The Justice of Land in a Land of Injustice

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Dealing with consequences of historical land dispossessions associated with colonialism, racism, and capitalist expansion dogs a variety of countries throughout the world. Nowhere is the issue of land reconciliation more important than in South Africa. That country today confronts a variety of land issues flowing from the country's history of land dispossessions, ranging from "land grabs" by the urban landless, to efforts by farm workers to achieve rights of ownership to their land, to claims by "surplus people" to land from which they were removed by government actions under apartheid. Land reconciliation raises and illustrates many significant theoretical issues related to the emerging interdisciplinary fields of transitional justice and justice psychology. Generally speaking, justice research argues that people judge law and politics by whether they comport with their standards of fairness. Such judgments are important since legal and political institutions perceived to be unjust are unlikely to be accorded legitimacy, and without legitimacy, compliance becomes problematical (i.e., it may become more closely related to calculations of costs and benefits) -- perhaps thereby exacerbating behaviors such as illegal land invasions. At the level of the political system, this project will examine land reconciliation, which is hypothesized to be most effective when law and elite and mass preferences coincide. At the micro-level (the level of this research), this study examines preferences on land reconciliation policies. These preferences are hypothesized to flow from (1) how issues land get framed in terms of the four sub-dimensions of justice (distributive, procedural, retributive, and restorative); (2) instrumental interests, especially as reflected in experiences with various forms of land dispossession; and (3) basic cultural values, in particular individualism (expected to be most common among those of European ancestry) versus collectivism (which may predominate among Africans). In addition, the principal investigator will investigate (4) whether South Africans approve of land invasions and are likely to join such movements in the future. The principal component of the research design is a survey of samples of both South African elites and members of the mass public. The survey incorporate a variety of innovative techniques, including persuasibility experiments, the use of experimental vignettes designed to assess the role of competing dimensions of justice on preferences for land reconciliation, and follow-up in-depth interviews with especially knowledgeable respondents.