Territorial Appropriation in Belize: An Institutional Genealogy of Property

Abstract

In Belize, land property rights have been instituted in colonial contexts marked by great precariousness, and juridical and political complexity. The process of the institution of land property registry took place in several phases that correspond to stages of colonial construction, each one generating different types of negotiation and interaction between political communities. The notions and legal categories elaborated around land property followed one another without replacing each other, and they reached interlaced configurations, splices, and overlays that lead to situations of extreme confusion. To understand the confusion and its political backgrounds, we propose a methodology that follows the legal territorial knowledge's evolution through an institutional genealogy of property in four stages, over the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.