The Rwandan government has been implementing a comprehensive program of agrarian reform since the early 2000s. This program includes making large areas of land available to local cooperatives and foreign enterprises for agricultural investment with a productivist rationale. This paper presents a case of land grabbing by the state and local elites in order to understand how the agrarian reform has disadvantaged ordinary peasants using these lands for subsistence production. First, the article introduces the literature’s debates on land grabbing, and proposes four streams of literature to understand the roles of state and local authorities (1). It then describes the process through which Rwanda has arrived at a productivist agricultural agenda, and reflects around the consequences in terms of land governance (2). Finally, the article attempts to understand how governmentality - as an organizational technique of power - participates in the process of land accumulation and peasant exploitation. The article then proposes to think of land grabbing as part of authorities’ governmentality and capitalist accumulation strategies, which places land grabbing within two spheres of domination: the organizational and the economic sphere (3).
Nyenyezi Bisoka, Aymar ; et. al. The state and local authorities in land grabbing in Rwanda: governmentality and capitalist accumulation. In: Food Security and the Contested Visions of Agrarian Change in Africa, (2019)
