Conflict and Housing, Land and Property Rights: A Handbook on Issues, Frameworks and Solutions

Housing, land, and property (HLP) rights, as rights, are widely recognized throughout international human rights and humanitarian law and provide a clear and consistent legal normative framework for developing better approaches to the HLP challenges faced by the UN and others seeking to build long-term peace. This book analyses the ubiquitous HLP challenges present in all conflict and post-conflict settings. It will bridge the worlds of the practitioner and the theorist by combining an overview of the international legal and policy frameworks on HLP rights with dozens of detailed case studies demonstrating country experiences from around the world. The book will be of particular interest to professors and students of international relations, law, human rights, and peace and conflict studies but will have a wider readership among practitioners working for international institutions such as the United Nations and the World Bank, non-governmental organizations, and national agencies in the developing world.

Scott Leckie is the Founder and Director of Displacement Solutions (www.displacementsolutions.org), an organization dedicated to resolving cases of forced displacement throughout the world. He also recently founded and directs the charitable organization Oneness World (www.onenessworld.org), which supports small research and other projects promoting global citizenship and peaceful and evolutionary ways of building a postnation-state world. He is also the founder of the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE - www.cohre.org), an organization he headed from 1991 to 2007. Leckie has written and/or edited 9 books and more than 175 articles and reports on issues including housing rights; economic, social, and cultural rights; forced evictions; the right to housing and property restitution for refugees and internally displaced persons; and other human rights themes. Chris Huggins is an academic and researcher specializing in the relationships between land rights, violent conflict, and postconflict development, particularly in Africa. He spent the last decade working in Eastern and Central Africa for the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTs), an intergovernmental organization, and consulting with several major nongovernmental organizations. He is currently based in Ottawa, Canada, where he heads a consultancy firm, Land Conflict Research.