Land Inequality and Rural Unrest

Abstract

What is the relationship between landholding inequality and rural unrest? And why does land reform that ostensibly addresses rural grievances sometimes exacerbate unrest? We advance the understanding of these longstanding questions by shifting the emphasis from how landholding inequality fuels rural grievances to how it captures the collective action capacity of landowners. Using municipal-level data from Brazil’s large land reform program from 1988 to 2013, we demonstrate that the relationship between landholding inequality and unrest is conditional. Isolated threats to landed elites in the form of land invasions are difficult to repel, generating a positive relationship between landholding inequality and one-off land invasions. By contrast, sustained, broader local threats triggered by nearby land reforms catalyze landowner organization to repel land invasions, leading to the reverse relationship. The findings provide a novel answer for why a straightforward link between land inequality and rural unrest is elusive and may generalize to a broad range of similar cases.

From chains to chainsaws: Modern slavery and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

“…Relations between racism and Brazil's economic system can explain why Brazil has one of the most unequal land distributions in the world, with a 0.73 land Gini-coefficient (WCMC, 2020). Scholars have emphasised that the 1850 Lei de Terras law has contributed to Brazil's land distribution issues and persistent inequality (Albertus et al, 2018; Damasceno et al, 2017; Oliveira, 2013; Silva, 2015; Wilkinson et al, 2012). As slavery came closer to abolition, landowners lobbied for the Lei de Terras law, where land ownership could now be gained through purchase, rather than occupancy (Albertus et al, 2018; Damasceno et al, 2017).…”

“…Scholars have emphasised that the 1850 Lei de Terras law has contributed to Brazil's land distribution issues and persistent inequality (Albertus et al, 2018; Damasceno et al, 2017; Oliveira, 2013; Silva, 2015; Wilkinson et al, 2012). As slavery came closer to abolition, landowners lobbied for the Lei de Terras law, where land ownership could now be gained through purchase, rather than occupancy (Albertus et al, 2018; Damasceno et al, 2017). Implementing land regulation was a deliberate strategy to keep people previously enslaved asset and income poor, making them dependent on landowners for survival, and maintaining conditions suitable for exploitation (Albertus et al, 2018; Meszaros, 2013).…”

Does credit availability mitigate domestic conflict?

“…Notwithstanding the relevance and exogenous characteristics of land reforms as instruments presented above, in the empirical analysis, we produce results after dropping Latin American countries as a sub-sample to weed out any potential contamination of exogeneity restrictions. Countries in Latin America are besieged with large scale inequality in land ownership and some of the conflicts may arise out of land reform implementations (Albertus et al, 2018), nullifying the exogeneity assumption of instruments. Thus, dropping them in subsample of empirical analysis would alleviate any remaining exogeneity concerns.…”

“…Table 5 presents results for developing countries except for Latin American region countries. Possible conflict involving land is quite prevalent in Latin America (Albertus et al, 2018;Albertus, 2020).…”

Violence in the Rural Global South

“…However, these mechanisms are not that simple. Albertus, Brambor, and Ceneviva (2016) show using municipal-level data from Brazil's large land reform program from 1988 to 2013, that the relationship between landholding inequality and rural unrest is not straightforward, yet both generate violence.…”