Land rights now: Global voices on Indigenous peoples and land justice by WilliamNikolakis (Ed.), Cambridge University Press. 2025. pp. 362. ISBN: 978‐1‐009‐52157‐4

I am writing parts of this review from the Ecuadorian Amazon. During my stay, I attended a legal hearing in the Indigenous territory of the A'i Cofán community of Sinangoe. To reach the hearing site, we crossed the Aguarico River. The community had prepared for decades to receive the judges of the Provincial Court, escorted by the Kuirasunde'khu (Indigenous Guard), who accepted to hold the hearing in the community's territory as a guarantee of intercultural dialogue. The hearing was, and is, about land rights, the very question at the heart of Land Rights Now: Global Voices on Indigenous Peoples and Land Justice, the volume under review. Land rights. Not only 63,755 ha were at stake, but also mourning, memories, (hi)stories, struggles for self-determination, politics of existence and the world-making practices through which collective life is sustained. Returning to the intercultural hearing in the Amazon, it began with the permission to hold a healing ceremony inside a circular space, with woven baskets filled with chonta palm (Bactris gasipaes) arranged at its centre. The smell of palo santo (Bursera graveolens) lingered. Branches of achiote (Bixa Orellana) and the urtica plant (Urtica dioica) were used to cleanse each person. Yoco (Paullinia yoco) was shared. Yoco is not merely a plant; it is a legal counsel, a companion and a vegetal authority participating in co-governance. The semillero de niños entered, small children in traditional blue clothing (cushma) singing to the rhythm of drums: ¿Quiénes somos? ¿Qué defendemos? Fuerza, fuerza. Guardia, guardia. El grito de la selva, uuuu (Who are we? What do we stand for? Strength, strength. Guard, guard. The cry of the forest, uuuu). Land rights were at stake, as they are in the volume under review. Land rights entangled with memories, ‘mental maps of the forest’,1 ancestral (hi)stories, invisible spiritual beings such as Atiambi a'i, Kukuya, Vajo and Kuankua, rivers that know no borders, toucans in flight, sacred sites of yoco and the tree of fishes from which, as they say, all Amazonian rivers are born. Just as in Land Rights Now, the A'i Cofán are claiming their land back—now. As William Nikolakis notes, reclaiming land ‘still costs the energy of Indigenous Peoples despite the acquired rights’ (at 1) and remains emotionally intensive: proving ancestry, navigating bureaucracies and demonstrating what has always been known. In Sinangoe, the mapping itself was carried out through a mandato comunitario (community mandate) entrusted to the Indigenous Guard. Even children painted their own map as part of this mandate. Such acts exceed the technical cartographies of the State, which cannot fully render what is being defended. The hearing I attended in the Amazon mirrors the struggles narrated across the 12 case studies in the edited volume under review, spanning Latin America, Africa and Asia and concluding with Europe and the Sámi cases. Patterns of dispossession, strategies of resistance and partial forms of recognition recur across these geographies, as described by Sami legal scholar Oula-Antti Laba (at 332). The volume is organised around three guiding questions: Who gets land rights? What do they get? With or without consent? This analytical framework structures the comparative endeavour and offers a clear entry into a ‘patchy landscape’2 of land rights. The 12 case studies are carefully chosen. Some chapters present what are described as ‘all-too-common’ examples of land rights being promised constitutionally yet denied in practice, such as in Botswana, where ‘land rights for all’ (at 222) remain aspirational rather than realised, as highlighted in Hitchcock, Sapignoli and Moeti's chapter. At the outset, the editor provides a working definition of land rights, alongside a conceptual map of dispossession patterns, strategies of reclamation, recognition processes, barriers and opportunities. This framework underpins all chapters, even if it is not always explicitly revisited. Before even asking what ‘land’ means, another underlying question traverses many chapters and the subjects seeking for land justice: Who qualifies as Indigenous? This definition remains contested in several jurisdictions, shaping the entire architecture of land rights. The central argument of the volume is clear: Land justice is not settled history but an ongoing struggle, a continuous reclaiming of land now. Across cases, one observes forms of what might be called a legal minga: Collective efforts to activate, reinterpret and insist upon rights that formally exist yet remain precarious.3 Collective mobilisation emerges not only as protest but as juridical practice. The Colombian example explored in Bolaños Cárdenas and Niño Izquierdo's chapter of the National Ethnic and Popular Minga organised between 2013 and 2021 by Indigenous communities of Cauca illustrates how collective action becomes a defence of territorial, environmental and constitutional rights. Here, minga is not merely an act of demonstration; it is a mode of assembling political and legal claims through communal deliberation and coordinated presence. This resonates with reflections on legal minga as the collective weaving of law across normative orders, grounded in shared responsibility and ‘relational accountability’, as I put it elsewhere.4 Law unfolds through cycles of gathering, movement and return, aligning with territorial and ecological rhythms of the land, rather than with the linear temporality of State procedure. From this perspective, the defence of land rights is not only a claim to recognition but a practice of sustaining relational worlds across fragmented regimes of being and living. Collective action becomes both juridical and ecological, both political and temporal. Three tensions weave through the volume. First, what is ‘land’? Although the book begins in the language of rights, the cases repeatedly show that what is at stake is rarely mere right to property. In the Chilean case explored by Tomaselli, the invocation of ‘Az Mapu’ (at 101) exceeds land as title and situates it as a historical and territorial space. Other chapters