The vernacular meaning of land-grabbing in Kenya points at the role played by the State in land thefts, reminding us that, historically, state power was built through control over land. Accusations of land-grabbing also convey the idea that the legitimacy of land ownership follows the orderly representation of ethnic and national belonging. We focus on actors and scales of the official making of private land ownership to highlight institutionally rooted strategies of control over land and contrasting formalizations. We link these to “national” and “ethnic” sovereignty. Case-studies help us understand the local transformation of land control and its power base whether dealing with large-scale international land acquisitions or domestic land-grabbing.