LANDac Conference 2026 – Call for Abstracts

Many of the countries where land governance interventions unfold, are directly or indirectly affected by conflict, while addressing land-related conflict and contested land governance are critical aspects to enable the transition from war to peace. This raises many questions, including, but not limited to:

What lessons can be learned from cases where inadequate land governance in post-conflict contexts undermined peace and stability? To what extent should humanitarians and peacebuilders integrate land and its governance in their work?

What are the specific challenges of managing land governance in protracted crises or fragile contexts? How are factors such as needs for transitional justice, reconstruction, dealing with broken social trust, or threats to state sovereignty, integrated into approaches to land governance in protracted crises and fragile contexts?

The following sessions are open for abstract submissions:

1. The importance of inclusive land governance and restoration for stability and resilience in the Sahel region
2. To what extent are improved land governance and land tenure security contributing to conflict reduction and peacebuilding?

The following sessions are not open for abstract submissions:

1. Land governance, agricultural innovations and pathways to peace in fragile rural contexts
2. Promoting responsible use of housing and land in humanitarian and development programming: towards governing principles

The role of land in peace and conflict often functions through the ‘everyday’ of people’s economic, political, and social reliance on land. This can, for example, relate to the role of land in competition over livelihoods, or the role that cooperative governance of land at a local-level can help to build social cohesion and trust in public authorities.

Suggested questions for this theme include: How do conflicts emerge from competition over livelihoods? What does the framing of these conflicts as ‘land rights’ conflicts do to the potential to resolve them? What roles do ‘outside’ actors take in exacerbating or reducing ‘everyday’ conflict dynamics? How do transformations in land governance serve as a starting point for wider transformations towards peace? How do these practices variously relate to top-down efforts at integrating land into peacebuilding projects?

The following sessions are open for abstract submissions:

1. Environmental peacebuilding and land governance
2. Critical issues in land dispute resolution in contexts of conflict and displacement
3. Land, Livelihoods, and Everyday Peace: Rethinking ‘Land Rights’ in Times of Conflict

The following session is not open for abstract submissions:

1. VNG International’s approach to land governance: e-cadaster, conflict resolution and climate-resilient land-use

Conflict-related displacement can be seen both through a lens of land dispossession, while displacement-related shifts in land access and ownership can in turn exacerbate risks of post-conflict peacebuilding depending on how it is addressed.

Suggested questions for this theme include: What are the specific challenges of securing access to land for “people on the move” (IDPs, refugees, and returnees) and how does this intersect with the rights of hosting communities? How to protect land  rights of ‘people on the move’ during and after conflict? What are the effects of this? What lessons can be taken from existing experiences with restitution?

The following sessions are open for abstract submissions:

1. Land rights, prolonged displacement and mobility
2. From Policy to Practice: Protecting Displaced Women’s Housing, Land and Property Rights
3. Governance of Land and Property Rights Under Mobility-Driven Stress: Institutional and Legal Approaches for Protracted Crisis Contexts
4. When Titles Don’t Exist: Making Informal Land Rights Visible for People on the Move
5. Conflict Inducted Displacement and Land Administration
6. Forced Displacement and Urban Agriculture; Building resilience aligning place, people and processes

The following sessions are not open for abstract submissions:

1. Beyond land: Questioning land access for displaced people in context of climate change
2. Land Governance and Migration: A Rule of Law Perspective

Often, the dynamics around land and conflict derive from and in turn build on historical problems of unequal land distribution and dispossession. Land conflict is also deeply entwined with contestation over identity, belonging, and citizenship.

Suggested questions for this theme include: How do historical claims, historical injustice, memory, and narratives of belonging shape contemporary land-related conflict? What analytical approaches best capture the complex relationship between land, memory, belonging, and  violent conflict? How can gendered, ethnic, or generational dimensions of land access and conflict be integrated into conflict analysis?

The following sessions are open for abstract submissions:

1. Struggles of the Soil: Farmers, Land, and Agrarian Protests in Contemporary India and South Asia
2. “Land as “fictitious commodity”: property regimes, dispossession and struggles for belonging
3. Conflict Without War: Indigenous Land Rights, Internal Conflict, and the Limits of Peace in India
4. Wars and agrarian change
5. Reframing land conflict discourse: from land dispute to social cohesion
6. Cities, Land and Conflict: Dreams, Developments and Damages?

As much as land can be linked to peace and conflict in the ‘everyday’ of people in particular places, geopolitics has long been part of land and conflict. From territorial disputes to the role of the global financial crisis in the 2008 ‘land grabbing rush’ geopolitics plays a key role in the dynamics of land dispossession and conflict. In the current context of a shifting international order and the complexity of the climate crisis, geopolitics is at the heart of new dynamics of land dispossession.

Suggested questions for this theme include: How does geopolitical competition, as part of a new emerging international order, figure in new forms of territorial conflict and land dispossession? In the context of the green transition, what is the role of geopolitical competition in engendering new forms or new dynamics of land dispossession? How do violent and non-violent forms of resistance to this dispossession engender conflict?

The following sessions are open for abstract submissions:

1. Policies of Pastoral and Collective Land Dispossession and Displacement: A Comparative Analytical Approach across Indigenous and Pastoral Communities
2. From Farmland to Frontlines: Urban Expansion, Agricultural Land Loss and Conflict Dynamics in Fragile and Peri-Urban Contexts
3. The Geopolitics of “Green Enclosures”: Comparative Perspectives on Mining, Carbon Markets, and Land Sovereignty in the Global South

The following sessions are not open to abstract submissions:

1. Global Capital, Local Conflict: The Neoliberal Logics of Rural Dispossession
2. Shadows of Green: The Global Green Transition as a Space of Conflict and Community Claims

In both policy and research, there is a great deal of attention to the role of climate shocks as a ‘risk multiplier’ or ‘threat amplifier’ for conflict. These debates have often included land rights, land degradation, and/or competition over land in their analysis of climate shock and conflict risk.

Suggested questions for this theme include: What are the linkages between climate shocks and escalating resource disputes, and how do these conflicts manifest? Who are the most impacted groups? How can changing landscapes be an opportunity for (re)negotiating rights? What approaches to this could appropriately center justice?

The following sessions are open for abstract submissions:

1. Remaking Land Rights Amidst Climate-Conflict Dynamics
2. Re-thinking Power, Land, and Identity: Law from Below in a Changing Climate
3. Tenure Renegotiation as Adaptive Governance at the Intersection of Climate and Conflict