"ABSTRACT: The transition from military dictatorship to an electoral regime has opened limited political spaces for social activism in Myanmar. Some have called the unfolding situation a ‘transition to democracy’. But this is far from the reality for some, if not most, of Myanmar’s ‘rural working people’. This paper explores the trajectory of the national land network called Land in Our Hands (LIOH or Doe Myay), which came into formal existence in 2014. This paper attempts to lay out a more comprehensive account of the historical legacies and internal and external pressures that have been shaping LIOH as a movement building initiative, and in relation to three key dimensions: its identity politics; its ideology and class base; and its political work.....Introduction: The transition from military dictatorship to an electoral regime has opened limited political spaces for social activism in Myanmar. Today’s electoral regime is still a largely elite-controlled political situation, with relatively more competitive elections but under unevenly restrictive conditions, including continued restricted access to basic democratic rights for much of the population especially outside the main urban areas. This goes hand in hand with a centrally controlled economic opening and continuing armed conflict in parts of the country. While the political space (such as it is) may be new, social movement in Myanmar is not. Social movements of different forms and scales continued to exist occupying non-traditional political spaces, especially local spaces, throughout the dark ages of military rule beginning from 1962. In the remote ethnic states, rural villagers have been using everyday forms of resistance such as ‘hiding resources, ignoring orders, packing road embankments with sticks during forced labour, informing human rights groups but not the military’ in order to protect their territories and communities (Malseed 2009, 380), which as a whole formed a grassroots movement (Malseed 2008). Some movements such as the Ba Ka Tha (All Burma Federation of Student Union) went underground after the brutal crackdown of the 1988 pro-democracy uprising to continue training student activists in leftwing political ideology. Others, including students and ethnic-based democracy movements, transformed into armed struggles along the Chinese, Thai and Indian borders. Diaspora-driven human rights coalitions sprang up in Western countries, exposing violations and atrocities committed by the military regime and lobbying for support for the democratic forces working inside and outside the country. Some have called the unfolding situation a ‘transition to democracy’ (Sein 2017). But this is far from the reality for some, if not most, of Myanmar’s ‘rural working people’. In this paper, we draw on Shivji’s (2017) conception of ‘working people’ to encompass a diverse constituency of people currently struggling to reproduce themselves and their households under contemporary political-economic conditions in Myanmar..."