Under what conditions do land-related tensions fuel partisan competition in the national electoral arena? This chapter offers a focused comparison of politicized land conflict in four countries: Kenya in 1992 and 1997, Côte d’Ivoire in the elections of the 1990s, Rwanda in 1991–1994, and Democratic Republic of Congo in 1991–1994. These countries differ in significant ways – in terms of size, level of economic development, colonial institutional heritage, and the presence or absence of a history of large-scale European land expropriations. Despite these dissimilarities, land politics became a divisive, explosive issue in the electoral arena in each country.

Our argument is that politicized land conflict, as we have defined it, is traceable to the statist character of the land tenure regime (LTR) in each of these settings. In each country, election-time conflict exploded in jurisdictions where the central state itself was responsible for allocating land rights and where state authorities (past or present) had assigned land to their own clients or constituents at the expense of aggrieved communities claiming ancestral rights to land. A mechanism linking institutional cause to political effect in each case was the presence of a belief – fear or hope – among the voters that the security/status of their land rights and claims hinged on the outcome of an electoral struggle for control over state power. The politically contingent nature of the ties that bound farming households to central authorities underlay these dynamics. Elections opened or heightened the possibility of a redistribution of land rights.