Tessa is a community organiser and scholar who has worked alongside activists and communities in northern Uganda since 2013 in struggles for social and environmental change. Her work has included supporting successful campaigns to pass and enforce alcohol legislation and to resist forced land evictions. She is currently the Peace & Justice Coordinator of the Anglican Diocese of Northern Uganda, leading a team focused on building a community-driven peace process to transform a large-scale land conflict.

Her research explores peasant political action in relation to the history and politics of African land regimes—examining the ways in which public authority, identity, administrative territory, and property rights shape struggles over land. She is also interested in how local peace-building efforts intersect with resistance to land expropriation and the governance of natural resources.

Tessa holds a Ph.D. in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge, an MA in Anthropology from the University of Canterbury, and a BA with Honours in Political Science from the University of Canterbury.

Research Interests: The politics of land, history of land tenure, public authority, resistance and peasant political action, natural resources, peace-building.

Expertise: Politics and history of land tenure and conflict in northern Uganda.

Regional Focus: Northern Uganda, East Africa.

Languages: Acholi and English

Publications

Laing, T. & Weschler, S. (2024). Rural radicalism and the tactic of third-party leverage: How Acholi peasants drew a UN agency into their struggle against land-grabbing by the Ugandan state. African Studies Review, 67(1), 38–66.

Laing, T. (2023). Resistance to state-driven land expropriation in northern Uganda: Counter-hegemonic imagination and the reconstruction of identity, authority, territory, and property. [Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge].