Restoring Property and Citizenship: Land Restitution in South Africa and Canada

The driving question for this paper relates to the deprivation of citizenship and how states must go about correcting these past injustices. Specifically, I look to examine the dispossession and restitution of land and property rights in South Africa and Canada. First, I try to illuminate the role of property rights as a citizenship right, finding a correlation between one’s conception of property as either a positive or negative right and one’s beliefs about what amounts to an equal distribution of rights. Then I determine that in both cases it is the nature of the initial dispossession and the initial injustice which determines how the dispossessed make their claims to property restitution and justice. This explains why dispossessed Aboriginal peoples in Canada make a claim to a specific non-economic relationship to the land, while the dispossessed black South Africans claim restitution more as a means to economic welfare