Everyday property-making: Negotiating land rights, precarity and public authority in urban Congo

Property rights are a major issue in cities marked by armed conflict in the global South. This article draws on research conducted in Bukavu, a city situated in the conflict-affected eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Using a relational theory of property and mixed methods, including 150 semi-structured interviews, surveys with 568 heads of households, case studies of land conflicts, and participant observation, we demonstrate that the issue of property rights is not a binary question of having or not having a formal title. Rather, property rights are produced through negotiations and power struggles among land claimants and a wide range of public authorities. We refer to this practice as everyday property-making . These negotiations do not take place on a level playing field. Instead, they reflect and reproduce the unequal distribution of resources in the city. The certainty of people's land rights depends on the symbolic and material resources they can mobilise to gain recognition from public authorities. Landholders with more resources are, thus, in a better position to legalise property rights than their less well-endowed competitors. In this context, the law is not an independent or neutral source of property certainty, but rather a kind of meta-resource – its power contingent on access to other forms of resources. Therefore, we contend, that policies aiming to improve property rights in cities located in conflict zones should begin by understanding and addressing the political and military realities of land governance. This requires moving beyond formalisation and rooting them in local political processes. • Property rights are linked to the exercise of public authority. • Property uncertainty is connected to symbolic and material resources. • Wealthy people access property rights through recognition by powerful claimants. • This hierarchy of property rights is produced through everyday property-making .