Displacement and dispossession through land grabbing in Mozambique: the limits of international and national legal instruments — Refugee Studies Centre

The scale and speed of coordinated land grabs over the past five years has created a new avenue through which people are being displaced and dispossessed of their lands.  This paper looks at what limits international and national law in addressing displacement and dispossession due to land grabs in Mozambique.

The author argues that the limits of law to address displacement and dispossession are not due to a lack of institutionalising international good governance norms into domestic-level legal frameworks. Nor can the limits be attributed to state incapacity. Rather, the limits of law lie within the norm implementation process, wherein norms are conditioned by the local Mozambican governance context to serve domestic interests.