goodwill and amateur enthusiasm that was powering every other government function and public service in Libya at the time. The difference being that his efforts targeted the virtual untouchables of the revolution, the communities driven out from their homes, persecuted and made to bear collective guilt for four decades of humiliation under the ousted dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
The next time I met Mohamed, it was in the cavernous bullet-riddled former Mercedes dealership in the center of town where he spent his days coordinating aid delivery, escaping to unwind in the cool breezes of Gargaresh only late in the afternoon. It was perhaps at this time I heard the whole story of how he had been a medical student in Benghazi when the revolution broke out and volunteered to fly back and forth to the front lines at Ajdabiya, rescuing battle-wounded overnight revolutionaries in a jerry-rigged ambulance.
Dr. Mohamed put a face on those turbulent times for me. It was him, young and idealistic, suppressing his fear by the things he could do with his own mind and his hands, who would build up a new and better country.
Now, three years after the revolution, Mohamed found himself back in Benghazi, once again risking his own life to save those injured in a far murkier and more ambiguous conflict. People like Mohamed, or the human rights lawyer Salwa Al-Bugaighis murdered last June in Benghazi are the most important resource Libya has. A country denied institutions cannot afford to lose the individuals who give of themselves most freely.
Rest in peace Doctor Mohamed. Libya, heal thyself.
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Tagged humanitarian aid, humanitarian response, Libya, UNHCR