Ketika Tanah Menentukan Nasib Bangsa: Resensi atas Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies karya Michael Albertus

Abstract

This review examines Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies (2025) by Michael Albertus, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who has long studied the political economy of land redistribution. The book's central argument is that the way societies have distributed and redistributed land ownership over the past two centuries—a process Albertus calls the Great Reshuffle—has laid the foundation for four of the greatest social problems of our time: racial inequality, gender inequity, economic underdevelopment, and environmental degradation. Drawing on comparative historical analysis across regions from the United States and Latin America to South Africa, Australia, and East Asia Albertus demonstrates that land is not merely an economic resource but a fundamental instrument of power that shapes social, political, and ecological structures in deep and transgenerational ways. While the book represents an important synthetic contribution to the political economy of land, this review also identifies several limitations, including insufficient attention to the agency of dispossessed peoples and the notable absence of Southeast Asian cases, Indonesia in particular, that are highly relevant to Albertus's thesis.