The state as landlord in Pakistani Punjab: Peasant struggles on the Okara military farms

Marxist theories of peasant revolt have identified different strata within the peasantry that adopt widely varying roles in rural conflict. However, a complex interplay of class and primordial factors has been identified in studies of Pakistani Punjab, where in a unique revolt beginning in 2000, peasants cultivating not private but public land have engaged in a widespread civil disobedience campaign against the state. This group of tenant farmers is sociologically distinct from the poor peasantry of most Marxist studies, and it is argued here that the revolt can be better understood as a grassroots mobilisation that was an effect of tenure relations combined with notions of community.