Guest Lecture: “Agricultural Structures and Land Grabbing”

On 11/06/2018 Christina Gabbert is giving a lecture in the open science forum of the University of Bielefeld:

Agricultural Structures and Land Grabbing – Anthropological Perspectives on Land Use in East Africa

At the beginning of the 21st century, numerous areas of land in East Africa were designated as unused areas in order to offer them for industrialisation projects, especially agro-investments on the world market. Since then, these regions have undergone extremely rapid changes. In this lecture, different and often contradictory views of “global neighbours”, such as local populations, politicians, development planners, investors, non-governmental organisations, human rights organisations and scientists will be compared using the example of land used by pastoral societies in Southern Ethiopia in order to work out the compatibility and incompatibility of different approaches to land use and food security in the 21st century and to contribute to constructive solutions. Keywords such as “stakeholder”, “land ownership” or “sustainability” are questioned in their terminology.

Christina Gabbert is an anthropologist with many years of field research experience in Southern Ethiopia. She is a research Fellow and lecturer at the Göttingen Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Christina Gabbert received her doctorate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale on war and peace processes in the Arbore region of Southern Ethiopia. Her dissertation “Deciding Peace” was awarded the Frobenius Society’s Research Award. Her research focuses on agro-pastoralism, subsistence economy and ecology, peace and conflict research, global markets and changing land use, as well as material culture, oral narrative tradition, visual anthropology and music. She is currently conducting research on global neighbourhood, land use and investment in East Africa and is coordinating the international research network “Lands of the Future” on these topics.