Introduction

Land grabbing is a ‘hot’ issue in Uganda. In late 2011, NGO-activists raised the alarm bell, accusing local elites, army generals, and highlevel politicians – including the president – to be at the centre of a series of contested large-scale land acquisitions and condemning the violence accompanying the evictions of land occupants. The debate on those acquisitions is complex not only because of the questionable roles of government and investors, but also because of the contested contributions of the deals to development. In that sense, the debate resonates with global discussions between those propagating the need for up-scaling and modernizing land use and those concerned about the fate of the original users of the lands acquired (Oxfam, 2011, Peluso and Lund, 2011; Borras and Franco, 2012; Cotula, 2012; White, et al., 2012). As in the global discussion, the details of the deals, their implementation, and their consequences often remain unknown, and the debate between opponents and supporters is frequently a mix of verifiable facts, unverifiable opinions and anger. Moreover, as often happens with catchwords, in Uganda, ‘land grabbing’ has become a label that covers a diversity of issues. While the common denominator is a sense of irregularity or injustice in the acquisition of land, Ugandan media, academics, civil-society activists and government use the term for multiple types of land acquisitions. ‘Land grabbing’ may range from the contested allocation of vast expanses of land at national level to ‘everyday’ land grabs between neighbours and relatives. Accordingly, many ‘land grabs’ involve not just (inter)national investors but also national and local elites and include contemporary as well as historical cases of ‘unjust’ land acquisitions.

In this chapter, we sketch the diversity and complexity of what is understood as ‘land grabbing’ in Uganda. We consider land grabbing as acquisitions that are contested because in the process human rights were violated, transparency was lacking, or affected land users were not consulted in the deals. From such a definition, however, it becomes clear that land grabbing in Uganda is not as ‘new’ and externally driven as is often assumed. Instead, there are important continuities between past and present practices of land grabbing. Even if land grabbing is externally driven, it remains strongly connected to local and national socio-political dynamics. The case of Uganda suggests that to better understand the ‘new’ wave of global land acquisitions we need to take account of such continuities.