My research examines how armed conflict and its settlement transform access to land and natural resources.
Research on land and conflict has mostly asked how land breeds violence. Land tensions are instrumentalised by political entrepreneurs, and land plays a central part in clientelist distribution. Far less is known about the reverse relation — what violence, and the peace that follows it, do to the ways people gain and keep access to land. War was a decisive factor in the development of capitalism in the Euro-Atlantic world. Economic historians take this for granted; studies of contemporary civil wars have largely ignored it. The political economy of war has concentrated on how wars are funded and how funding shapes their length and brutality. Much less has been written on what violence does, in the long run, to capital accumulation, class formation and the control of labour.
The Proceeds of Peace (book in progress)
Wars end, but the property relations they produce do not dissolve with them. The Proceeds of Peace: land, plunder and the making of post-war capitalism argues that international peacebuilding and the politics around it launder the spoils of war into the proceeds of peace. Through a series of legal and symbolic operations, wealth seized by force is converted into wealth that can be held, traded and invested without embarrassment. The instrument of that conversion is the depoliticisation of land, recast as a technical matter of registries, cadastres and administrative capacity. The result is post-war capitalism — a settlement that consolidates the economic order that emerged from war while opening new frontiers of accumulation to those best placed to seize them.
The book draws on my field research in Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia, on further cases in Central America and Asia, and on interviews with the land professionals who move from one post-war country to another.
Agrarian capitalism, war and peace in Colombia
Peacebuilding policies often rest on the belief that violence breaks with the normal course of society and stands apart from the legal economy. That belief obscures the ties between armed conflict and the formation of the economy, and it legitimises post-war inequality in the name of development. My book on Colombia (Routledge, 2021) traces these ties through paramilitary violence, land grabbing and the unfulfilled promises of restitution.
Pacifying property: land policy instruments after war
Peacebuilding actors have experimented with a range of instruments meant to pacify property relations — land restitution, community land governance, land formalisation. I study how these instruments circulate between post-war countries, and what becomes of them when they meet the legacies of war in Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia.
Environmental peace and the climate crisis
Rivalries over land are also fought through environmental conservation. Forests are margins of state control, where political power is put to the test. They are also frontiers of capitalism, long shielded from exploitation by violence and by the territorial control of armed groups. Conservation is therefore one of the arenas in which political and economic domination is contested after war.
The FORPEACE project (ANR, 2023–2027) examines these struggles in Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia, with partners in all three countries. ENCLAV (ANR, 2027–2030), which I coordinate, studies environmental conflict narratives and policies in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, with the SAGE laboratory (Strasbourg) and the SOURCE unit (IRD).
Past research projects also include:
Check the publications page for a complete list of my research output.
