Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how displaced communities in northern Sudan re-established land relations after rejecting state resettlement, revealing how land, power and belonging are reworked through self-directed responses to development-induced displacement.

Paper long abstract

Large infrastructure projects continue to displace millions of people globally, yet dominant development frameworks still treat resettlement as a technical problem rather than a deeply political process. This paper examines the case of the Manāṣīr of northern Sudan, who rejected state-led resettlement following the construction of the Merowe Dam and instead re-established their lives along the reservoir’s margins.

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, the paper explores how displaced communities actively reconstructed land relations, social authority, and livelihoods in the absence of formal recognition or institutional support. Rather than viewing displacement as a rupture followed by rehabilitation, the analysis foregrounds self-directed resettlement as an ongoing social and political process shaped by local histories, customary land relations, and unequal power structures.

Using a relational approach to property, the paper shows how land tenure in this context is not a fixed legal category but an evolving set of practices negotiated under conditions of uncertainty, dispossession, and constraint. These practices both reproduce and transform earlier forms of territorial belonging, revealing how displaced communities assert agency beyond the boundaries of state-led development.

By centring the experiences of those who refused formal resettlement, the paper challenges dominant development narratives and calls for greater attention to the material, political, and ethical dimensions of displacement and self-directed recovery.