Rival jurisdictions on a resource frontier: Law, territorialization, and inscription in the Eastern Cape, South Africa

A framework for understanding land control transfer in agricultural commodity frontiers

“…Overt resistance can also involve less confrontational tactics. Strategies of counter‐mapping and counter‐inscription, by means of community‐led territorial mapping and census initiatives, for example (Bauer, 2009; IIED, 2006; Shepard, 2002), are used to challenge tactics of control through imposed legibility, to assert presence, and to illuminate harms (Cooke, 2003; Huizenga, 2022; Wainwright & Bryan, 2009). Similarly, reactive strategies of counter‐enclosure, including demarcation, fencing, and titling, are used to match and thus most effectively challenge new claims to ownership (Paz, 2020).…”

“…Where resources are ‘discovered’, the appropriation of those resources involves competition and negotiation between active occupants and users of a given space and the newly involved actors doing the ‘discovering’ (Chaumbra et al, 2003; Gasparri, 2016), each party bringing to the table different perspectives and interests (Zepharovich et al, 2020). Prior to being sites of land‐use transformation, agricultural commodity frontiers are thus contact zones characterized by relational fault lines (Huizenga, 2022; Korf & Raeymaekers, 2013; Rasmussen & Lund, 2018), ‘ecological, social, economic and political battlegrounds where social actors dispute power and try to prevail over other actors' interests’ (Cáceres, 2015, p. 118). The battle fought, fundamentally, is for access to resources and the transfer of control over land to the dominant party the outcome (Peluso & Lund, 2011).…”