About the Contributors

Dr. José Laimone Adalima earned his doctorate in anthropology from the University of Pretoria in South Africa. He is currently an assistant professor of anthropology at Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique. His research focuses on natural resources and livelihoods, land rights, land dynamics and economic transformation, and civil society and democracy.

Dr. Bernardo Almeida is an assistant professor at Leiden University College and the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society at the Leiden University Law School. He works as a socio-legal researcher and practitioner in land tenure, law, lawmaking, and development, and is currently researching the nexus between climate change response and land rights.

Dr. Carmen Alveal is an associate professor in the Department of History at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, and a researcher at CNPq. She received a PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2007. Her research interests include the history of property rights, rural history, colonial Brazilian history, and the Portuguese Empire. She is also the director of LEHS, the Laboratory of Experimental Social History.

Dr. Matthias Röhrig Assunção is professor of history at the University of Essex, United Kingdom. His research deals with the history of slavery and post-emancipation society in Brazil, in particular in Maranhão, popular culture, capoeira and the martial arts of the Black Atlantic. He coordinates the Capoeira History website (www.capoeirahistory.com). You can learn more about his work at https://essex.academia.edu/MatthiasRöhrigAssunção.

Dr. Susanna Barnes received her doctorate in anthropology from Monash University. Her research interests include the anthropology of island Southeast Asia, customary governance and land tenure, intergenerational well-being and healing, colonial and post-colonial history, and international development. She is currently an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Saskatchewan.

Dr. Aharon deGrassi is an interdisciplinary geographer focusing on the political economy of rural development in Africa. His research examines the agrarian geo-history of Angola, Amílcar Cabral’s political ecology, and the colonial contexts of Weberian approaches in African studies. He obtained his PhD at UC Berkeley, held fellowships at Yale and Bayreuth Universities, works with international organizations, and is an assistant professor at College of the Desert.

Dr. Bárbara Direito holds a PhD from the University of Lisbon (2013) and since 2019 has been a research fellow at the Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e da Tecnologia (School of Science and Technology, NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal). She is interested in the history of colonial Mozambique in the twentieth century, in particular in agrarian history, the history of medicine, and environmental history, on which she has published in national and international journals.

Dr. Laura Gerken is a political sociologist. She pursued her doctorate at the International Max Planck Research School on the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy in cooperation with the University of Duisburg-Essen. Her research interests include social movements, global governance, and rural livelihoods.

Dr. Hans Hägerdal is a professor of history in the Department of Cultural Studies, Linnaeus University, Sweden. His research areas include colonial diplomacy in Southeast Asia, slavery and the slave trade in the Indian Ocean world, and colonial-Indigenous interaction in eastern Indonesia, in particular the Timor islands and Maluku.

Dr. Elissio Jossias is an assistant professor of social anthropology at Eduardo Mondlane University (Mozambique) and a guest researcher at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg (Sweden). His research interests include the historicity of land and transformative notions of property and belonging, the impacts of changing land governance systems, and land acquisitions (large-scale national and international investments in land) in northern Mozambique.

Dr. Douglas Kammen is an associate professor in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. He is the co-author ofA Tour of Duty: Changing Patterns of Military Politics in Indonesia in the 1990s (Cornell Southeast Asia Program) andCina Timor: Hakka and Cantonese in the Making of East Timor (Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies), the author ofThree Centuries of Conflict in East Timor (Rutgers University Press) andIndependent Timor-Leste: Between Coercion and Consent (Cambridge University Press), and has written numerous articles and book chapters.

Dr. Tania Murray Li is a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her field-defining research has been grounded in long-term, comparative analysis of the Indonesian uplands and beyond, spanning research on land and labour, Indigenous rights, development, governance, and environmental advocacy. Her research engages activists and policy-makers, and her recent work on plantations (Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia’s Oil Palm Zone, with Pujo Semedi) examines the intersection of land governance, the politics of commodity production, and Indigenous livelihoods and well-being in historical and modern contexts.

Dr. Ricardo Roque is research professor in history at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal, where he is the current group leader of the Empires, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Societies research group and teaches in the history and anthropology doctoral programs. His current research includes projects on the history and ethnography of colonial collections and Indigenous archives in the Portuguese Empire.

Dr. Laura S. Meitzner Yoder is professor of environmental studies and John Stott Chair and director of the Human Needs and Global Resources Program, Wheaton College, Illinois, USA. Her work centres on environmental histories and political ecology of Southeast Asia, especially the smallholder farmers and forest dwellers of Oé-Cusse, Timor-Leste, as they relate to state institutions on land and forest governance.