UC Berkeley

Land restitution in South Africa is a state-led program developed to return lost lands to those dispossessed by colonial and apartheid policies and practices. However, the program is widely lamented for its failure to deliver upon its post-apartheid promise for land during its first-wave (1994-8) and second-wave (2014-9) efforts. Though an important body of scholarship has emerged to investigate the legal, legislative and constitutional shortcomings that substantively limit its decolonizing potential, little research has been conducted to examine the program itself as a project of spatial governance. This dissertation examines the land restitution program as increasingly estranged from its central mandate, captured instead by a range of alternate politics, institutional imperatives and technological interventions. Drawing upon Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and assemblage thinking, the chapters therein explore an array of spatial assemblages corresponding with distinct phases or elements of the land claims process, each articulated by the circulation of policies, protocols, objects and technologies deployed to bring a disparate constellation of sites into communication and coherence. These spatial assemblages are shown to have agential capacities, producing several program outcomes and effects that unsettle the post-apartheid aspirations of land restitution. This dissertation calls for further research attending to the ways in which land restitution and reform efforts are increasingly repurposed as technocratic projects of socio-spatial governance in post-colonial contexts.