Rene Odanga and Gerardo Manrique de Lara Ruiz participated in the Naturalizing Inequalities: Law and Dispossession in Historical Perspective panel at the 2024 ASA in Chicago. Rene Odanga’s paper was titled Dispossession as Rule: Colonial Transformation and the Establishment of Control in British East Africa, 1885-1915. Gerardo Manrique de Lara presented a paper titled The “Mochudi Affair”: Custom, Power, and Land in the Bechuanaland Frontier.

Both their papers interrogated the role of land dispossession in the establishment of colonial rule and its practices. Tasha Rijke-Epstein (Vanderbilt University) and Admire Mseba (University of Southern California) served as discussants.