Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Political and Economic Impacts of Land Registration and Titling Efforts

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

Land grabs, the process through which formerly public assets are privatized an acquired, particularly in rural areas, have had significant impacts in areas of the world in which the U.S. has a strategic economic and political interest. Scientific research has explored the motivations for such speculative investments at the government level, but there has been significantly less focus on the process through which property is formalized in land registration and titling practices. This project, which trains a graduate in methods of rigorous, empirically-grounded scientific fieldwork, examines a context historically impacted by varied, and sometimes competing, land registration and titling practices. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in methods of rigorous, empirically-grounded scientific fieldwork, findings from this case study would be developed and shared with international scholars and organizations, thereby increasing international scientific cooperation. Johns Hopkins University doctoral student Paul Kohlbry, with the direction of Dr. Deborah Poole, will undertake an ethnographic and historical study of land registration efforts in the West Bank. He will explore the ways in which Jordanian, Israeli and Palestinian Authority land registration projects have instituted private property and transformed political and economic life in rural areas. This research relies on data from the Jordanian archives, oral histories in Palestinian villages, interviews with bureaucrats, lawyers, businessmen and land registration personnel, and observation of an ongoing land registration project. His hypothesis is that Jordanian and Israeli land registration made private property central to nationalist political conflicts which revolved around the ownership of agricultural land. However, the long decline of agricultural production in Palestine over the past decades has lessened agriculture's economic and political significance. The research contributes to understanding how current land titling efforts by the Palestinian Authority unfold in the context with local and national conflicts around the sale of agricultural land and transform the relationship between the Palestinian government and its subjects and between Israelis and Palestinians. By giving careful attention to the various processes that constitute land registration, his research seeks to expand current social science literature on land privatization and agrarian change. This study also deepens our understanding of Palestine and the Middle East and adopts a methodology that focuses on economic, rather than cultural or religious factors. Finally, it sheds new light on the mundane, everyday legal, social and technical aspects of the Israel-Palestine conflict that are often missed by scholars and policy makers.