Margot Leegwater

Margot Leegwater is an anthropologist who started her PhD in January 2008. She examines land access in rural southeastern Rwanda in relation to land-tenure and ethnicity policies. Her research is based on the premise that ethnic problems in a post-conflict situation can best be studied through the concrete example of land access practices. The project is part of the IS Academy partnership between the African Studies Centre and the Africa Department of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In Rwanda at least sixty percent of households live beneath the poverty line. Since more than ninety percent of the population depends on subsistence farming, access to land is of crucial importance. Land is scarce, population density is the highest in Africa and many people have been displaced. Because land is the key to existence, contested land rights pose challenges to post-conflict reconstruction. These days, land conflicts are on the increase and have a negative impact on intra- and inter-ethnic relations as well as on gender relations.

One of Rwanda’s new and far-reaching policies is a law that states that all land must be registered, as of 2010, and formal land titles have to be issued. After registration, the state guarantees occupancy rights to farmland by means of a 99-year lease. While the government argues that the new land law will strengthen land-tenure security and reduce conflicts, recent fieldwork in southeastern Rwanda has shown that land conflicts within families and between neighbours have increased since registration was introduced. By ignoring sensitivities at the local level and rigidly implementing the new policies, the tensions in pre-existing social relations have not decreased.

In 2004, Margot conducted MA research into the Rwandan gacaca courts, popular courts based on a traditional justice system that have tried perpetrators of the 1994 genocide within and by their own community.