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.