Drawing on local judicial records and on-the-ground interviews, the chapter examines two criminal cases in a Shandong village, highlighting how, in the hyper-politicized context of the Great Leap Forward, factional struggles among rural elites took on a dangerous new significance. The revival of the Socialist Education Movement saw the downfall of two leading cadres in early 1960. The local lineage made a series of incendiary allegations against them, leading to their removal from office, prosecution, and long-term imprisonment. A key learning from this case study concerns the way in which the implementation of campaigns, as well as judicial punishments, produced contingency. At the local level, campaigns were not just a path by which the state achieved or failed to achieve its own goals, but also provided a framework for individuals to exercise their own agency. Meanwhile, a decentralized judicial system with limited safeguards and poor evidence-gathering and case-making practices allowed campaign-induced conflict to spill over into criminal punishment. The convergence of campaign-style politics with politicalized legal enforcement seems inevitably to have ratcheted up the stakes to the point where only one endgame was possible: a bitter struggle followed by brutal and ultimately fatal punishments.

A fee simple owner has the right to exclusive possession and may choose to occupy the land. Alternatively, a fee simple owner may choose to grant another person the right of occupation. This chapter explores the main way in which an owner of land grants another a right to occupy the land, via a lease. The chapter first considers leases under the general law. The chapter then turns to consider retail lease and residential lease legislation that was enacted in all Australian jurisdictions in the latter quarter of the 20th century. These two statutory regimes provide greater clarity as to the rights and obligations of the parties and confer significant protections for lessees. Although other lease legislation has been enacted in various Australian jurisdictions, this legislation is not considered in this chapter.

The parties to retail and residential leases cannot contract out of the provisions of the legislation. However, the general law principles regarding leases continue to apply to retail and residential leases to the extent that these principles are not inconsistent with the legislation.

Chapter 7 examines why contentious land narratives are not sufficient predictors of electoral violence. In contrast to the previous chapter, which demonstrates how elites use narratives to organize violence, this chapter draws on evidence from counties in the Coast region where there are salient contentious land narratives yet electoral violence is rare. The chapter argues that land narratives work differently along the Coast because residents do not link their land rights with electoral outcomes. Hence, residents have few motives to participate in electoral violence and politicians have far less power to use land narratives to organize violence. To account for this regional difference, the chapter brings the reader back to the theory of “landlord” and “land patron,” which it discusses in terms of patronage strength. It also explains the importance of group size: the proportion of ethnic insiders relative to outsiders at the local level.

Chapter 3 provides the historical context in which to understand land and political violence in Kenya. It does so by comparing the histories of land ownership and distribution between Kenya’s highlands and the Coast region. The chapter’s central question asks how and why practices of land allocation vary between regions. Drawing on patterns of land allocation, archival data, and in-depth interviews, the chapter argues that two styles of political leadership – the vote-seeking land patron and rent-seeking landlord – reflect different modes and logics of land accumulation and distribution that have developed over each political regime. The chapter further explains how these different modes of land distribution and the broader politics of land play out under three phases of Kenya: colonial rule and the Mau Mau civil war (1900–1962), the single party rule of Jomo Kenyatta (1962–1978), and the de facto single party rule of Daniel arap Moi (1978–2002).

This chapter uses a range of records of grants and other documents of order to introduce the protagonists and to trace the story of their accmulation of entitlements related to land, agrarian revenues, and state offices. It discusses how such grants were received from emperor, princes, and nobles, as reward for a variety of services – military, fiscal, and administrative – provided to those higher authorities. As such, the protagonists are shown to be part of a ubiquitous and diverse social class, referred to in Mughal parlance as zamindars – holders of land. All this is used to show how the Mughal state was actuated and even inhabited, and turned into family property – not just at the top, but also the bottom of the regime's hierarchy.