Taking Land By Force And The Limitations Of Law
By FEMI D. OJUMU
SEVERAL centuries later, the aforementioned Thucydidean quote from The Melian Dialogue is a hawkish exposition of the warring vicissitudes of insatiability, power, and annexation or forcible land acquisition, that remains relevant in contemporary times.
Adam Smith’s postulation in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776), adopting economic logic, established that the human desire for enhancement is a boundless sine qua non for economic activity given the agency of the invisible hand of market forces.
A striking inference from that hypothesis is man’s unlimited wants. Because, a limitless desire for improvement necessarily implies an endless demand for resources, not least given the neo-consumerism of this 21st Century’s Fourth Industrial Revolution, largely characterised by universal digitisation.
Extending the logic, because land is a fundamental factor of production of goods and services, and all resources necessary for the extraction of economic value emanate thereof, its demand will increase over time. These dynamics, when brigaded with the complexities of adverse climate change effects which, according to the International Organisation for Migration will displace between 25 million to 1 billion people by 2050 within their countries or trans-borders is not alarmist, but real and a recipe for serious conflict and annexations.
Plus, causal and non-causal asylum and refugee driven migrations, global population (it rose by 24 per cent from 6.6 billion in 2005 to 8.2 billion in 2025, UN); the legacy of colonialism, corruption-laden and egregious land use policies in some countries, zero sum game geostrategic interests by superpowers, ethno-religious terrorism and attempts at dispossessing indigenous people of their ancestral lands across the world, further justify the assertion of the subsistence the ingredients of serious conflict.
Yet, whilst diplomacy may well intermediate, its efficacy is however bounded by realpolitik. How then, if at all, does the rule of law address these issues?
Discourse
Take Nigeria’s de facto economic heartbeat port city, and former capital Lagos, home to approximately 21 million people (World Population Review, 2025). The autochthonous ethnic Yoruba, have occupied and owned the lands for several centuries called, and call it, Eko.
Alas, 15th Century Portuguese explorers or irregular migrants including Rui de Sequeira, circa 1472, christened it Lago de Curamo (Lake of Curamo) pursuant to maritime and slave trade expeditions, along the West African coastline intersecting the Atlantic Ocean.
Lagos was a Portuguese realm from the late 15th Century for 164 years until the execution under extreme duress, of The Treaty of Cession on 6 August 1861 between British expeditionary force colonialists and the local monarch, Oba Dosumu. His predecessor, Oba Kosoko, had resisted British forces at the Battle of Ahoyaya through 4 December 1851 and 28 December 1851, before escaping to Ijebu-land (in Nigeria’s present-day Ogun State).
Lagos remained a British colony subject to English law from that point, through the adoption of the UK’s Statute of General Application(which established that the common law of England, the principles of equity and generic statutes applicable in England on 1st January 1900, would be applicable in Lagos; Dede v African Association Limited 1910 1 (NLR) 130); through the 1914 amalgamation of the Northern and Southern protectorates to form present day Nigeria, albeit without the democratic mandate of the people; until the country’s political Independence on 1 October 1960. The fundamental thesis here is the annexation and colonisation of Lagos by British forces in furtherance of the latter’s foreign policy goals and the subjugation of indigenous customs, laws and mores.
Four important domestic and international case studies and further demonstrate the point.
Chagos Islands–
Without the consent of indigenous people in 1965, the British government excised the Chagos Islands from Mauritius, then under the former’s colonisation. Mauritius contended in domestic and international fora that this excision was unlawful and constituted an incomplete act of decolonisation when it gained independence in 1968. Through 1967 and 1973, the indigenous peoples of the Chagos Islands were forcefully removed or impeded from re-entry to afford the construction of the UK/British naval base at Diego Garcia, the largest isle on the archipelago.
The Permanent Court of Arbitration, a complementary institution pursuant to Article 33 of the UN Charter 1945 in that its raison d’etre is to seek a solution by “negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration” to “any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security”, on March 18, 2015, comprehensively decided that the Marine Protected Area which Britain had declared over the Chagos Islands in April 2010 breached international law.
Two years later, the UN General Assembly in June 2017 by a 94 vote in favour of referral of the dispute between UK and Mauritius to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and 15 against, referred the raging dispute to the ICJ. The International Court of Justice in 2019, established in its advisory opinion that the UK’s administration of the Chagos Archipelago was illegal and the country was ordered to halt its de facto sovereignty therein “as rapidly as possible.”
Following increasing international pressure, and the grave reputational risk the UK faced as a country guided by the rule of law and justice, it conceded sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius in May 2025. It also executed a compact to that effect worth £3.4 billion ($4.6 billion) whilst retaining control over the joint U.S./UK Diego Garcia miliary base, completing “the total process of decolonisation” according to Navin Ramgoolam, the Mauritian Prime Minister. The law prevailed, in part, after 60 years for legal wrangling!
