Displacement, Land Grabs, and Post-Conflict Property Regimes in South Sudan

This article develops conflict-shaped property regime as an analytical lens for understanding property rights, displacement, and hybrid land governance after conflict. Rather than treating land, displacement, and the political economy of post-conflict property rights as a descriptive case, the manuscript argues that mass displacement in South Sudan has produced a layered property regime in which statutory law, customary claims, wartime occupation, and commercial appropriation overlap; the result is not merely administrative confusion but a durable political economy of contested return and accumulation. Anchored in Property rights theory (North; De Soto — critically); post-conflict land governance (Unruh; Pantuliano); political ecology (Peluso & Watts). Develops a theory of 'conflict-induced property regime transformation' — how mass displacement permanently restructures land tenure systems in ways that drive continued instability. the paper translates the topic brief into three linked questions: How has the mass displacement of over four million South Sudanese — through both internal movement and cross-border refuge — transformed the de facto and de jure land tenure landscape, and what conflicts does this transformation generate upon return? To what extent is land-grabbing by military commanders, government officials, and returning diaspora a deliberate strategy of accumulation enabled by displacement and governance collapse — and how does this interact with customary land tenure systems? What institutional arrangements — in terms of land registry, dispute adjudication, and transitional justice for property crimes — have succeeded in managing post-conflict land conflict in comparative cases (Rwanda, Liberia, Timor-Leste), and what is their applicability to South Sudan?