This book looks at how the benefits of economic development in the Great Lakes Region of Africa are not being equally distributed. It studies the impact of the increasing scramble for natural resources upon local livelihoods and considers the ambiguities that characterise the relationship between mining and development.

Dispossession of land on a small scale can have as great an impact on living conditions as large-scale land-grabs. With the increasing commodification of land, new forms of dispossession, in urban as well as rural districts, are also gaining in importance. This book looks at this largely uninvestigated issue through case studies in the Eastern DRC, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda: here the loss of land often represents the loss of people's livelihoods in these areas of extreme land scarcity in highly populated regions. In the post-conflict states of the Great Lakes, governance challenges increase...