Book Extract: Land Power

Extracted with permission from Land Power, Michael Albertus, Profile Books/ Hachette India.

ONE SMALL STEP FOR WOMEN

Elena PARODIS MEDINA WAS BORN AND RAISED IN THE countryside of northern Colombia. Her story is a typically complex one in a society that has been rent by land strife and conflict for the better part of a century, but it also has a simple through line: for generations, men in her family worked the land, mostly as hired help or as renters, while women raised the children and hustled to help make ends meet.

Elena came of age working on nearby farms to help her parents put bread on the table for her and her nine younger siblings. She met her husband on one of these farms and together they moved to work at a large ranch nearby named Tranquilandia. The ranch owners let them live on a small plot, where they raised six children together and grew food for their own consumption. But they longed to have land of their own.

They were not alone. When the ranch owners sought to sell the property, the farmworkers at Tranquilandia formed an association and petitioned the Colombian government to buy the estate and turn it over to them. They succeeded. In 1996, Colombia’s national land agency purchased the property and handed it over to its workers to divide among themselves.

This reshuffle represented a pivotal moment in Colombia’s history of land reallocation. After decades of doling out land to men and privileging men in land ownership, women began organizing and advocating for their fair share. International and domestic women’s rights movements worked together, and in the 1980s they convinced the Colombian government to shift to jointly granting land to both partners of couples.

Elena and her husband provisionally received a plot of eighty acres where they grew corn, cassava, plantains, and bananas, raised pigs, and had three cows for milking. It was a modest life. But Elena’s land was not quite hers; she and her husband had to make monthly payments to the government in order to eventually be granted full ownership with a clear title. Just a few years later, war would shatter the dream of land ownership.

Leftist guerrilla groups had formed in Colombia’s countryside in the mid-1960s to contest large landholding and the elite-dominated political system. One of their central demands was land reallocation in favor of landless peasants. By the 1990s, the country’s civil war was metastasizing and had drawn in drug cartels and paramilitary groups.

In 2001, paramilitaries entered the farms at Tranquilandia and targeted the farming association. They brutally killed many of its leaders and several members, burnt their homes, and committed a host of unspeakable human rights abuses. The danger escalated so quickly that Elena’s family had no time to even gather their belongings before they were forced to flee. She and her husband lost everything, including one of their sons, to the violence and chaos. Their family was now homeless, living and begging in the streets of the nearby town of Fundación. Her children slept on park benches. “That was really hard,” she recalls. “We suffered a lot.”

Meanwhile, along with a number of their neighbors who also fled from their homes, they began the process of registering their property for restitution. The group, driven mainly by women who had survived the forced displacement, eventually got in touch with a legal nonprofit called the Yira Castro Legal Corporation (Corporación Jurídica Yira Castro). Named after the prominent activist and leader for women’s rights and student demands Yira Castro, the nonprofit helped families displaced by Colombia’s conflict in their effort to recover their land and livelihoods. It worked with the land agency to find the legal documents on the prior land transfer and verify that Elena and her husband and the other families had faithfully made their monthly land payments to the agency prior to their displacement.

In 2019, after the land agency and the courts had sifted through a heap of subsequent land transactions at Tranquilandia and associated land claims in the aftermath of the paramilitary incursion, the land agency called a meeting in a local school to deliver land back to the remaining members of the original community. Elena went there on a typically hot and humid day on November 14 along with other beneficiaries, officials from the land agency, and the members of the legal team that had provided aid for the petition. Recalling the feeling she’d had when the agency handed over the title for the land, she told me, “I was so happy after so many years to know that we got the land we had so wished for.” It was an appropriate ending for someone who lived near the childhood home of Gabriel García Márquez, Colombia’s most famed author, known for his fantastical novels full of twists and turns.

Elena is one of the first women in her extended family to own land. It has changed her life. “When you know how to work, it makes you feel proud. And when you have your own land to work, well, it feels really good,” she said. She now works the farm with her husband and two of her children. Together with her daughter, who serves as secretary of the association of restituted families at Tranquilandia, she is active in pushing for development and better infrastructure in the area.

Elena is one of many thousands of Colombian women who have come to own land for the first time since the government pivoted to be more inclusive of them at the behest of women’s organizations. This historic shift, which started in the 1980s, has advanced the position of women in society and is part of a broader shift away from male dominance over both public and private affairs in the country. It reveals land power’s capacity to give women opportunities that their mothers and grandmothers could not have conceived.