Russian Annexation of Ukraine –
Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula through February and March 2014, which intensified with full-scale aerial, ground and sea bombardments of Ukraine via a war of aggression commencing February 24, 2022 highlights the boundaries of the rule of law when powerful sovereign countries aggressively advance their “overriding” national interests.
Russia’s western neighbour, Ukraine, was historically part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and gained independence in 1991. Vladimir Putin, the Russian Czar’s premise for initiating the war of aggression against Ukraine included serious anxieties over Ukrainian attempts to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) military alliance, co-founded by the United States, UK and Canada; NATO’s expansion to Russian borders; diminution of Russian power in Eastern Europe and by implication, a geopolitical diminuendo in its global superpower status.
In addition, Putin emphasised “demilitarisation and denazification” of Ukraine, geared towards safeguarding Russian-speaking citizens of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, as further justification of the attack. More than three years since the war commenced with hundreds of thousands of fatalities and millions of displaced people around the world, the legal order has proved ineffective in halting the war, just as recent spirited diplomacy by the U.S. is yet to achieve tangible results; which may (or may not!) result in Ukraine ceding territory to Russia.
Israel occupation of Palestine territories–
This remains an intractable problem with many states and international organisations criticising Israel’s actions as violating international law. Despite numerous resolutions and diplomatic efforts, the occupation continues, and the situation remains unresolved.
The extant Israeli versus Palestinian Hamas war which began on 7 October 2023, where according to the UK Parliament, Hamas killed approximately 1,189 Israelis and took over 200 hostages; and Israel countered by killing over 58,000 Gazans, destroying Gaza; killing 184 journalists according to AP; and the decades of war between Israel (and, at various times, allies including Britain, France and the United States) versus Palestinian resistance movements (at various times, allies including Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Syria, Yemen et al) are traceable to the lingering complexities of the 1917 Balfour Declaration over a century later. The law has proven ineffective in this decade’s old conflict.
Boko Haram/Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP) –
These terrorist groups operating primarily in Northeastern Nigeria, and neighbouring countries including Cameroon, Chad and Niger Republic. The groups and their proxies, seek to overthrow the Nigerian government and replace it with an Islamic Caliphate. Its terrorist campaigns have been sustained for over a decade causing over 345,000 deaths, the displacement of over 2 million people, and a humanitarian crisis affecting more than five million people according to the United Nations Development Programme.
These coordinated terrorist attacks often target military and police facilities, the mass killings of civilians, large scale abductions, systematic assassination of local officials and community leaders. Part of the group’s modus operandi is to kill and forcibly displace people from their indigenous lands and occupy same.
Evidently, this is ethnic cleansing and annexation. Section 1 (2) of the 1999 Nigerian Constitution (as amended) is clear. The country “shall not be governed, nor shall any person or group of persons take control of the government of Nigeria or any part thereof, except in accordance with the provisions of this Constitution…” The challenge here is not just about the law but about the political will, patriotism, resource commitments and collaborative international security partnerships that’s necessary to address the crisis.
Conclusion and recommendations
In the final analysis, there are multiple reasons for land annexations ranging from geostrategic, economic, the logic of strategic defence and safeguarding national interests, development and socio-economic factors, and in extremis, terrorism.
Equally engaging, are the aforementioned estimates from the International Organisation for Migration on the potential displacement of up to billion people by 2050 and by inference, its impact on mass migration and serious conflicts over territory. In other words, there is a robust argument for effective global action on the climate change crisis, migration policy and national governance.
The law has proven in the aforementioned case studies to be sub-optimal as a deterrence which unleashes the philosophical and policy poser as to the point of law without a robust enforcement capacity? Again, can laws be enforced without the proactive political will and resources to do so?
That poser must be answered negatively and accords with Fernanda Pirie’s seminal assessment in The Rule of Laws (2021): “The United Nations can exert pressure on its members, but defiant leaders flout conventions, manipulate resolutions and commit acts of aggression in the face of condemnation.”
Accordingly, the contention for a more effective rules-based domestic and international order is stronger not the converse.
In the final analysis, there are multiple reasons for land annexations ranging from geostrategic, economic, the logic of strategic defence and safeguarding national interests, development and socio-economic factors, and in extremis, terrorism.
– Ojumu is the Principal Partner at Balliol Myers LP, a firm of legal practitioners and strategy consultants in Lagos, Nigeria, and the author of The Dynamic Intersections of Economics, Foreign Relations, Jurisprudence and National Development (2023).
(The Guardian)
