This book explores how customary institutions, citizens, and chiefs impact the expansion of state control over land, determining how state capacity grows and why it is spatially uneven. It shows that, by influencing how chiefs and citizens weigh competing incentives in their decisions, customary institutions can divert the outcomes intended by state policy or predicted by market forces. Local power dynamics and the agency of members of customary institutions are thus critical to understanding both the resilience of customary land tenure regimes and the continuing influence of customary institutions in citizens’ lives. Chapter 8 concludes the book by examining the broader implications of these findings for the contemporary role of customary institutions as intermediaries between citizen and state; the political determinants of property rights; and land titling policies.

There is a complex set of political systems in Africa. While some countries democratized, particularly in the 1990s, others are run by authoritarian leaders. Some of the former have made efforts to strengthen their democracies whereas others have started to dismantle them. To understand these dynamics, this chapter scrutinizes the nature of the state, political orders, and democratization (attempts). It discusses the introduction of term limits (and their later abolishment) and strategies of leaders to stay in power: neopatrimonialism, violence and intimidation, electoral manipulation, as well as culture. There is a variety of actors operating in these systems besides the president, including the government, the public administration, parliamentarians, the military, judges, traditional leaders, and non-governmental organizations, all being discussed in this chapter.