Land expropriation and displacement in Bangladesh

This paper examines land grabbing in Bangladesh and views such seizures through the lens of displacement and land encroachment. Two different but potentially interacting displacement processes are examined. The first, the char riverine and coastal sediment regions that are in a constant state of formation and erosion, are contested sites ripe for power plays that uproot small producers on their rich alluvial soils. The second examines new patterns of land capture by elites who engage gangs, corrupted public servants and the military to coerce small producers into relinquishing titles to their ever more valuable lands in and near urban areas. These historically specific and contingent land grabs draw attention to in situ displacement, where people may remain in place or experience a prolonged multi-stage process of removal. This contrasts with ex situ displacement, a decisive expulsion of people from their homes, communities and livelihoods. In both the char and peri-urban case, we signal new forms of collective action in response to involuntary alienation of land resources in a rapidly and violently transforming political economy. We conclude with a caution against naturalizing displacement, casting it as an ‘inevitable’ consequence of changing weather conditions in the former and population dynamics in the latter.     

Waiting for Palestine: refracted citizenship and latent sovereignty in Gaza

This article explores the dynamics of citizenship under conditions of statelessness and in territories with uncertain sovereignty. The Gaza Strip under Egyptian Administration (1948–1967) – a nearly indefinable entity that was under Egyptian authority but no one's sovereignty – offers an especially good site for this exploration. In this period, both the government and the population were invested in some notion of Palestinian citizenship, but there was no Palestinian state to codify that concept. The Palestinian loss of formal citizenship with the end of the British Mandate in 1948, and the continued absence of this legal category, has shaped Palestinian life and political identification in profound ways. Even under these conditions, though, both conceptions about, and the social practice of, citizenship have also been crucially important for Palestinian community. Conditions in Gaza under Egyptian Administration illuminate a ‘refracted citizenship’ that articulated a relationship to both a future state and an existing government. Considering both the earlier dynamics of citizenship and sovereignty under the contested circumstances of the Mandate and the details of Egyptian governing practices in Gaza, the article argues that refracted citizenship provided a mechanism for people to make claims of the existing government and offered a means for that government to better manage the place and people of Gaza. Refracted citizenship also enabled people to build new community relations within Gaza – to develop a sense of specifically Gazan community – without feeling that they were jeopardizing their claims to Palestinian citizenship.     

Does personalization of officeholders undermine the legitimacy of the office? On perceptions of objectivity in legal decisionmaking

Public legitimation of legal decisionmaking can be promoted through various strategies. We examine strategies of legitimation that are premised on personalizing the public image of legal agents. A personalized public administration emphasizes individual decisionmakers and seeks legitimacy through familiarity with the character, identity, and virtues of individual agents, whereas a non-personalized public administration projects an ethos of technocratic decisionmaking, seeking legitimacy through institutional objectivity and impartiality. We conducted an experiment to examine the efficacy of personalization strategies in the context of a politically charged legal affair: the criminal cases involving the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. We focus on people's perceived objectivity of the office of the Israeli attorney general (AG), given exposure (vs. no exposure) to different types of personal information about the AG, and while manipulating the salience of contrasting decisions concerning Netanyahu (indicting him on several counts of corruption versus exculpating him in others). We find that exposure to personal information about the AG decreased the perceived objectivity of his office, compared to no exposure to personal information, regardless of the type of information, decision salience, and respondents' political leanings. Our findings, therefore, support the legitimating potential of the non-personalization of decisionmakers, and show that it pertains to people positioned as both “losers” and “winners” with regard the political impact of the decision. The study further reflects the capacity of nonabstract real-world, real-time, analyses to shed light on the drivers of public trust in legal decisionmaking in politically polarized contexts—an issue of pertinence in many contemporary democracies.