Gendered Citizenship: Land Reform, Authority, and the Limits of “Gender Equality” in Liberia and Sierra Leone

Land reform is frequently framed as a means of regularising access to land and strengthening the rule of law. In conjunction with current campaigns to formalise customary land rights, there is a major push to make these processes more gender equal. In this paper, I analyse two such reforms–the Liberian Land Rights Act and the Sierra Leonean Customary Land Rights Act. I start from the question of “What gendered forms of power are deployed in making claims to authority? Based on research in Liberian and Sierra Leonean communities that have taken part in projects to implement land reform, I explore how gendered forms of autochthony are used as a basis to claim entitlement and authority over land. Drawing on the existing debates on women’s land rights, and on autochthony, I argue for a more explicitly gendered approach to understanding autochthony. The gender provisions of the reforms highlight wider tensions between autochthony, authority, and citizenship. The findings clearly show that entitlement claims to land made through the gendered power of autochthony are not static or anachronistic, but part of dynamic and contemporary processes of contestation that are as much global as they are local.