Catherine Boone is Professor of Government at the University of Texas, Austin. Boone has been a member of the Board of Directors of the African Studies Association, the Executive Council of the American Political Science Association (APSA) and the Executive Committee of the Comparative Politics Section of APSA, as well as of review boards for the National Science Foundation, Fulbright, and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). She was a member of the Africa Regional Advisory Panel of the SSRC and was Secretary of the African Politics Conference Group, an APSA- and ISA-affiliated research network. Boone was Treasurer and then President of the West Africa Research Association (2005-8), which oversees the West African Research Center in Dakar, Senegal. With Archon Fung, she is Program Co-Chair for the 2013 APSA Annual Meeting. She is a member of the advisory committee of APSA's Africa Workshops Program. She is author of Merchant Capital and the Roots of State Power in Senegal, 1930-1985 (Cambridge, 1992), which was a finalist for the Herskovitz award in 1993, and Political Topographies of the African State: Rural Authority and Institutional Choice (Cambridge, 2003), which was a finalist for the Herskovitz award in 2004, a runner-up for the Luebbert Award in 2004, and winner of the Society for Comparative Research Mattei Dogan Award in 2005.

1. Introduction: property regimes and land conflict: seeing institutions and their effects; Part I. Property Rights and the Structure of Politics: 2. Land tenure regimes and political order in rural Africa; 3. Rising competition for land: redistribution and its varied political effects; Part II. Ethnicity: Property Institutions and Ethnic Cleavage: 4. Ethnic strangers as second-class citizens; 5. Ethnic strangers as protected clients of the state; Part III. Political Scale: Property Institutions and the Scale and Scope of Conflict: 6. Land conflict at the micro-scale: family; 7. Chieftaincy: the local state as arena of redistributive conflict; 8. Land conflict at the national scale; Part IV. Multiparty Competition: Elections and the Nationalization of Land Conflict: 9. Winning and losing politically allocated land rights; 10. Zimbabwe in comparative perspective; Conclusion: property regimes in political explanation.