It is clear that property rights protection in African countries with pluralistic legal traditions, inefficient or failing public administrations, low education levels and a weak infrastructure cannot be easily modelled on the mass claims processes in the Balkans. In the last years, the peacekeeping and human rights community has increasingly recognized that its approaches to peacebuilding and rights protection have been too state-centric and have neglected informal, traditional and/or indigenous forms of organization. Moreover, it is obvious that the international community was willing to back up its protection programmes in the former Yugoslavia with sufficient force and resources, whereas it often fails to do so in the Global South. In reality, African refugees and IDPs who have lost their homes and/or property in ethno-political conflict are usually left without much protection of their property rights. In most post-conflict scenarios, there are no functioning judicial institutions anymore which claimants could turn to. And even if they existed and claimants found their way to their locations, court proceedings in many African countries tend to be inefficient and slow, costly and at times corrupt. The vast majority of the population prefers to settle their property disputes at the local level in customary justice systems, such as councils of elders or Chiefs courts. Many Africans, in particular those living in rural communities, favour the community-oriented and consensual approaches of customary or traditional dispute settlement over the formal judiciary with its focus on individual parties and adversarial process. However, not just the courts, but also traditional structures might have been destroyed in a violent conflict. There are also several human rights-related problems in connection with customary governance structures, in particular in relation to minority rights and gender justice. For all of these reasons, legal aid programmes have become very popular among international organizations and NGOs intending to protect property rights in sub-saharan refugee crises and displacement scenarios. Legal aid can be provided by legal aid clinics in which paralegals explain claimants their rights and provide legal advice or even free counsel to enforce rights before court. Another trend is to establish or to support mediation services – free of charge –between refugees and IDPs on the one hand and receiving communities on the other. Quite a large number of cases can be settled this way, which is partly due to a serious backlog of pending court cases. But of course, mediation is not feasible in all cases, for example when housing or land was expropriated for public purposes or is occupied by organized criminal structures. In these cases, a resort to judicial proceedings is necessary. Lastly, I would like to mention the Rwandan case, where post-conflict