This dissertation examines Q'eqchi' Maya survivors of Guatemala's genocidal counterinsurgency campaign that burned over 440 villages to the ground. I argue that lowlands Q'eqchi's communities' struggles for land were not won or lost on civil war battlefields, but are still being determined through the contested politics of land ownership on scorched earth. I present the implications of my argument for territory, identity and development through four case studies based on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork. First, case studies of former development poles reveal that people displaced during Guatemala's civil war (1960-1996) associate the military's scorched earth counterinsurgency strategies with contemporary scorched earth conservation enforcement. I employ a political ecology approach to argue that conservation (creation and enforcement of protected areas) and neoliberal land policies (projects to map, title and register land that privilege private property) articulate in a single territorial project that facilitates the contemporary dispossession of small land holders. Second, I show how genocide survivors articulate a Q'eqchi' identity through land claims in titling and conservation projects. Lowlands Q'eqchi's share narratives of suffering for territory, which they trace from the colonial period to the present. My ethnography reveals the challenges Q'eqchi' communities face in linking their land claims to the broader Pan-Maya movement, which is dominated by Western Highlands Maya. As such, I caution against subsuming Guatemalan politics of indigeneity to the politics of the Pan-Maya movement. Finally, I show how conservation and development projects have become the terrain of post-war politics in Guatemala. Whether they like it or not, international development agencies have become arbiters of land conflicts. In the process, they must decide whose battle was righteous, who is indigenous, who is a peasant, which lands are sacred, and whose struggle for territory merits title and enforcement. Development projects that have important juridical and material effects on land tenure--land titling, community based natural resource management, payments for environmental services--largely ignore complicated war histories. Given that international development projects ally with regional and national elites, including the military, these projects can authorize violent exclusions that reproduce racialized hierarchies. I conclude by showing that who becomes a land owner and who becomes dispossessed not only decides outcomes of civil war struggles, but also shapes how people can forge their livelihoods in the future.

Between 1960 and 1996, Guatemala's civil war claimed 250,000 lives and displaced one million people. Since the peace accords, Guatemala has struggled to address the legacy of war, genocidal violence against the Maya, and the dismantling of alternative projects for the future. War by Other Means brings together new essays by leading scholars of Guatemala from a range of geographical backgrounds and disciplinary perspectives. Contributors consider a wide range of issues confronting present-day Guatemala: returning refugees, land reform, gang violence, neoliberal economic restructuring, indigenous and women's rights, complex race relations, the politics of memory, and the challenges of sustaining hope. From a sweeping account of Guatemalan elites' centuries-long use of violence to suppress dissent to studies of intimate experiences of complicity and contestation in richly drawn localities, War by Other Means provides a nuanced reckoning of the injustices that made genocide possible and the ongoing attempts to overcome them. Contributors. Santiago Bastos, Jennifer Burrell, Manuela Camus, Matilde González-Izás, Jorge Ramón González Ponciano, Greg Grandin, Paul Kobrak, Deborah T. Levenson, Carlota McAllister, Diane M. Nelson, Elizabeth Oglesby, Luis Solano, Irmalicia Velásquez Nimatuj, Paula Worby

Field study of the impact of political violence on rural development and indigenous community life in Guatemala - reports on human rights violations, suppression of the rural area leadership and cooperative movement, aftermath of the seism, etc.; examines impacts on the agricultural sector and food production, health, education, religion and the family; looks at refugees, rural poverty, role of the armed forces and national liberation movements, role of USA and implications for development aid. Photographs, statistical tables.

In sub-Saharan Africa, property relationships around land and access to natural resources vary across localities, districts, and farming regions. These differences produce patterned variations in relationships between individuals, communities, and the state. This book captures these patterns in an analysis of structure and variation in rural land tenure regimes. In most farming areas, state authority is deeply embedded in land regimes, drawing farmers, ethnic insiders and outsiders, lineages, villages, and communities into direct and indirect relationships with political authorities at different levels of the state apparatus. The analysis shows how property institutions - institutions that define political authority and hierarchy around land - shape dynamics of great interest to scholars of politics, including the dynamics of land-related competition and conflict, territorial conflict, patron-client relations, electoral cleavage and mobilization, ethnic politics, rural rebellion, and the localization and "nationalization" of political competition.