PhD
Margot Leegwater is an anthropologist who has started her PhD in January 2008. She examines land access practices at the local level in Rwanda (and to a lesser extent in Burundi) and the dialectics of government policies concerning land access and ethnicity with local practices of land access. 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.
From July to December 2008 Margot conducted fieldwork in Rwanda. In the capital city Kigali she spoke to some thirty organisations (both government and non-government) that deal with the land issue and/ or with future land reforms. In South-East Rwanda she held more than forty interviews with peasants. During a one week visit to Burundi she discussed land and security issues with some important NGOs and experts based in Bujumbura. In Rwanda and Burundi 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, or are, displaced. Because land is the key to existence, contested land rights pose challenges to post-conflict reconstruction.
In both countries land conflicts are on the increase and have a negative impact on intra- and inter-ethnic relations as well as on gender relations. Both Rwanda and Burundi have recently revised their land policies to deal with land conflicts. In 2004, Margot conducted 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.
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