This book analyzes the politics of land and the use of natural resources in Africa.

1. Introduction: property regimes and land conflict: seeing institutions and their effects; Part I. Property Rights and the Structure of Politics: 2. Land tenure regimes and political order in rural Africa; 3. Rising competition for land: redistribution and its varied political effects; Part II. Ethnicity: Property Institutions and Ethnic Cleavage: 4. Ethnic strangers as second-class citizens; 5. Ethnic strangers as protected clients of the state; Part III. Political Scale: Property Institutions and the Scale and Scope of Conflict: 6. Land conflict at the micro-scale: family; 7. Chieftaincy: the local state as arena of redistributive conflict; 8. Land conflict at the national scale; Part IV. Multiparty Competition: Elections and the Nationalization of Land Conflict: 9. Winning and losing politically allocated land rights; 10. Zimbabwe in comparative perspective; Conclusion: property regimes in political explanation.