Land

It is acknowledged that conflict over land is a major source of violence in various parts of Mindanao, particularly the prosed Bangsamoro region. Historical accounts trace the root cause of land issues and identity-based conflict to the introduction of the Regalian doctrine of land ownership by Spanish colonizers. During the American colonial regime at the turn of the 20th century, dispossession of land held by the original inhabitants of Mindanao accelerated, with an emphasis of titling lands for private ownership that clashed with the tradition of ancestral domain. This was further exacerbated by migration instigated by the central government, starting with the development of "agricultural colonies: in the early 1900s to 1940s, to the passage of a series of land reform laws from the 1960s until the end of the 1980s to encourage individual land titling as a strategy for agricultural development. These evens radically altered land ownership patterns in Mindanao, as communal ownership of land by its original inhabitants gave way to individual titles in the possession of settlers from Luzon and the Visayas.