Short Abstract

Climate change, demographic growth, and urbanization contribute to increasing pressure on land and transforming labor relations across the African continent. This panel approaches these tensions from a historical perspective by tracing struggles over land in relation to labor.

Long Abstract

Climate change, demographic growth, and urbanization contribute to increasing pressure on land across the African continent (Benjaminsen et al, 2026). This panel approaches these tensions from a historical and anthropological perspective, by tracing struggles over land in relation to labor. This panel asks: who owns the land? Is ownership an adequate notion to historicize human relations to land? Who cultivates the land? What impact did colonialism have on the division between land ownership and labor? How do class and gender play a role in these dynamics? And how do these dynamics play out in a context of increasing urbanization? Different scholars refer to work as part of labor, as practical activity (Spittler, 2016; Bellucci and Eckert 2019), something people organize, negotiate and accomplish through embodied knowledge, engineering (Twagira, 2021), technology and social relationships. Others assert that greater participation in production does not necessarily produce greater autonomy. Women can acquire economic responsibilities without acquiring secure rights to land or experiencing a redistribution of reproductive labor (Tsikata, 2019). Another question is therefore not whether women participate in work but who controls the conditions and benefits of their labor.

The panel builds on longstanding debates about the relationship between land, labor, and social power, examining how these connections have been reconfigured across different African historical contexts. We welcome contributions from disciplines such as history, anthropology, political science, but we do ask that papers pay attention to diachronic analysis and shifts over time.

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