Lauren Honig wins the 2022 Best Book Award

Lauren Honig (Boston College) wins the 2022 Best Book Award for her book titled "Land Politics How Customary Institutions Shape State Building in Zambia and Senegal"

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Land Politics examines the struggle to control land in Africa through the lens of land titling in Zambia and Senegal. Contrary to standard wisdom portraying titling as an inevitable product of economic development, Lauren Honig traces its distinctly political logic and shows how informality is maintained by local actors. The book's analysis focuses on chiefs, customary institutions, and citizens, revealing that the strength of these institutions and an individual's position within them impact the expansion of state authority over land rights. Honig explores common subnational patterns within the two very different countries to highlight the important effects of local institutions, not the state's capacity or priorities alone, on state building outcomes. Drawing on evidence from national land titling records, qualitative case studies, interviews, and surveys, this book contributes new insights into the persistence of institutional legacies and the political determinants of property rights.

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The drama of African politics is increasingly a story of fierce competition over land, especially as states attempt to wrest control from customary authorities. In this carefully-crafted book, Lauren Honig shows that even across divergent contexts, longstanding institutions continue to shape and to constrain the realization of such ambitions, with important distributional consequences for citizens. With a wealth of empirical evidence based on extensive original data collection, Land Politics details the ways in which institutions affect the balance of power, and the likelihood of citizens engaging the state or local chiefs to advance their interests. This ambitious volume is a must-read for understanding the political economy of land in Africa.’

Evan S. Lieberman - Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa, Director, Global Diversity Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

‘Honig’s superb book advances scholarship on land politics and customary leadership by theorizing and demonstrating how variation within traditional political institutions matters. Based on original qualitative and quantitative evidence from both Anglophone and Francophone Africa, the book is an exemplar of field research in comparative politics.’

Kate Baldwin - Associate Professor of Political Science, Yale University

‘Honig’s book makes an innovative theoretical contribution to our understanding of how customary institutions shape state building from the ground up in very different ways. In a fascinating comparison of Zambia and Senegal, she investigates different pathways of accountability during the complex local-level negotiations over land titles. Her analysis and arguments are powerfully enriched by a rigorous case comparison and extensive, multi-method fieldwork.’

Lauren M. MacLean - Department Chair, Political Science, Indiana University

‘‘Land Politics’ offers a rich menu for everyone interested in land. To have the empirical details of two major cases in one book is a significant accomplishment, and so is the insight on the power of both formal (Zambia) and informal (Senegal) institutions.’

Franklin Obeng-Odoom Source: Perspectives on Politics

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