Overview

Conflicts about even the smallest amount of land potentially generate violence and reshape people's mutual relations and their relationship with the state. This book investigates the conflicting norms that people and the Honduran state use to justify property claims to the land, as well as the problematic role of the legal system in solving - or amplifying - conflicts. It combines detailed case studies of land conflicts, property transfers and inheritance in a rural village with extensive reading of court case files and interviews with actors within the legal system. The author develops the concept of 'stacked law' to explore the historical building-up of a pluralist constellation of norms and interpretations of the law regarding property rights to land. The term 'stacked law' also indicates metaphorically that norms are not replaced by others in time, but that they become stacked on top of other norms. Former regulation is therefore not simply set aside through new state interventions. This framework for studying law in society provides an alternative to the 'customary rights' concept, which has become popular in policy circles to indicate that people do not strictly adhere to state law in justifying their land claims. This book questions major development interventions through land titling and women's projects, and it unravels in detail how legal insecurity affects rural people in Honduras. Stacked law will be of interest to scholars in law, legal sociology and development studies, and to policymakers and development experts in the field of land regulation, state modernisation and governance in developing countries.

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