The Dispossessed: Large-Scale Land Acquisitions, Elite Capture, and Dissent in Africa

Jonathan Dries

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Over the past two decades, millions of hectares of land in Africa have been transferred to investors, raising fears of displacement and conflict. This paper estimates the causal impact of large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) on local dissent by comparing successfully implemented projects to a control group of exogenously failed deals. Using staggered difference-in-differences estimators across 1,391 geocoded deals, I find that LSLAs cause a sustained increase in civic unrest of 158% relative to the pre-treatment mean. Protest responses are strongest among domestic investors acquiring community or state land for food-crop production, pointing to local dispossession and domestic elite capture. Integrating media, survey, and electoral data consistent with this hypothesis, I document parallel shifts in property-rights media discourse, an erosion of traditional authority, and broader electoral mobilization in affected constituencies.

Date: 2026-06
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.09642 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2606.09642

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().