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Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Society<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\u200bFor millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. Land Power<\/em> shows that who owns the land determines whether a society will be equal or unequal, whether it will develop or decline, and whether it will safeguard or sacrifice its environment.
Modern history has been defined by land reallocation on a massive scale. From the 1500s on, European colonial powers and new nation-states shifted indigenous lands into the hands of settlers. The 1900s brought new waves of land appropriation, from Soviet and Maoist collectivization to initiatives turning large estates over to family farmers. The shuffle continues today as governments vie for power and prosperity by choosing who should get land. Drawing on a career\u2019s worth of original research and on-the-ground fieldwork, Albertus shows that choices about who owns the land have locked in poverty, sexism, racism, and climate crisis\u2014and that what we do with the land today can change our collective fate.
Global in scope, Land Power<\/em> argues that saving civilization must begin with the earth under our feet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Speaker<\/strong>: Michael Albertus, Univeristy of Chicago<\/p>\n\n\n\nMichael Albertus is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and the author of five books. His newest book, Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies<\/em>, was published by Basic Books in January 2025. It tells the story of how land came to be power within human societies, how it shapes power, and how its allocation determines the major social ills that societies grapple with. <\/p>\n\n\n\nAlbertus studied math, electrical engineering, and political science at the University of Michigan and earned degrees in all three in 2005. He then did a PhD in political science at Stanford University, completing in 2011. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, Albertus joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2012 and has since been on sabbatical twice back at Stanford, including as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavior Sciences. In addition to his books, Albertus is also the author of over 30 peer-reviewed journal articles, including at flagship journals like the American Political Science Review,<\/em>American Journal of Political Science<\/em>, Journal of Politics<\/em>, and World Politics<\/em>. He has taught courses to undergraduate, Masters, and PhD students on topics including inequality and redistribution, democracy and dictatorship, comparative politics, and political and economic development and policy in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe defining features of Albertus’ work are his engagement with big questions and puzzles and the ability to join big data and cutting-edge research methods with original, deep on-the-ground fieldwork everywhere from government offices to archives and farm fields. He has conducted fieldwork throughout the Americas, southern Europe, South Africa, and elsewhere. His books and articles have won numerous awards and shifted conventional understandings of democracy, authoritarianism, and the consequences of how humans occupy and relate to the land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Discussant:\u00a0<\/strong>Sukriti Issar, Associate Professor, CRIS, Sciences Po<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Compulsory registration Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Society \u200bFor millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. Land Power shows that who owns the land determines whether a society will be equal or unequal, whether it will develop or decline, and whether it will safeguard or sacrifice its environment. Modern history has been defined by land reallocation on a massive scale. From the 1500s on, European colonial powers and new nation-states shifted indigenous lands into the hands [\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":482,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3286"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3286"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3287,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3286\/revisions\/3287"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}