People have always been on the move, either in search for greener pastures, both figuratively and literally speaking, or in order to escape war, persecution, famine, or environmental hazard. Many people have created their ways of life based on movement and regular migration, lacking what Scott [1](p. 327) calls the “‘nerve centers’ that a state might seize”, be it to follow their livestock across the savannah or to follow oil platform engineering jobs across the world’s oceans. Human organization is both settlement and movement. In the past 10 to 20 years, however, there has been a remarkable increase in the scale of migration. According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the number of international migrants worldwide in 2019 was nearly 272 million, an increase of 51 million compared to 2010 and an increase of 98 million compared to the year 2000. There are many reasons for this, including large movements of refugees due to conflict, war, or climate change [2, 3]. At the same time large-scale land acquisitions for international investment in the agricultural sector and for natural resource extraction have deprived people of access to their land and livelihoods and induced additional waves of displacement, migration, and resettlement [4–6]. Similar dynamics are visible in cities in the course of gentrification, urban infrastructure development, or in the name of city beautification and modernization [7–10]. Policy makers, activists, and scholars have therefore argued and lobbied for the recognition of written and unwritten land rights, which may derive their legitimacy from various sources [11, 12], but also to recognize new “foundations of rights” that derive from bottom-up processes of claim making, in light of the multiple and often contradictory versions of legal land claims [13]. Such recognition, for instance if combined with context-sensitive forms of registration [14, 15], could help prevent unjust displacement, and potentially help migrants, refugees, and returnees to build (new) livelihoods in places of arrival. Against this background, the aim of this special issue is to shed light onto the nature of relationships between land and people’s mobility, and its implications for land governance. Thinking about land rights in relation to mobility raises key issues that the land literature seldom addresses. Land governance needs to explicitly consider people, who are “out of place” in land regimes, which too often hinge on who was there first, who has a customary claim, and/or who holds paper titles, instead of who is there now and who needs the land most for purposes of livelihood and communal lives. Together, the contributions in this special issue demonstrate that land governance is not about how to regulate the presence of static people to static places, but how to take care of people being on the move and land itself being in transformation: when a rice field becomes a city block, it is no longer the “same” land.