Prof Ruth Hall

Professor Ruth Hall is the Acting Director of PLAAS. She holds a DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford, where she previously obtained an MPhil in Development Studies. Her first two degrees were from the University of Cape Town.

Professor Hall has published extensively on land reform, tenure and governance in Africa, with a focus on transnational land investments. She convenes a continent-wide accredited short course for land professionals, activists and officials and on the Political Economy of Land Governance in Africa. She serves on the advisory board of the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa at the University of Ghana, and on the Scientific Committee of the African Union’s Conference on Land Policy in Africa.

Professor Hall is the editor of the Journal of Peasant Studies. She has co-founded several regional and global research networks: the Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI), the BRICS Initiative in Critical Agrarian Studies (BICAS), the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI), and the Network of Excellence on Land Governance in Africa (NELGA). She served as a member of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Advisory Panel on Land Reform, and has published several books, including Africa’s Land Rush: Rural Livelihoods and Agrarian Change; Global Land Grabbing and Political Reactions from Below; Another Countryside? Policy Options for Land and Agrarian Reform in South Africa; Land, Memory, Reconstruction and Justice: Perspectives on Land Claims in South Africa  and The Land Question in South Africa.

Professor Hall previously held the South African Research Chair in Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, which is funded by the National Research Foundation. The Chair is located at PLAAS at the University of the Western Cape.

Political economy of land and agrarian change, redistributive land reforms, statutory and customary land tenure, women’s land rights, land governance, agro-food systems, agrarian labour