reveal similar tensions between the grammar of rights and relational understandings of territory. Is ‘land’ framed predominantly as property? Often, yes. Yet relational dimensions persist—implicitly or explicitly—as exemplified in the New Zealand case study written by Jones and Córtes Acosta. The land appears as ancestral presence, as spiritual geography, as defended life-world. Attempts are made to move beyond classical property frameworks, even if ontology often remains partially subordinated to legal discourse. The second tension the book navigates relates to questions of recognition, fragmentation and transformation of land rights. Land rights emerge fragmented across constitutions, statutes, decrees, customary and civil law, treaties, policies, international instruments and in Indigenous normative orders. Judicial decisions sometimes open doors and sometimes close them. Indigenous law may appear as an autonomous source, or as conditionally recognised by the State—as illustrated in the Australian and Canadian case studies. The strength or weakness of legal pluralism within each jurisdiction shapes these outcomes. Fragmentation of land rights across normative regimes is not merely technical; it structures possibilities of transformation. Recognition does not automatically entail justice: ‘rights by themselves are insufficient’, being ‘only effective to the extent that they are morally and institutionally enforceable’, as Ivison puts it (at 7). Litigation appears repeatedly as a strategic pathway for claiming land rights. The Malaysian chapter by Subramaniam shows both litigation's potential and its limitations: doctrinal constraints, burdens of proof, restricted evidentiary standards and the practical demands of sustaining long-term legal processes (at 297–300). Similar to the experience of the A'i Cofán community in the Ecuadorian Amazon, litigation requires organised community participation, internal decision-making structures and resources capable of mobilising an entire collective over time. It also raises questions about what counts as Indigenous evidence and whether courts are prepared to engage in genuine intercultural dialogue. The need for such dialogue resonates beyond any single jurisdiction. Finally, the third tension concerns the ‘now’. The ‘now’ in Land Rights Now carries temporal force. It reads as urgency—political, economic and ecological—and as rupture, yet also as continuity. Across the 12 chapters, the struggle for land is not a new phenomenon; it is the continuation of colonial and postcolonial dispossession. The ‘now’ is therefore double: a new legal moment and a long-standing history of interruption and survival. This temporal layering resonates with Indigenous thinkers such as Ailton Krenak, who speaks of an ‘ancestral future’: a future that is not projected forward in linear time, but one already carried in ancestral knowledge, practices and modes of inhabiting that persist despite dispossession.5 Read through this lens, the ‘now’ is not only urgency and insurgency—as Ambagudia notes in the Indian chapter (at 249)—but continuity: The insistence that what has been defended for centuries remains present. Krenak's idea of florestanía further gestures toward reimagining citizenship intertwined with the forest—land not as resource but as relation. In this sense, Land Rights Now invites reflection on what kind of future is being claimed when land is reclaimed and whose temporalities structure that claim. There is, however, an omission and ethnographic longing one can feel while reading the book. One wonders what types of land dominate in the chapters. While forests are central, mountains, rivers, mangroves and more-than-human inhabitants appear less prominently. The ‘living beings’ as part of the lands claimed and defended are absent. One therefore, at times, longs to hear more of them. While the volume is not ethnographic in nature and offers robust overviews of litigation and formal disputes, the daily dimension of inhabiting lands remains less developed, especially when the absence of land tenure perpetuates conditions of precarity, where long-term life projects of all inhabitants of the land remain suspended. This, however, may merely reflect my own ethnographic longing. In terms of accessibility, clarity and readability, the edited volume brings together different authorial styles and global voices while addressing a complex topic. Each chapter renders its context accessible, enabling readers to grasp both the specificity and the broader implications of the particular case. As noted in the foreword by Robert A Williams of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, the volume gathers in short form the entanglements of ‘national laws, prejudices, and degrees of repression, intimidation and violence’ (at xi). For readers seeking comparative insight, a concluding table synthesising the 12 chapters, aligned with the initial conceptual framework introduced at the beginning of the book, could have further strengthened the coherence of the volume and facilitated cross-case comparisons. Returning to the Amazon, with which I started my reflections, similar to the A'i Cofán community of Sinangoe in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and like the stories narrated throughout this volume, the struggle for land is not only about hectares or judicial victories. It is about returning to territory, to memory and to responsibility. As referred to in the volume, Anishinaabe scholar Leanne Simpson speaks of ‘returning to ourselves’. In the context of land struggles, this return is spatial, relational and political. In Sinangoe, it unfolded through ceremony, collective mapping and children painting their forests into being among the Indigenous Guard and yoco plant standing watch.6 It unfolded in the insistence that what has always been known does not require translation to exist. Land Rights Now documents this insistence across continents. The title speaks of urgency—and rightly so—but also of enduringness. The ‘now’ is the present form of a longer claim and protest. As Robert A Williams suggests, ‘Indigenous Peoples and their stories have much to offer the world’ (at xiii), not only as claims within law but as lessons about what it means to inhabit land otherwise.