Conflicts of customary land tenure in rural Africa: is large-scale land acquisition a driver of ‘institutional innovation’?

This study combines legal and anthropological approaches to investigate how the establishment of a large-scale biofuel agro-industry is reinterpreting and potentially transforming customary institutional arrangements in rural Sierra Leone. The contractual relationships established between land acquirers and local authorities can be seen as an ‘institutional innovation’ that aims at interpreting and overcoming the limits of the national land regime. However, by formalizing customary land tenure structures through land registration, such innovations are exacerbating pre-existing social inequalities. We identified four categories of resulting conflicts: interlineage, intervillage, interfamily and intergenerational conflicts. Taken together, these conflicts question the current land-based sociopolitical structures of rural Sierra Leone and could be drivers of societal change.     

High time for high tech? China’s program for an indigenous high technology capability

Chinese policymakers have increasingly turned their attention to developing high technology. The state has, through a number of central directives, attempted to promote the production and commercialization of high tech products. Yet, the level of Chinese high technology products remains fairly low. This article argues that the state, especially in trying to recrease Silicon Valley in China, has learned the wrong lessons from the West’s experience. In order to promote the development of high tech, the state needs to build up a more adequate science and technology infrastructure and to define and protect property rights.     

Winter in Xi’an

正The weather in Xi'an is dominated by mercilessly hot summers and bonechilling winters. Their length makes them seem unending and so overpowering that, sandwiched between these two opposing giants, the other seasons feel inconsequential. This distorted climate cycle leaves me simultaneously eager for change, yet caught unaware when that change finally comes. While I will always prefer the languid heat of