This article seeks to draw connections between a political ecology of global investment in resource sector development and a culturally informed understanding of rural out-migration across the Lao–Thai border.

In the last ten years or so, the global interest in, and concerns about, the issue of how the world shall provide a growing population with sufficient food, bioenergy and wood raw material has attracted increasing attention.

Investment in land is not conflict-neutral, and given the history of violent conflict and mutual destabilization in the Horn of Africa there is potential for localized political grievances to turn into wider regional conflict.

The structure of this review is as follows: the first section discusses how contract farming is defined for the purposes of this review and  briefly describes the history and extent of contract farming globally.

The main objective of this paper is to provide a) a presentation of the diversity of land related conflicts in Africa, b) an analysis of underlying causes of conflicts and experiences in conflict resolution and, c) lessons learnt and best practices from the policy and legal responses and links wi