Agrarian politics and land struggles in northern Uganda

Abstract

Since 2004, we have observed a significant resurgence of public protests and social mobilizations, both urban and rural, across the African continent. Though the multiplicity of agrarian struggles have gone largely unnoticed by academics and policy makers, rural social struggles have significantly affected the trajectories of rural social change. This article historicizes rural social struggles and explores the diverse range of discourses and forms of resistance that have animated the northern Ugandan countryside, with particular reference to the Amuru district. Initiated as a response to the wave of neoliberal agricultural restructuring through structural adjustment plans, rural social movements, and other community-based political initiatives from below, proliferated in the context of rampant large-scale land enclosures and state authoritarianism. The article suggests that such agrarian struggles be regarded as a process of contestation over the norms, values and practices, which govern the control, access and the use of natural resources such as land, water and food. It situates these struggles within the parameters of everyday peasant politics, which are driven by impulses ranging from the protection of livelihoods and local environments, to claims of autonomy and land sovereignty, and which are grounded in an ontology of the moral economy. Finally, the article engages with the question of the political relevance of localized forms of rural resistance, and how their tactics, strategies and discourses can consolidate or undermine community solidarity, attract or deter other social constituents, and stimulate or diminish equitable and sustainable rural social change. © Oxford University Press and Community Development Journal. 2017.