Landscapes of dispossession: criminal justice and property rights in Mexico (2015–2020)

Abstract

It is generally accepted that the State plays an important role in promoting and facilitating practices of dispossession; yet there is little reflection on its role in prevention, processing, and reversion (restitution). Our research focusses on dispossession understood as a crime. The criminal classification of dispossession as well as the continued reporting of its frequency and magnitude, suggest that crucial State institutions, such as those which form part of the criminal justice system, play a determining role in both how certain property conflicts are denominated as well as the trajectory, duration, and ways in which these are processed. Using a spatial analysis of criminal records of dispossession on a municipal level, from 2015 – 2020 in Mexico, we aim to demonstrate dispossession as a highly collective, contested, and concentrated process of changing relations of land and property that materialize in unequal ways on specific regulated spaces, rather than as a random occurrence on institutionally and socially empty territories.