1. Introduction: Property regimes and land conflict: seeing institutions and their effects -- Land tenure regimes and political order in rural Africa -- Rising competition for land: redistribution and its varied political effects -- Ethnic strangers as second-class citizens. Ethnic heterogeneity in western Burkina Faso -- Expulsion of aliens from Ghana's cocoa region -- Land tensions in western Ghana. -- Ethnic strangers as protected clients of the state. Southwestern Côte d'Ivoire: strangers imposed "by force!" -- Kenya's Rift Valley settlers -- "Forced cohabitation" in eastern DRC. -- Land conflict at the micro-scale: family. Western Kenya: Kisii. -- Chieftaincy: the local state as arena of redistributive conflict. Northern Cameroon: states within the state -- Conflict repressed within chieftaincies: periurban Kumasi, Ghana. Land conflict at the national scale. Rwanda. -- Winning and losing politically-allocated land rights. Kenya since 1991-2010 -- Côte d'Ivoire: 1990-2010 -- Rwanda, 1991-4 -- Eastern DRC, 1990-4. -- Zimbabwe in comparative perspective. Elections and expropriations, 2000-2010. Conclusion: property regimes in political explanation. Property regimes in comparative politics -- Economic institutions and democracy -- Patrimonialism vs. bargained institutions -- Ethnicity as a state effect -- Ethnicity and class politics -- Scale effects in political explanation. -- Epilogue: rising pressure on the land.