Land rights in crisis : restoring tenure security in Afghanistan / Liz Alden Wily.

“March 2003”.

“Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit”—at head of title.

“Include bibliography”—(p. 127-131).

Executive summary in English and Dari also published separately.

Summary: “Land tenure insecurity has many faces – from the returning refugee widow who is unable to wrest her husband’s land from his family, to the community evicted by a land-hungry warlord, to the drought-defeated smallholder who has sold his last plot for food and cannot find a landlord willing to enter a sharecrop arrangement. It may also be a case of clan heads carving up local pasture for new cultivation, land that poorer villagers thought was theirs to share, that the government though was its own to distribute, that visiting nomads thought was theirs to graze – and often have documents to “prove” it – documents that may conflict with other issued at different times, with the law, or with human rights and justice norms. At this point in time, multiple claims, each with its own historical legitimacy, may exist over the same land. The law, and the documents or testimony it generates, is plural, complex, uncertain, incomplete and currently unenforceable. At every turn, there is a need to rethink norms for a sustainable future while reconciling with the past”—(p. 1).