The property regime that is professed in Jordanian laws, regulations and by land registration institutions is very different from the actually existing property regimes. Azraq, a small village in the North-eastern desert of Jordan where farmers and land speculators are involved at a daily basis in illegal grabs of significant pieces of state land, provides but one of the many examples hereof. To understand this widespread difference, it is important to approach the concept of property as relationally constructed: Property is a relation between people about things. In Jordan (as in many other countries) this relation has come to be increasingly regulated by the state during the past century. Consequently, the relation between the state and its citizens forms a constitutive element in the construction of a particular property regime. Demands for a different property regime thus necessarily need to address this relation. As one can see in Azraq, these demands are often expressed either through direct and violent confrontations between the state and interest groups, or through lobbying. However, these are far from the only methods farmers use to re-design the formal property regime. This paper looks at less visible and more subtle ways of contestation that manifest themselves in the imagining and acting upon a different (relation to the) state altogether - One that fits the farmers’ aspired property regime. Based on several months of ethnographic research in Azraq, the paper starts with a focus on the kind of property relations that exists within Azraq and the ways in which proprietorial practices of farmers and other interest groups seem, at first sight, to undo the state. However, an anthropological analysis of these possessive practices shows that these do not so much negate the state as try to re-construct it into one that will lend legitimacy to the property regimes of their desires. This paper shows how they do so through particular quotidian practices that play on (and with) temporal and spatial properties that are characteristic of (and inherent in) state practices.