As we have seen, land plays a foundational role in the creation of wealth and power, so when it changes hands, the beneficiaries make gains in both respects. The transformations of the past two centuries across the globe have largely left women out, deepening gender inequities, sometimes through inattention, and sometimes by de- sign. But these dynamics, much like the underdevelopment trap, are not intractable. Prodded by increasingly organized women’s movements and changing sensibilities about traditional gender roles and norms, some societies have embraced a different approach to land and gender.

Land ownership is an object of change as well as an accelerator of it. When men dominate landholding, it can tighten the grip of patriarchy by giving them greater control over household decisions and in- heritance. But land also has the power to loosen men’s hold. Putting land into the hands of women can empower them to own their own destiny, gain wealth and influence, and improve the welfare of their families. The effects trickle into every gendered aspect of society.

Reversing patriarchy is never a fast and uncontroversial process. In most places, there is a long-standing edifice of male-owned property that cannot be easily dismantled, especially if property rights are strong. Progress toward gender equity in land ownership struggles with this potent legacy. Gender-based reforms to property ownership can also unsettle relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, and citizens and rulers. It is sensitive terrain. But it can be done.

Changing gender relations through land is easiest to do in places where there is land readily available to reallocate or in places where property rights are poorly defined and can be rewritten. Two particularly notable paths toward advancing gender equity with land run through Colombia and Bolivia.

Colombia revised its male-biased land reallocation laws in the late 1980s to be more inclusive of women. As more women began to directly gain land, the gender gap in the ownership of land began to close, and bit by bit Colombian society started becoming fairer for women.

In Bolivia, an enormous program of land reallocation in the second half of the twentieth century largely overlooked women and entrenched gender disparities. But property rights were weak across the board. As economic crisis and foreign intervention pushed property rights to the fore, women had a chance for a redo. Fueled by powerful women’s movements and a reformist government, Bolivia has put women on the map over the past twenty years by granting them ownership of land along with men. Although rural women continue to struggle, many of them now have opportunities and a voice that their mothers and grandmothers could not have dreamed of.

*****

Michael Albertus Land Power: who has it, Who doesn’t, and how that determines the fate of societies Basic Books UK, an imprint of John Murray Press/ Hachette India, London, 2025. Pb. Pp. 322. Rs 799

An award-winning political scientist shows that a society's path to prosperity, sustainability, and equality depends on who owns the land.

For millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think - in Land Power, political scientist Michael Albertus shows that who owns the land determines whether a society will be equal or unequal, whether it will develop or decline, and whether it will safeguard or sacrifice its environment.

Modern history has been defined by land reallocation on a massive scale. In the 1700s and 1800s, European colonial powers and new nation-states snapped up indigenous land around the globe and granted it to landless settlers. In the 1900s, Soviets and Maoists appropriated masses of land for communal farming, Latin American nations toppled powerful landowners to form collectives and cooperatives among the landless, and East Asian countries handed parcels of lands to individual farmers in pursuit of development. Drawing on a career's worth of original research and extensive on-the-ground fieldwork, Albertus shows that choices about who owns the land have locked in sexism, racism, and climate crisis — and that what we do with the land today can change our collective fate.

Several studies also indicate that gender-progressive reforms to property inheritance laws from the 1970s through the 1990s had negative consequences. The Hindu Succession Act of 1956 stipulated that while sons and daughters both had rights to inheriting land that a father accumulated during his lifetime, only sons had a birthright to ancestral joint family property. Given that most land is jointly owned, this rule excluded women from land inheritance in most places. A handful of southern Indian states amended this law from the 1970s through the 1990s to extend women’s inheritance rights to joint property. However, these reforms did not actually increase the likelihood of women inheriting land. Instead, most families circumvented the law by “gifting” their land to their sons. At the same time, these forms raised female child mortality rates, caused an increase in female suicides, and increased the incidence of wife beating. A countrywide reform to the act in 2005 brought gender equality to inheritance, but even that has not considerably enhanced women’s land ownership.

Land reallocation policies in India since independence, to the extent knowable, have had little to no appreciable impact on women holding land. Today women in India make up only 14 percent of landowners and own just 11 percent of agricultural land in rural households (2021, Journal of Development Studies 57, no.11:1807-1829. This data is from 2009-2014 survey across nine Indian states). Most of these landowning women gain land through their marital families, typically as widows. Consistent with this, women are more likely to inherit land as widows than as daughters, in spite of recent legal efforts to strengthen daughters’ claims to inheritance. And few women are co-owners in joint family property.

