This dissertation explores peasant political action in response to state-driven land expropriation in the Acholi-Madi border region of northern Uganda. Based on a two-year period of archival inquiry, interviews, activist research and participant observation, the dissertation examines the case of Apaa, where a large-scale struggle entangles peasant resistance to state enclosure of land for conservation, territorial disputes between local governments, and ethnic-based conflict over land access. The issues I explore intersect discussions on peasant resistance and African land regimes–institutional arrangements linking forms of public authority, identity, administrative territory, and property.

As war in northern Uganda began to subside in 2006, a surge of large-scale land struggles ensued. Two opposing narratives emerged around these conflicts: that they constitute peasant uprisings to defend ancestral land against state and commercial interests or that they reflect political manoeuvres inciting ethnic claims to vacant land. Such views either reify ethnic belonging to land or cast it as a product of elite manipulation; both foreclose analysis of how peasants navigate inherited discourses and forms linking identity, territory, and authority.

The dissertation argues that to understand the dynamics that enable resistance to forms of dispossession, peasant action must be viewed in light of the contested history of land regimes. My research in Apaa reveals that in contexts of institutional pluralism, peasants may mobilise a range of possible identities, authorities, spatial logics, and forms of property to contest state expropriation, all of which involve trade-offs.

Adopting a Gramsci-inspired lens, I argue that when peasants mirror the ‘hegemonic’ ethno-territorial logics and patterns of accumulation advanced by ruling classes, they gain powerful tools for political mobilisation, but perpetuate conflict and erode the solidarity necessary for effective organising. By developing ‘counter-hegemonic’ forms of identity, authority, and property, peasant organisers can more effectively disrupt state enclosure of land. Although such processes remain unstable and incomplete, peasant organisers in Apaa have reinterpreted the past to reimagine new forms of belonging and land tenure, enabling them to defy state evictions and expand territorial control.

This dissertation contributes historically grounded, ethnographic evidence to emerging research melding critical approaches to resistance with the study of land regimes. It suggests that successful resistance to state enclosure of land is enabled by collective action that addresses internal inequalities within peasant communities and transcends social divisions and ethno-territorial logics exploited by ruling elites.