Insurgent Citizenship for Ancestral Rights: Pastoralists' Resistance to Land Dispossession in Madagascar

ABSTRACT By examining the enduring resistance of Malagasy pastoralists to a large‐scale biofuel and afforestation project, this paper explores how the dispossession of agrarian populations reflects and shapes citizenship regimes and practices from below. Drawing on fieldwork and documentary analysis spanning 2010–2026, it shows how a State‐backed corporate land acquisition operates through frontier dynamics, classifying pastoral territory as legally empty and its inhabitants as less than legal subjects. In refusing this erasure and asserting alternative sources of rights and legitimacy, affected communities engage in what Holston calls ‘insurgent citizenship’. They assert political subjectivity and the right to territory on two simultaneous grounds: as citizens contesting universal rights violations and as territorial authorities demanding recognition of ancestral rule and intergenerational stewardship. The paper contributes to debates on citizenship and agrarian change by showing how territorial governance and ancestral belonging can ground claims to both land and citizenship at extractive frontiers.