Meanwhile, by rocking the boat socially, ostensibly progressive land policies have actually backfired in certain instances as land became more common object of dispute within traditional families and worsened gender relations. Greater land rights and ownership among the poor have raised the stakes over its control. Fathers fear losing control over their land if they cede it to married daughters, and daughters fear upsetting domestic life and damaging family relations if they claim their legal shares to land

This situation has helped to fuel an epidemic of gender violence, discrimination, and suicide in modern Indian society, where nearly 65 percent of people still live in rural areas and depend on land for their livelihoods. One in three women report being the victim of domestic abuse (2020, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 74, no.9: 732-740). The country accounts for over one-third of the world’s female suicides, with family problems as the chief driver. It is the most common cause of death for young women. And India has long had a skewed sex ratio at birth in favor of boys as a result of male-preference sex selection — the country’s approach to the Great Reshuffle only made this problem worse.

Patriarchy did not originate in land reshuffles. The story of gendered inequality is much older than shifts in land ownership that followed the Great Reshuffle. But decisions about who gets the land can sharpen a society’s sexism, and land power can entrench patriarchy nearly to the point of vulnerability. India offers a stark view of how land power can exacerbate the ugliest forms of gender inequity.

Improving the position of women in society by giving them a greater share of land is a long journey that many societies have not even begun. As in Colombia and Bolivia, it requires pressure from women and a political opening. Sometimes it even comes out of disruption, tragedy, and war. The fastest way to move the dial is through changing property rights and property law as Bolivia did rather than through land reallocation. Extending property titles to women within couples and changing inheritance laws to eliminate or reduce favoritism for sons as two examples. These policies can give women opportunities and independence that they would not have had otherwise. Countries as different as Ecuador, India, Ireland, Nepal, and Vietnam have pursued these paths.

Changing customs and traditions is difficult. There is often pushback by men who protest or ignore these changes. That pushback can overwhelm reform efforts. And sometimes reforms are too timid to have major effects as in Vietnam. But the experiences of Colombia and Bolivia show that real progress can be made. Modernization and urbanization can accelerate that progress. Modernization changes social values and gives women a greater voice that they can use to effect change. It is also linked to shrinking birth rates, which sharply gendered competitions for property inheritance and opportunity among children. Urbanization reduces population pressure on land and, like modernization, can lead to value changes and facilitate women’s movements.

Most of the countries that have tried to empower women through land reallocation efforts, as Colombia have done, have failed to make much progress. Some notorious examples include the Soviet Union and China, where women were sidelines from decision-making within collectives. Even well-intentioned contemporary efforts have foundered. South Africa’s land restitution and reallocation programs aimed to include women, but because of the persistence of customary practices and prevailing gender biases, and because they neglected to take the unique needs of women into consideration, women have still been left on the sidelines.

Given the social barriers to change, it is not surprising that landholding across most of the world continues to favor men and that this gap fuels gender inequity. But those barriers are slowly breaking under women’s pressure. To be sure, it has been the countries facing the darkest national circumstances where the most progress has been made. In times of catastrophe, disruption, and even war, it can become impossible to graft women’s empowerment onto other necessary state projects to heal national wounds. But regardless of how these openings have come about, where women have won property, they have won far greater equity with men.

Global in scope, Land Power argues that saving civilization must begin with the earth under our feet.

Thomas Piketty, New York Times–bestselling author says that “Land Power is a fascinating book on the power of land inequality in history and the large land reshufflings of the past and present. It is a must-read to think about the coming struggles over land in the 21st century”

Nobel Laureate Daron Acemoglu adds that “Land has always been a source of economic wealth. This captivating book demonstrates that it has also been a fountainhead of political and social power, profoundly shaping the organization and political structures of many societies.”

"Land" - Four simple letters. Four enormous impacts: on racial divides, gender inequality, the struggle for development, and our precarious environment. In this powerful and compelling book, Michael Albertus re-invents how to think about that most simple but profound force shaping our lives - the ground beneath us -- Ben Ansell, author of WHY POLITICS FAILS

Michael Albertus is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. The author of three previous books, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.