Meghan L Morris

Research

I have completed a book manuscript on property, war, and peacemaking in Colombia, and am currently working on a book project on property and paramilitarism in the United States. Both draw on ethnographic and archival work to examine the relationship between property and conflict.

Making Peace with Property: Specters of Post-Conflict Colombia is an ethnography of property in the space of ambiguity between peace and war. The manuscript examines two state projects: a national land restitution program designed to return and title rural land to displaced people who lost it in Colombia’s civil war, and a municipal infrastructure project in Medellín that aspired to “turn the page on violence” through green, equitable urban planning. It analyzes the ways that property becomes both a critical element of and an obstacle to peace through these projects, against the backdrop of the peace talks between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas.

While debates around transitional justice often privilege the penal, the book argues that property is a particularly generative legal form in war and peace because of how it makes possible certain kinds of political, environmental, and social reconfiguration. The book’s chapters trace how people enacted the reordering of property for peace through other concepts, such as land, territory, soil, plot, and housing. These each facilitated the unfolding of the reordering of property into a reconfiguration of relations that were bound up with, but collectively exceeded, relations of property. This reconfiguration allowed the reordering of property to open broad terrains of political possibility in the shadow of the post-conflict – a temporal space that can be understood both as a time yet to come and the condition of the present, as peace is continually deferred.

This Land is My Land: Property, Paramilitarism, and the American Dream examines the relationship between property and paramilitarism. It explores how historical movements were rooted in notions of property as an American founding ideal, and shaped property as a legal regime and American cultural imaginary. It analyzes the legacies of this for contemporary conflicts over public lands and natural resources, racial justice, and immigration.

I also have work published or forthcoming on the ways that property structures citizen-state relations; property and debt; the legal temporality of speculation; the relationship between property and soil; the intellectual history of anthropology in property theory; and the debate around property as the “law of things." My work in progress includes article manuscripts on paramilitary property and soil forensics, a book chapter on plot surveys as forms of relational demarcation, and an essay on land politics and the rise of the left in Colombia.

My research and writing have been supported by the National Science Foundation; the American Bar Foundation; the Social Science Research Council; the Wenner-Gren Foundation; the Inter-American Foundation; the Land Deal Politics Initiative; the University of Chicago Center for Latin American Studies, Department of Anthropology, and Pozen Family Center for Human Rights; and the University Research Council at the University of Cincinnati.