Short Abstract

This panel examines how African youth navigate intense land pressures, large-scale investments and formalization processes. It explores resource struggles, changing customary tenure, and exclusions that drive youth from rural communities into non-farm activities, move to cities and fight for land.

Long Abstract

Nearly 20 years after the “Global Land Rush,” this panel analyzes the political, economic, and social shifts brought about by young people’s land practices in Africa. These practices unfold under intense land pressure, accelerated urbanization, large-scale infrastructure projects, conservation enclosures, and restructured land policies.

Investigating property regimes, spatial boundaries, and rural-urban continuums, we examine how large-scale investments and state-led formalization processes—such as Certificates of Customary Right of Occupancy (CCROs)—encroach upon agricultural hinterlands. Critically, while land titling is promoted to enhance tenure security, empirical evidence demonstrates that formalization can create institutional ambiguity and accelerate youth dispossession, fueling speculative markets and localized, intra-community conflicts.

By analyzing ongoing land reforms, customary tenure adaptations, and commercial pressures, this panel highlights how changing land dynamics fundamentally alter peasant livelihoods, spatial segregation, and the socio-economic fabric of rural and urban areas. We offer a comparative analysis of how young people—routinely marginalized by state and customary frameworks—appropriate, transform, or challenge modes of land access, and how these struggles intersect with local governance logics.

The panel is built on two observations: youth constitute a demographic majority with structurally precarious land access, and land remains a central flashpoint for socioeconomic integration and political protest. We welcome papers exploring how youth navigate these structural enclosures, including the rapid transition of young herders and farmers into alternative, non-farm activities and leave for urban areas. Ultimately, we examine how land access shapes young people’s multimodal, multi-sited, and political forms of engagement to examine socio-environmental and agricultural justice struggles.

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