When Pakistan absorbed its Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) into the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in 2018, it triggered a complex bureaucratic collision over land ownership. Researcher Alia Qaim Bukhari argues that the government’s demand for formal documentation ignores centuries of deeply entrenched tribal customs, oral histories, and colonial-era agreements, exposing a critical flaw in the region’s political integration.

The core issue lies in how ownership is defined. During fieldwork in the former FATA, Bukhari questioned a senior bureaucrat managing the transition about how land could be seamlessly integrated into a modern market when locals view it as a matter of honor, lineage, and territorial identity. The bureaucrat claimed that the political merger and land settlement could simply progress side by side.

According to Bukhari, this assumption represents the central failure of the post-merger strategy. Land settlement is not a parallel initiative; it is the absolute foundation required for the merger to succeed. Today, provincial departments, police forces, and courts are attempting to enforce paper-based property laws in regions where authority and ownership are dictated by local memory, lineage, *jirga* (council of tribal elders), and *nikat* (customary shares). The 2018 merger did not invent this property dispute, but it made it impossible to ignore.

In these newly merged districts, land is not merely an undocumented financial asset. It embodies political authority, ancestry, water rights, grazing spaces, forests, and minerals. Faheem Mohammad’s 2012 doctoral study previously cautioned against state development frameworks that bypass these localized systems.

Academic Akbar S. Ahmed’s historical distinction between *nang* and *qalang* further illustrates why a uniform approach fails. Under his framework, *nang* represents collective claims, lineage, autonomy, and honor, whereas *qalang* signifies state penetration, taxation, and landed elites. Because FATA was never a monolith, the meaning of land shifts dramatically depending on the region.

In many districts, property governance relies on *nikat* (tribal shares), *shamilat* (collectively governed forests, grazing areas, and mountains), and *barkha* (an individual’s recognized portion of a collective order). The primary obstacle is not a lack of rules, but the inability to translate these complex social structures into simple bureaucratic titles. The state demands to know the legal owner of a parcel, while local communities evaluate who grazes there, whose lineage has historical rights, and who belongs to the territory.

Consequently, there is no single narrative for land in the region. Waziristan is distinct from Kurram, and Khyber differs from Bajaur. Bukhari asserts that the common refrain claiming ‘there are no land records in FATA’ is entirely misleading. Documentation does exist, but it serves as an additional layer of evidence rather than a replacement for older traditions.

The Kurram district perfectly demonstrates why modern documentation alone cannot resolve these overlapping claims. In 1893, British officials struck a political bargain with the Shia Turi tribe and finalized a land settlement. This resulted in the *Turizuna*, a written compilation of Turi *rewaj* (custom) designed to standardize *jirga* rulings. Once recorded and utilized by administrators, the line separating custom from formal law vanished. Today, while violence in the districts of Boshera, Balishkhel, and Sadda is frequently blamed on sectarian divides, it is fundamentally driven by underlying disputes over water, forests, and land access.

A different trajectory occurred in the Tochi Valley, where a 1902–03 British settlement formally separated agricultural properties from *ghair-tankai* (communal lands). Modern land disputes around the town of Mir Ali now involve a tangled web of collective memory, *jirga* precedent, ancestral grazing rights, *nikat*, revenue history, and colonial settlement records. These represent competing archives of legitimacy. One faction might present paper records and proof of cultivation, while another points to customary shares and ancestral lineage, each relying on vastly different definitions of proof.

Meanwhile, the town of Khar in the Bajaur district provides a third scenario. Colonizers never formally settled the area, but residents still deposited property sale deeds with the local political agent for safekeeping. This created a buildup of official records that existed alongside, rather than replaced, customary authority.

These historical tensions are currently being inflamed by the mining industry as land gains commercial value. Under Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s legal framework, the state owns all subsurface minerals, even if a tribe or individual owns the surface land. While straightforward on paper, it is highly contentious in reality.

Before the 2018 merger, resource extraction required negotiated consent via customary authority, lineages, and *malikana* (ownership rights). The new provincial mining regulations directly conflict with these established practices. Recent opposition to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Mines and Minerals Bill 2025 was not solely about financial revenue; it was fundamentally about who holds the authority to grant community consent. Because a single mountain can serve as a mineral deposit, an ancestral boundary, grazing land, and a *shamilat* all at once, disputes over the surface naturally bleed into disputes over what lies beneath.

Since the 2018 merger cannot be undone, the state’s challenge is to find a way to verify these deeply accumulated claims. Bukhari calls this phenomenon “layered continuity,” where new laws and practices are absorbed into older systems. She proposes a practical solution called “layered verification”—a methodology that tests evidence from various historical layers against each other, rather than treating the newest government document as the ultimate truth. While *jirga* decisions, British records, *nikat*, oral histories, and current use all carry weight, none are free from political bias.

Ultimately, for Pakistan to achieve a durable political settlement, the government must recognize that successful state-building requires reading land claims across these overlapping historical layers, rather than trying to erase them.