Lands for the Taking:  Neo-Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Unravelling of International Law

We are pleased to invite you to the conference “Lands for the Taking: Neo-Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Unravelling of International Law”, which will be held at the Geneva Graduate Institute on 12–13 March 2026.

Organised in collaboration with the United Nations Human Rights Council Working Group on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas and with the generous support of the Heinrich-Böll Foundation, the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Geneva Graduate Institute, this conference will address the pressing and sensitive issue of contemporary land capture in the context of international law, focusing on both overt and invisibilised forms of territorial appropriation. Bringing together a diverse group of legal scholars, historians, anthropologists, policymakers and civil society actors, the conference will critically examine the erosion of core legal principles such as sovereignty, self-determination, and collective rights to natural resources.

Key questions to be explored include:

• How effective are international legal frameworks in preventing various forms of land capture?
• What is the role of cronyism and corporate capture of state authority in land appropriation?
• How do Indigenous and peasant communities experience and resist displacement, dispossession and erasure?
• How are legal configurations, in both substance and form, related to modes of land capture, and what possibilities for resistance do they provide?
• How might law need to be transformed or reimagined to resist neo-imperial and corporate forms of land capture?

Preliminary programme: