A. Home and Land Titling

Mass land titling was at the heart of LMAP. The World Bank’s rationale was twofold. First, it said that lack of land titling in Cambodia directly related to the high incidence of land conflict.Footnote ⁶⁹ Uncertainty about the boundaries of land resulting from unclear land policy and land classification had led to competing land claims between individuals, the government, and investors. Second, lack of land title and ambiguity about land rights was hindering economic growth in Cambodia by reducing incentives to invest.Footnote ⁷⁰ According to the World Bank, “[l]ack of a land law is one of the main complaints of foreign investors in Cambodia”.Footnote ⁷¹ By rolling out land titles in Cambodia, LMAP would “reduce the amount of land under state control”,Footnote ⁷² “stimulate the development of more efficient land markets and allocate land to its ‘best use’”.Footnote ⁷³

The World Bank has long promoted land titling as key to its pro-market approach to development and economic growth in developing countries.Footnote ⁷⁴ This is reflected in its housing policy, which has shifted from a “site and service” approach in the 1960s and 1970s to, with the rise of agricultural and urban capitalism, market provision of housing through land titling supported by state-backed land and property rights.Footnote ⁷⁵ In its flagship 1993 report, Housing: Enabling Markets to Work, the World Bank argued that establishing property rights was key to ensuring the effective operation of land markets. In its 1997 World Development Report, the World Bank emphasized the importance of state-backed property rights systems and local land markets as “institutional enablers” of economic growth.Footnote ⁷⁶

The World Bank’s championing of land titling bears the influence of Hernando De Soto’s theory of property formalization.Footnote ⁷⁷ De Soto posits land titling as a solution to Third World poverty. His theory has almost single-handedly reshaped land administration in many low-income countries.Footnote ⁷⁸ It rests on the claim that the poor are occupying unlocked capital—according to De Soto, “forty times all the foreign aid received throughout the world since 1945”—and that this is held in “defective form”.Footnote ⁷⁹ Poverty will be reduced when the poor convert the “dead capital” of their land into collateral for loans through land title.Footnote ⁸⁰ The Royal Government of Cambodia [RGC] has expressed a similar faith in capitalist land transformation: “[d]espite sensitive issues around land, there is still a lot of possibility to convert land into capital for high value addition.”Footnote ⁸¹ In the past two decades, the World Bank has conducted dozens of “land administration” projects identical to the project at Boeung Kak Lake, combining mass land titling with new land and property law systems and kick-starting land markets.Footnote ⁸²

But land titling is not without significant and vocal detractors—not least when we look from the perspective of home.Footnote ⁸³ First, the promotion of land titling rests on a number of assumptions about the capability of smallholders (which includes the land poor) to be active market players, the existence of functioning institutions modelled on those in the West, and services to assist smallholders to “maximize” their “assets”. The success of land titling, then, rests on the fantasy that, as Lucy Earle argues, “one small piece of a complex cultural and legal fabric can be simply transplanted to a different social and political reality”.Footnote ⁸⁴ In many parts of the global South this does not reflect conditions on the ground.Footnote ⁸⁵ Indeed, Mitchell critiques De Soto’s plans for the vast creation of wealth by transforming “dead capital” into “live capital” through land titling, arguing that, in practice, this does not produce capital but instead transfers wealth from the poor and less affluent to the more secure.Footnote ⁸⁶

Second, scholars have criticized the idea that land title gives smallholders bargaining power to resist the advance of investors or to negotiate better deals.Footnote ⁸⁷ The reality is often the opposite. Land targeted for investment is often in poor agricultural areas where smallholders struggle with debt and face competition from industrial manufacturing, making it more difficult to make ends meet. In these circumstances, smallholders may be forced into distress sales, losing home and livelihood.Footnote ⁸⁸ Land title makes transactions in land easier, swifter, and more transparent, mainly benefiting buyers and investors. As a result, land titling moves from the promise of redistribution to actual reconcentration.Footnote ⁸⁹ As Polanyi understood, the creation of markets in land leads to despoliation of both nature and livelihood.Footnote ⁹⁰

A third criticism is that investors are also inevitably larger and more experienced market players. Individual smallholders are unlikely to be successful in using their title to challenge investors in court or to extract concessions in deals. This resonates with Olivier De Schutter’s argument that land deals should be the last and least desirable option because they can permanently close off the option of smallholding and alienate current and future generations of smallholders from returning to their homes, and the culture and history linked to this.Footnote ⁹¹ Finally, smallholders will not always have the skills or resources to “capitalize” on land title in the entrepreneurial ways imagined by De Soto, such as by using their homes as collateral to finance a business venture. Moreover, for smallholders, the “best use” of their land may be for it to remain as it is (home, pasture, place of work) rather than as an asset or commodity.Footnote ⁹² Even when land titling schemes are meant to increase security and protect against eviction, they accelerate “the development of a market for land rights with potentially destructive effects on livelihoods”.Footnote ⁹³

A final criticism is that capitalist accounts such as De Soto’s place unrecorded and irregular forms of socioeconomic life (for example, self-sufficient and bartering smallholders) outside the market. However, they are in fact neither inside nor outside. As Mitchell argues, they instead form a frontier or a border, neither exterior nor interior to the market.Footnote ⁹⁴ They are partly outside because their assets cannot be priced by the market, but also partly inside because the forms taken by capitalism or the market (for example, the forms of rent that are the principle means for the elite to reproduce its wealth) “are the outcome of a long and continuing encounter and interaction with this so-called outside”.Footnote ⁹⁵ As such, the transfer of wealth from the “outside” to the “inside” creates wealth, but not in the way envisaged by De Soto. Instead, property titling and the use of property—and home into property—as collateral create opportunities for speculation, for concentrating wealth, and accumulating rents. In the process, the poor, and their homes, are not the source of wealth but the means through which wealth is reorganized and accumulated.Footnote ⁹⁶

Many Boeung Kak Lake residents welcomed the opportunity to apply for land title under LMAP.Footnote ⁹⁷ Few residents had formal legal ownership of their homes. This is unsurprising, considering the ad hoc way Boeung Kak Lake was settled and the almost non-existence of a land administration system—resulting in what Robin Biddulph describes as Cambodia’s “uneven geography” of tenure insecurity.Footnote ⁹⁸ This is not to say it was impossible to buy and sell property rights in Cambodia before the World Bank arrived. However, there has been a preference among Boeung Kak Lake residents to rely on customary systems of tenure.Footnote ⁹⁹ This includes the custom of passing on the family home through kinship lines and the Khmer tradition of “family books” that record the history of every home. It also includes other forms of tenure recognition. For example, most families at Boeung Kak Lake were issued with house numbers and family books by the district authority. Some were approved for small home improvements and many had land sale contracts witnessed by district officials. One resident who lives at Boeung Kak Lake with her husband, five children, and three grandchildren holds the land sale contract to her home. These customary tenure arrangements have long ensured residents’ security at home, and are also linked to membership of a community and shared culture. For Boeung Kak Lake residents, ontological securityFootnote ¹⁰⁰ —the sense of being and belonging in the world derived from living in their homes at the lake—was just as, if not more, important than legal security of tenure. Until the World Bank’s arrival at the lake they had not sought to change these arrangements.

In the end, no land titles were ever distributed at Boeung Kak Lake. The lake was excised from the project during the first stage, which involved mapping and classifying the land. The aim of mapping and classifying the land, according to the World Bank, was to formalize the boundaries of the lake area “in a transparent, rule-based manner” and to identify land available for private ownership.Footnote ¹⁰¹ After the lake was mapped it was classified as “unclear” and “unknown”. Under the terms of LMAP, land determined to be “unclear” or “unknown” was automatically excluded from adjudication for title claims and handed over to the state as “state public land”.Footnote ¹⁰² Under the Land Law 2001, “state public land” is unavailable for private ownership and no claims for land title can be made over it.Footnote ¹⁰³ The maps were displayed in the local pagoda.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Residents were distressed to see not only that the lake had been excised from the project but also that their homes were unmarked and had effectively been disappeared, contrary to their settlement.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The CPP shortly afterwards initiated a process under the Land Law 2001 to convert the lake from “state public land” into “state private land”.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ State private land cannot be sold but it can be leased to individuals and corporations on long leases such as “economic land concessions” for exploitation and development.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ When residents approached project officials they were told they were living in a “development zone”. Thus while pitched as part of a redistributive process, technologies of mapping and classifying have been critiqued as cover for attempts by states and governments to locate and reserve land for development and investment, or to legitimate the selection of land for those purposes after the fact, resulting in reconcentration of land and resources.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Robin Biddulph, for example, argues that mapping and classification exercises “smooth space and conceal unevenness” and “define fixed boundaries” with the intent of transforming land for market exploitation.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

B. Transforming the Lake Home

The World Bank’s intervention at Boeung Kak Lake transformed home for inhabitants and did so in particularly negative ways. First, since no land titles were distributed at the lake, LMAP entirely failed to improve tenure security for residents. In fact, the project succeeded in generating new insecurities about home. Second, residents were given the message that without land title, their homes were at risk of capture, and that failure to capitalize on their property through land title left them in a weak position. Third, the reclassification of the lake area as “unknown” and “unclear” devastated residents by erasing their homes from the land, denying their existence, and, to the extent that residents remained legally visible, criminalizing them as illegal squatters in their own homes. In effect, LMAP created and authorized conditions in which residents could be dispossessed of their homes.

The Bank’s intervention also disrupted residents’ ontological security, which rests on the affective connections between people and home and is vital to an individual’s sense of being and belonging in the world. The type of insecurity at home LMAP generated can be understood as a particularly powerful background condition for capitalist land transformation precisely because it taps into the intimate and meaningful ontological experience of home. As residents reported, the Bank’s intervention left them not only at risk of losing their physical homes, but also emotionally, socially, and spiritually threatened by the denial of home, belonging, memory, and identity that attends such a loss.

Thus the events at the lake reflect how international law is involved in profound transformations of home. To the extent that international law’s “homemaking” work at Boeung Kak Lake involved acts of deprivation, we should also talk about “home-unmaking”. By taking home as an analytical tool to examine the events at the lake, a terrain of experience opens up that cannot be captured or expressed in international law. The loss of home for residents, and the suffering and struggle related to that loss, is not part of the international development agenda or the responsibilities of international development agencies or actors. To the extent that home is implicated in titling schemes such as LMAP, home is seen as property, as an investment vehicle, and as an instrumental good or commodity. Transforming home in this way has the potential to leave behind “landscapes of dispossession”.Footnote ¹¹⁰ This ignores and denies the richer meaning and experience of home that entails, for Boeung Kak Lake residents, the intrinsic link between home, being and belonging, family, community, identity, custom, and memory.

The World Bank project at Boeung Kak Lake is only one aspect of international law’s homemaking and home-unmaking work that I look at in this paper. In the second part, I turn to examine the land grab that unfolded at the lake under the watch of the World Bank. This discussion is a starting point for investigating later in the paper how international law is involved in homemaking work in the wider context of the “global land grab”, and what the implications of this are for home.

A. The Global Land Grab

Phnom Penh’s Olympic Stadium was built between 1963 and 1964 by the celebrated Khmer architect Van Molyvann. From a sporting centre, the Brutalist masterpiece was co-opted by the Khmer Rouge during the 1970s as an agitprop parade ground. Today the stadium remains one of the highest points in the city and is a favourite place for locals to exercise in the cool of the concrete pylons at dusk. From the rim of the stadium, one looks out across a landscape expanding in every direction, pockmarked with the craters of demolition sites, shiny new skyscrapers and apartment towers piercing through narrow spaces alongside pagodas and French colonial mansions. Since the mid 2000s, Phnom Penh’s city policy has been to make the capital competitive with other Southeast Asian cities, an aspiration reflected in the pace of construction.Footnote ¹³⁴ Opened to foreign trade and markets after the isolation of the Khmer Rouge era, and insulated from the effects of the Asian financial crash in the late 1990s, Phnom Penh now bears all the tumours of neoliberal urban growth in the global South: a building boom, rising land values, and swelling slums.

The land grab at Boeung Kak Lake can be seen in the context of Phnom Penh’s post-conflict transformation under the aegis of investor-led global capitalism. However, it can also be linked to what scholars are now calling the “global land grab”. While the phenomenon of land grabbing has so far caught the attention of scholars in geography, political ecology, rural sociology, development, and anthropology, among others,Footnote ¹³⁵ international law scholars have been slow to enter the debate, at least in part because law is seen as epiphenomenal to land grabbing rather than a key driver of it.Footnote ¹³⁶ It is worth spending a moment here sketching out the general idea of land grabbing before turning to the role of the World Bank in the global land grab, and the implications for home.

Land grabbing is not a new phenomenon. However, much about its contemporary phase is debated. Scholars variously refer to “land grabbing”, “land deals”, “large-scale land acquisition”, and “large-scale investment in land”.Footnote ¹³⁷ Land grabbing is sometimes the thing to be explained while at other times it is the thing that does the explaining. What scholars do agree on is the idea that land grabbing is a process that generally entails the capturing of control of vast tracts of land and other natural resources through a variety of mechanisms, involving significant transfer of capital and often resulting in shifts in resource use from (for example) farming and forestry to extractive industries, whether for international or domestic purposes. Lorenzo Cotula talks about “land control”, that is, “how actors are able to hold onto the land and to the institutional and political ramifications of access, claims, and exclusions”.Footnote ¹³⁸ The transactions that lie beneath a land grab are frequently characterized by disparities of power and market access as between states, investors, smallholders, and the land-poor in targeted areas.Footnote ¹³⁹

So we can see land grabbing as simultaneously a geographically specific event and part of a process that brings together different uses of land (production, industry, agriculture, speculation) with a range of local, national, transnational, and international practices, including planning rules, property regimes, trade policies, and investment law.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ The exact causes and rationales of land grabbing are many and varied but it is said to be a “massive” and “growing” trend, catalysed by multiple, overlapping crises—oil, food, and finance.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The objectives of land grabbing may include genuine attempts to secure land for food and fuel production in the face of risks from unstable commodity markets and scarcity arising from environmental issues such as drought and climate change (sometimes referred to as the “food-fuel-feed crisis”Footnote ¹⁴² ) to speculative acquisition driven by surplus cash withdrawn from precarious enterprises following financial crisis.Footnote ¹⁴³

In the light of this detailed picture it is less possible to think about land grabbing as a discrete, “one-off” event. That is, there may be “no one land grab”.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Land grabbing might instead be understood as “a series of changing contexts, emergent processes and forces, and contestations that are producing new conditions and facilitating shifts in both de jure and de facto land control”.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ While the “grab” itself is important, it might only mark the beginning of a process: of “land emptying”—gaining access to and clearing the land for later development—or “land parking”—holding the land while its value appreciates before reselling at a profit. A large-scale land deal, then, might be no more than a framework. Concrete deals for leasing land—between private investors, agribusiness corporations, and local governments, for example—may or may not emerge, and even when they do they may not result in the actual enclosure of land, the dispossession of previous users, and the establishment of new production and labour regimes until many years later.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Land grabbing is an “amorphous and complex event”.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

While land grabbing remains a conceptual challenge, we can gain some sense of its real-world significance through empirical evidence that indicates that an accelerated period of dispossession is in motion. Between 2000 and 2016, 26.7 million hectares of land have been transferred to private investors in large-scale land deals.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The vast majority of deals have been made in sub-Saharan Africa (forty-one percent), followed by Southeast Asia (thirty-two percent), and the Americas and Caribbean (nineteen percent).Footnote ¹⁴⁹ These data have led scholars to suggest that land grabbing has “spiked” in the past decade.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ However, the evidence needs to be approached with caution: collecting data on land grabbing is complicated by legibility problems and is, therefore, of uneven quality. Marc Edelman worries that oversimplified claims based on problematic data risks undermining attempts to counter land grabbing, while the tendency to reduce land grabbing to a quantitative problem distracts from the social relations it transforms.Footnote ¹⁵¹

Another perspective on land grabbing comes from critical geographers. These scholars frame land grabbing as a capitalist colonial practice linked to the creation of new spatialized regimes of control.Footnote ¹⁵² Recalling the nineteenth century “Scramble for Africa”, the contemporary phase of land transformation has been described as a “global land rush”.Footnote ¹⁵³ On this view, land grabbing today might be seen less as a unique event than “a surge within a well-trodden path of expanding and also ever-globalising capitalism”,Footnote ¹⁵⁴ a bout of “primitive accumulation” of land and natural resources by elites in both developed and developing country contexts. Land grabbing may be key not only to the transformation of land, but also to change in wider social, political, and economic conditions, including the conditions of human habitation.

However, contemporary land grabbing also has characteristics that distinguish it from the patterns of accumulation in the past. For one, land grabbing today involves new actors in new places—it is now just as likely to occur “South-South” as “North-South”—and new expressions of, and locations for, sovereign authority over territory, deterritorialization of power, shifting jurisdictions, and porous borders.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ As Saskia Sassen argues, land grabbing “widens structural holes in the tissue of national sovereignty”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ because “what was once part of national sovereign territory is increasingly repurposed for a foreign firm or government”.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The trends and character of contemporary land grabbing might then be read as signals for the disassembly of national territory, the emergence of a new geopolitics characterized by non-national forms of authority over territory, such as foreign investors and World Bank loan conditionalities,Footnote ¹⁵⁸ and the “active making” of new partial, specialized, cross-border spaces and arrangements.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

With this background, we are now in a position to examine the role of the World Bank in the global land grab. Arguably, this is not a new role as such but one the World Bank has arrived at after several decades of policy travelling in a particular direction. The World Bank’s structural adjustment programmes, beginning in the early 1980s, developed into other forms of conditionality in the 1990s and 2000s, in particular “donee loan agreements”. Donee loan agreements typically use land and land deals to create new spaces for capital flow. For example, agreements are often conditional on donee states privatizing resources that previously belonged in the public sector, such as the development of housing. Sassen argues that one effect of World Bank restructuring programmes, loans, and conditionalities is to rearrange land for its “insertion in today’s novel global corporate circuits”.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ These are “disciplining regimes”Footnote ¹⁶¹ —not simply banking transactions—which tether already weak states to international institutions as well as to foreign national actors (other states, firms, and individual elites) and shape the socioeconomic effects that enable foreign buyers to access land with ease.Footnote ¹⁶² While corruption, maladministration, and other local factors are cited by international institutions as reasons for intervening in weak states, the continuing vulnerability of weak states is convenient for those same institutions to maintain power through access to land and natural resources. “The process of foreign land acquisitions now under way cannot be understood simply as caused by the corruption and weakness of host states.”Footnote ¹⁶³ Land grabbing should instead be seen as the product of complex instrumentalities, economic rationalities, and layers of governance operating at different levels—local, national, transnational, international, global.

Home at Boeung Kak Lake emerged from the land grab through this sort of interplay: between the World Bank and the Cambodian government; between the international development agenda and a national land law system; and between domestic elites, foreign corporations, and local residents. International law’s homemaking (and home-unmaking) work is one part of this larger web of interactions that catalyse and condition land grabbing. Homemaking, then, is not a linear process with definite beginning and end points. Nor is it always easy or possible to trace lines of responsibility from international to home and back again, especially in the complicated context of a land grab. International law’s homemaking work in this arena reflects the increasing interaction taking place in the local and global spheres between diverse sources of authority, as well as the more intensive and extensive reach of the international into the local.

Recently the World Bank has taken on a new role in the land grabbing debate, emerging as a leader in the push to regulate large-scale land acquisition. Yet the link between international law, through the agency of the World Bank, and land grabbing continues to go unnoticed. In the next part of this paper I briefly examine the regulation and suggest that it promotes, rather than prevents, land grabbing, with devastating effects for home. The World Bank’s support for regulating land grabbing is another dimension of international law’s homemaking and home-unmaking work, here on a global scale.

B. The World Bank and Land Grabbing

With anxieties about land grabbing increasing over the past decade, it has become a hot topic at the meeting tables of international institutions and multilateral groups such as the G8Footnote ¹⁶⁴ and the G20.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ It has also prompted a flurry of law-making activity. The World Bank has been a central player in the push to regulate large-scale land acquisition, arguing that regulation can transform the risks of land transactions into opportunities for investment.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ This position is now crystallized in the two key regulatory prescriptions: the Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment that Respects Rights, Livelihoods and Resources [PRAI]Footnote ¹⁶⁷ and the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land and other Natural Resources [Voluntary Guidelines].Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Both the PRAI and the Voluntary Guidelines were developed by a coalition of specialized UN agencies led by the World Bank.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ As pro-investment instruments, their aim is to facilitate land deals and reduce the risks of—but not prevent—land grabbing. They frame land deals as an equation of “risks” and “opportunities”. The risks—for example, of a land deal being hampered by lack of property rights, unfair dealing, or the resistance of local people—can be transformed into opportunities for investment through “best practice”, a “proper” regulatory environment,Footnote ¹⁷⁰ and by consulting affected populations.Footnote ¹⁷¹

It is perhaps not surprising that, on the pro-investment landscape, home interests are secondary. While the PRAI and the Voluntary Guidelines are concerned about food securityFootnote ¹⁷² and environmental impactsFootnote ¹⁷³ —which readily relate to agricultural and industrial productivity—the impact of land deals on local people’s homes goes unmentioned. And to the extent that home interests are implicitly raised in provisions for lawful eviction,Footnote ¹⁷⁴ compensation, and resettlement under the PRAI and the Voluntary Guidelines, home is positioned as a mere good or commodity that can be exchanged and replaced. Again, this view contrasts with the rich concept of home I have elaborated in this paper. The pro-investment instruments indicate that the loss of home—ending in dispossession and eviction arising from a land deal—are not “risks” to be reduced but rather are accepted as part of, perhaps even an inevitable part of, a land deal. By providing a framework to facilitate and legitimate land transactions, and enshrining the loss of home within the logic of development, the PRAI and the Voluntary Guidelines perpetuate the dispossessory path of economic growth that underlies the international development agenda pursued by the World Bank.

The pro-investment response to land grabbing has been matched by a pro-poor, pro-human rights narrative. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food,Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Olivier De Schutter, has developed a Set of Minimum Principles to Address the Human Rights Challenge of Large-scale Land Acquisitions and Leases [Minimum Principles], while Miloon Kothari has proposed the Basic Principles and Guidelines on Development-based Evictions and Displacement [Basic Principles].Footnote ¹⁷⁶ The International Land Coalition has also adopted the Tirana Declaration, which defines land grabbing as a human rights violation.Footnote ¹⁷⁷

While these are welcome developments, when we examine the instruments from the perspective of home the difference between the pro-investment and pro-human rights camps appears limited. Neither the Minimum Principles nor the Basic Principles call for land grabbing to be rolled back. Instead, their aim is to mitigate human rights violations arising from large-scale land acquisition while still allowing the practice. Both the Minimum Principles and the Basic Principles authorize eviction and resettlement, accepting this as part of the reality of land deals.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ In this way, the pro-poor, pro-human rights instruments tacitly legitimize the same dispossessory path of economic growth promoted by the pro-investment regulation and fall within the now-familiar discipline and logic of capitalist land transformation.

Further, the pro-human rights instruments suffer from the contradiction that, on the one hand, they authorize and facilitate a neoliberal development strategy through the transformation of home into property and the commodification of land while, on the other hand, they provide a modality through which social movements can oppose and resist the dispossessory consequences of that strategy.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ This contradiction reflects an attempt to broker a compromise between groups vulnerable to dispossession from land grabbing and dominant groups whose interests are linked to the exploitation of the spaces being opened up by market-oriented reforms in the unfolding process of neoliberalization in the global South, a paradigm that has been noted by scholars in other contexts.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Even where such a compromise results in rights to compensation and resettlement, the fact remains that the regulation yokes international law to a regime of dispossession through the regulation. This also speaks to the tension in which international law in the development context frequently exacerbates and even reproduces the struggles it sets out to oppose.Footnote ¹⁸¹

Further, whether pro-investment or pro-human rights, the regulation of land grabbing facilitates the transformation of home into property. While as soft law the regulation is not enforceable in international law, it does, however, form the backdrop to, or elucidate the ways in which, international law norms, duties, and activities are shaped and operate. Moreover, soft-law rules endorsed by international organizations such as the Bank carry normative force in their potential to “harden” into formal international legal rules, as Benedict Kingsbury has argued.Footnote ¹⁸² The transformation of home into property through the regulation and facilitation of large-scale land acquisition gives rise to opportunities for speculation, and in turn results in the dispossession of inhabitants and the reorganization and accumulation of wealth away from the poor to the more secure. This type of home-unmaking work involves reconstituting and reshaping home in destructive ways and ignoring, or denying, the important connections between home and notions of community, tradition, homeland, and memory for inhabitants. It also dismisses the potential of home as a place of radical engagement and possibility for international law to effect redistributive outcomes in the development context. In the final section of this paper, I turn to those possibilities.