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Abstract
On Wednesday 18 April 2012, between 80 and 100 women from Amuru District in northern Uganda stripped naked in a protest to block their eviction from land they claim is rightfully theirs. They did this in front of representatives of the Local District Board and surveyors of the sugar company Madhvani Group, the firm seeking land in the area for sugarcane growing. By resisting dispossession and challenging state violence, small-scale poor peasants reiterated the political salience of rural social struggles and highlighted the significance of land and agrarian questions. By placing social struggles over control, access and use of land and existing social relations – property and labour regimes – at the core of social analysis, this papers aims to contribute to further understanding both the character of contemporary land grabs and the nature of peasant resistance. It argues that escalating rural social protests manifested in both everyday, hidden practices of resistance and moments of open, militant contestation are aimed at (re)establishing and securing access to means of social reproduction. Yet these struggles cumulatively embody claims of land sovereignty and autonomy vis-à-vis capitalist markets and state.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Arthur Owor Spender and Dave-Ngendo Tshimba respectively for fieldwork and research assistance. My heartfelt thanks to Ruth Hall for her critical commentaries and editorial suggestions, and to Eria Serwajja for important details about the Amuru case, which greatly improved the quality and rigour of the manuscript. Last but not least, I need to thank the villagers of Kololo-Lakang communities who shared their time and knowledge. Without them this work would not have been possible. To them this work is dedicated.
Notes
1The term refers to the quality of being clear enough to be read.
2Community labour groups.
Additional information
Giuliano Martiniello is a research fellow at the Makerere Institute of Social Research, Makerere University. He holds a PhD in politics and international studies and an MA in Africa: human and sustainable development, both from the University of Leeds. He is broadly interested in the political economy and political ecology of agrarian change with particular reference to land dispossession, labour and land-tenure regimes, food security/sovereignty, peasant social struggles and market-based land reforms in South Africa, Uganda and Tanzania.