This paper focuses on one community in Cambodia that won back land from a large land deal by grabbing onto the rupture in property relations initiated by a one-year land titling campaign. I document the struggle between competing legibility and illegibility projects which I examine through two moments, one of the state choosing to see its population and their relations to territory, and another in which the state’s excuses for not recognizing smallholders’ claims began to falter.

Land change in Kigali, Rwanda, is examined using Intensity Analysis, which measures the temporal stationarity of changes among categories. Maps for 1981, 2002 and 2014 were produced that show the land categories Built, Vegetated and Other, which is composed mainly of croplands and bare surfaces. Land change accelerated from the first time interval (1981–2002) to the second time interval (2002–2014), as increased human and economic activities drove land transformation.