“Owning formal property also tends to discourage unruly behavior. When people are forced to divide their property into smaller and smaller parcels, the heirs of their heirs, crowded off the family land, are more likely to squat elsewhere. Also, when a person cannot prove he owns anything, he is more likely to have to bribe his way through the bureaucracy, or with the help of his neighbors, take the law into his own hands. Worse still, without good law to enforce obligations, society in effect invites the gangsters and terrorists to do the job. My colleagues and I have carried out formal titling campaigns that have displaced terrorists by coopting their role as the area’s security force against the real or imagined threat of land expropriation.”

—The Mystery of Capital