Property and territoriality are key for peoples’ livelihood and political rights in rural areas in many poor countries. Analysing emerging forms of citizenship in a context of changing property regimes links property and citizenship as fundamental concepts, and promises a theoretically innovative and historically grounded analysis. While soil and territory has been studied as a source of national and post-colonial identities, this research seeks to highlight processes of citizenship formation by focusing on the intersections between forms of governance, territorial control and practices of belonging. In the project, I set out to explore citizenship formation on the margins, focusing on the spaces of inclusion that is created among those who are perceived by dominant classes to be obstacles to national development, and perceive themselves to be left out of national development. I emphasize territorial control as suspended between regimes of property and regimes of citizenship, both of them undergoing radical reconfigurations in highland Peru.

I am particularly interested in how local politics seen as negotiations with state authorities as well as the internal affairs of the Peasant Community serve as vehicles for the social production of property and citizenship. I wish to explore the current changes in the patterns of property governance and idioms of citizenship in the Andean highland by scrutinizing the circumstances under which citizenship is articulated through property, how property is articulated as a matter of citizenship, and which role the property regime of the Peasant Community is achieving in terms of putting forward claims and demanding rights. And thus, in different ways, I seek to explore in which ways territoriality moves beyond the territory.