Gender Relations in Local-Level Dispute Settlement in Ethiopia's Zeghie Peninsula

摘要

Access to tenure security in dispute settlement contexts has become a serious concern in Ethiopia's rural areas, where eighty-five percent of the population resides, including Zeghie Peninsula. Intense struggles for land and property re-sulting from growing landlessness and female-only heads of households have rendered women's property rights a partic-ularly contested terrain. Existing statutory laws and policies assigning rights to property and inheritance have done little to protect women from the theft of their crops, land, or tenure. This has left women with few options except those offered by civic courts and a local system known as the Shimgelina (a customary dispute settlement mechanism); yet both have been largely unfavorable to women. This paper examines these local legal and rule-based systems, and the enduring practices that reinforce inequality through imposed 'commu-nity harmony' where cultural and gendered expectations are invoked, and largely realized.