Prof Ruth Hall

Ruth Hall holds the position of Director of PLAAS from 2025 to 2030. She holds a DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and where she previously obtained an MPhil in Development Studies. Her first two degrees were from the University of Cape Town. She 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 on the Political Economy of Land Governance in Africa. She has served on the Scientific Committee of the African Union’s Conference on Land Policy in Africa and is a member of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture. 

Professor Hall is an 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 has published several books, including 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, The Land Question in South Africa and Africa’s Land Rush: Rural Livelihoods and Agrarian Change. 

Professor Hall previously held the South African Research Chair in Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, which is funded by the National Research Foundation from 2020 to 2024, and has simultaneously been Acting Director of PLAAS since May 2024.

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