The recent land invasions in Zimbabwe represent a profound and contradictory revolution in that country's agrarian social order, with implications that have already spilled over the borders of this small southern African country. A settler colonial heritage that tenaciously mapped land and tenure forms into unequal zones according to race is giving way to a more complex and spatially diversified configuration of agrarian property forms and production strategies. Control over access to the means of violence has been devolved to ruling party loyalists, war veterans, army personnel, provincial administrators and local councillors, thus shifting the forms and functions of power exercised in the name of the state and the nation. 'Resettlement', 'squatting' and 'farm invasions' constitute morally charged alternatives in the lexicon of movement across tenurial boundaries. Contested rights to land and to movement are mediated through discourses of national and sub-national belonging and exclusion, with commercial farm workersdeemed foreigners -the chief victims. The dramatic challenge that the invasions pose to private property, and to the rule of law more generally, suggest the possible collapse of large-scale capitalist farming and the withdrawal of aid and foreign investment. Yet, at the same time, new forms of capitalist investment
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