Is land a human rights issue? approaching land reform in South Africa

This essay briefly explores South African post-apartheid land reform as a human rights issue. It suggests that land reform has an ethically, politically and strategically important interface with international human rights. This refers both to the context-dependent livelihood role of land and to context-independent principles regarding land ownership and governance, involving several types of rights (allocation, protection, provision, procedure and development). It discusses the merit and limitation of a state-centric perspective on human rights and development. This places “human rights” in a social, contested process of rights- and land-based development. A state-centric human rights system has an important role in this process, but rights-based development requires a broader vision of how people realise rights in social dynamics.