Land Politics and Human Mobilities: The Land-Mobility Nexus as an Analytical Lens

Debates on land politics and migration conventionally focus on fixing people to a particular space by regularizing land tenure, containing migrants within a territory, and enforcing boundaries against outsiders. Little attention has been paid to how land politics shapes migration and how mobilities influence land use and access to land. This chapter establishes the land-mobility nexus as an analytical lens to fill the gaps. Land politics and investments induce displacement, resettlement, and urbanization, further generating mobilities. Migration politics induces land acquisitions for refugee and labor camps and influences the ways that migrants invest in rebuilding livelihoods in new places or in their homelands. Drawing from literature and empirical examples, the chapter advocates a translocal approach to engage with the land-mobility nexus and a perspective that migrants and nonmigrants are agents of development as investors and placemakers. A people-as-agents perspective is increasingly pertinent as climate change and its politics affect the land-mobility nexus, forcing people to move and to make new land investments, often in multiple locations. The chapter argues that land, migration, and climate politics should jointly support people’s ongoing place-making practices.