Politics from below? Small-, mid- and large-scale land dispossession in Teso, Uganda, and the relevance of scale

Abstract

While processes of land dispossession – or ‘land grabbing' – have garnered significant attention from researchers in recent years, local reactions to instances of land alienation have received insufficient scrutiny. This paper focuses on small-, mid- and large-scale land dispossession in the post-conflict Teso region in Uganda, and considers how people assert their agency when their tenure rights are infringed upon. I argue that those who lose tenure rights through small-scale land dispossession are primarily focused on reacquiring tenure rights and meeting the demands of their basic social reproduction. In these cases, there is little resistance that is definitively ‘political'. In contrast, a ‘politics from below’ more clearly emerges in the cases of mid- and large-scale land alienation, which I attribute to particular structural conditions.

Keywords:

• land grabbing
• small-scale land dispossession
• politics from below
• resistance
• Uganda
• Sub-Saharan Africa

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their contributions to improving the quality of this paper.

Notes

¹See e.g. Deininger and Mpuga (2004) and Place (2009) for a discussion of the increase of rental markets in Sub-Saharan Africa. Chimhowu and Woodhouse (2006) use the term ‘vernacular markets’ to underline the informal mechanisms undergirding these markets. Adoko and Levine (2007) discuss this specifically with respect to Teso.

²Throughout this work, I use terms such as ‘land dispossession’ or ‘land expropriation’ rather than ‘land grabbing’ in order to reserve the latter for describing large large-scale land acquisitions (> 1000 hectares). Except for two cases, every instance of land dispossession referred to here involves much smaller extensions of land. I use the term ‘small-scale' to refer to land that amounts to less than 20 hectares, although the majority of cases of land dispossession in Teso involve much smaller extensions – typically less than 10 hectares.

³My distinction between CSOs and NGOs is based on differences in scale. I consider the former to constitute locally run organizations and the latter to denote national and/or international organizations. In Teso, CSOs typically rely on international financing (such as from private individuals or NGOs from Western countries) but they are generally locally managed and operated.

⁴Due to the political sensitivity of land-related issues in Uganda, a number of participants requested anonymity. Therefore, I have removed or changed some identifiers such as names and professions. However, the locations of sites (when specified) are all accurate.

⁵Thirteen percent of the total surface area of Uganda is wetlands (Matete and BakaNume 2010).

⁶2750 UGX is roughly equivalent to 1 USD.

⁷There are four forms of land tenure recognized by the 1995 Constitution and the 1998 Land Act: mailo, freehold, leasehold and customary (Coldham 2000; Hunt 2004; Rugadya 2009). Mailo tenure rights are found exclusively in the central region of Uganda. According to Land Office officials in Teso, 70 to 80 percent of land in the region is customarily held.

⁸A Human Rights Watch report (Burnett 2012) cites instances of NGO actors who have been arbitrarily detained by district security personnel for attempting to assist victims of land dispossession.

⁹Twenty-five percent of Karamoja's total surface area (27,700 square kilometers) is licensed for mining (Rugadya, Kamusiime, and Nsamba-Gayiiya 2010).

¹⁰In Teso, ‘youth’ generally refers to anyone under the age of 30.

Additional information

Matt Kandel is a postdoctoral research fellow in the College of Health Sciences at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. He recently completed his doctorate in cultural anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.