The Justice of Land in a Land of Injustice.

The issue of land reform in South Africa is compelling not just as a crucial threat to democratic consolidation, but also as a challenging case for the psychology of justice. In land controversies in transitional regimes around the globe, the unfairness of the past confronts the fairness of the present as alternative principles of justice collide and conflict. For instance, to what degree should land rights secured under a prior illicit regime be recognized and honored by the newly formed democratic system? Land reconciliation presents prototypical problems of transitional justice. Based on a survey of a large national sample of South Africans (conducted in October/November 2003), this paper investigates the means by which ordinary people adjudicate conflicts between alternatives principles of justice. The survey includes a formal experiment, based on a vignette in which the dependent variable is perceptions of fairness in a land dispute in which a squatter is evicted from private property. Judgments of the fairness of squatter evictions are hypothesized to be a related to the perceived need and deservingness of the squatter (distributive justice), the due process of the eviction (procedural justice), and the nature of the current use of the land (individual land rights, rule of law). Thus, this analysis promises to yield important insights into the role of justice considerations in contemporary land conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]