This article shows the coexistence of the language of legal claims and the use of violence as constitutive modes of getting control over resources. Through the analysis of a specific case of land dispute east of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, we aim at revealing how local struggles are linked to broader geographies of power. Following important changes in the material conditions in Afghanistan, which have led to the expansion of the city and the transformation of the rural-urban fringe, territorialized power appears as a pre-condition to control the circulation of people, goods and money, information and ideas, allowing us to add landscapes, the circulation of land, to the five categories famously distinguished by Appadurai as a way of organizing the study of the world's culture and economy.