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?

These and other questions will be discussed in a series of workshops and a public panel. The sessions will be open to Geneva Graduate Institute students as well as the broader community of International Geneva, fostering critical and interdisciplinary dialogue on the political, economic, and legal dynamics reshaping land, sovereignty, and global governance in the 21st century. These reflections build on the momentum generated by ICAARD +20, held in February 2026 in Cartagena, Colombia, and seek to advance ongoing conversations on land rights, accountability, and structural reform.

The full programme of the conference is available here.

The conference is organised with the generous support of the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. 238234), the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Unit for Human Security, and the Geneva Graduate Institute’s International Law Department.

Photo credit:  Annie Spratt @ Unsplash