In Southeast Asia reversals of earlier agrarian reforms have rolled back "land-to-the-tiller" policies created in the wake of Cold War-era revolutions. This trend, marked by increased land concentration and the promotion of export-oriented agribusiness at the expense of smallholder farmers, exposes the convergence of capitalist relations and state agendas that expand territorial control within and across national borders. Turning Land into Capital examines the contradictions produced by superimposing twenty-first-century neoliberal projects onto diverse landscapes etched by decades of war and state socialism.
Chapters in the book explore geopolitics, legacies of colonialism, ideologies of development, and strategies to achieve land justice in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. The resulting picture reveals the place-specific interactions of state and market ideologies, regional geopolitics, and local elites in concentrating control over land.
Table of Contents:
Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction / Philip Hirsch, Kevin Woods, Natalia Scurrah, and Michael B. Dwyer
List of Abbreviations
PART I: Mekong Regional Themes
1. Land and Capital across Borders: A Regional Geopolitics / Natalia Scurrah and Philip Hirsch
2. Legacies in Land Governance: Colonialism, War, and Socialism / Kevin Woods, Michael B. Dwyer, and Jean-Christophe Diepart
3. Agrarian Modernization and Counter Land Reforms: Ideologies and Realities / Jean-Christophe Diepart and Christian Castellanet
4. Grounding Land Justice: Contested Principles, Processes, and Outcomes / Carl Middleton and Vanessa Lamb
PART II: Mekong Country Cases
5. Land Commodification, State Formation, and Agrarian Capitalism: The Political Economy of Land Governance in Cambodia / Jean-Christophe Diepart and Carl Middleton
6. "Thirty Thousand Hectares Will Not Be a Proble": The Politics of Large-Scale Land Development in Laos / Michael B. Dwyer
7. Legacies of Race, Ethnicity, and War: Contemporary Land Governance Reform in Myanmar / Kevin Woods
8. Movement, Countermovement, and Regionalization of Capital: The Dynamics of Land Relations in Thailand / Philip Hirsch
9. Land from the Tiller: The Politics of "Land Recovery" in Vietnam / Nga Dao and Marie Mellac
Conclusion: A Regional Approach to Land Capitalization / Philip Hirsch, Kevin Woods, Natalia Scurrah, and Michael B. Dwyer
References
Contributors
Index
About the Author :
Philip Hirsch is emeritus professor of human geography at the University of Sydney and coauthor of Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia. Kevin Woods is a fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu. Natalia Scurrah is an independent researcher based in Thailand and coauthor of The Mekong: A Sociolegal Approach to River Basin Development. Michael Dwyer is assistant professor of geography at Indiana University Bloomington and author of Upland Geopolitics: Postwar Laos and the Global Land Rush.
Review :
"Anyone familiar with this group of authors will not be surprised that Turning Land into Capital is incisive work, informed by a range of interdisciplinary perspectives and communicating the complexities of land politics with depth and clarity."
"A highly readable, insightful volume on land politics across the Mekong region today. Featuring detailed case studies, and grounded in a solid political ecological perspective, it is an essential read for scholars across the social sciences interested in the region. Additionally, it is extremely insightful for scholars who are thinking about land governance from multiple scales and comparatively across regions."
"The book is geared towards experts in the region and could prove useful for a graduate seminar on development, land, or economy in Southeast Asia. It will be exceptionally rewarding for those of us conducting fieldwork on a smaller scale, where it is easy to lose sight of larger economic and political developments across the region."
"The volume is rich in content. Its contributors, who have long been engaged in research on land politics and land relations, have based their work on an abundance of research results. Undoubtedly, the book makes a significant contribution to understanding the ongoing issues of land grabbing, crop booms, agricultural transformation, and rural-urban interactions in the Mekong region and other developing countries."
"This book is an important palliative to the recent ontological turn in environmental anthropology. It throws into sharp relief issues of power, inequality, and the commodification of nature that go beyond the intimacies of human-nature entanglement. Crafting a more-than-human perspective grounded in the dynamics of land capitalization and justice allows for a more robust approach to scholarship in this academic subfield and region. . . . Furthermore, the volume is an outcome of collaborative scholarship engaged deeply in local and regional work."
