Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: State Authority and Land Rights in the Americas

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The establishment of authority over a country's territory is a critical component of stability and security. This project addresses how states in the Americas have approached the issue of land rights. Internal threats to the state's territorial control and targeted international pressure stimulate executive action with state strategic interests being the crucial mediating factor to explain the patterns. This research project is designed to explain why the implementation of ethnic land rights varies by examining closely the cases of Brazil, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The research involves fieldwork on-site, including the construction of nation-wide databases for ethnic land claims and resulting government decisions, original experimental data on political elites' attitudes on the implementation question, archival documentation, and in-depth interviews of state elites and non-elites, experts, and practitioners in ethnic land claims. The intellectual merits are associated with the project's theoretical and empirical advances in the study of state control over territory. Because ethnic collectivities are often minorities that claim vast tracts of sparsely populated lands rich in energy, mineral, and natural resources, scholars and policy makers have pointed to competing economic interests, low administrative capacity of the state, or insufficient socialization of state elites as factors that impinge on the implementation of ethnic land rights. This project advances this discussion by seriously considering the mediating effect of state interest and power in shaping the implementation of multicultural legal principles in the Americas. The broader impacts of the projects are two: providing insights useful to international and national policymakers to improve policy implementation strategies and producing original observational and experimental data on ethnic land rights implementation. The data collected will help assess the geographic patterns of ethnic land rights implementation over time and the effects of key policy decisions on the ground. The findings should enhance national security by clarifying how states can develop secure borders and territories.