Although ethnic heterogeneity is a pervasive feature of much of rural Africa, the local political structures that organize interethnic relations vary a great deal across space. Such variation produces different forms of local hierarchy, different avenues and venues for political representation (or subordination) of ethnic outsiders, and different imbrications of the state in local-level power relations.

Where the state itself is the allocator of land rights, the political character and dénouement of land-related conflict are likely to contrast starkly with what we have observed in the customary land tenure regimes (LTRs), where local-level customary authorities (lineage heads or chiefs) control land allocation and adjudication. In zones of in-migration governed under statist land regimes, the central government itself has organized the in-migration and settlement (the “implantation”) of ethnic outsiders. These are cases of the migrations organisées or migrations officielles, where state power has been used to “administratively insert” settlers into the locality.