In 2012, Cambodia—an epicenter of violent land grabbing—announced a bold new initiative to develop land redistribution efforts inside agribusiness concessions. Alice Beban's Unwritten Rule focuses on ...this land reform to understand the larger nature of democracy in Cambodia. Beban contends that the national land-titling program, the so-called leopard skin land reform, was first and foremost a political campaign orchestrated by the world's longest-serving prime minister, Hun Sen. The reform aimed to secure the loyalty of rural voters, produce modern farmers, and wrest control over land distribution from local officials. Through ambiguous legal directives and unwritten rules guiding the allocation of land, the government fostered uncertainty and fear within local communities. Unwritten Rule gives pause both to celebratory claims that land reform will enable land tenure security, and to critical claims that land reform will enmesh rural people more tightly in state bureaucracies and create a fiscally legible landscape. Instead, Beban argues that the extension of formal property rights strengthened the very patronage-based politics that Western development agencies hope to subvert.
In areas of land conflict, fear and the threat of violence work to reproduce imaginaries of land as a resource that powerful people can grab. An urgent question for agrarian scholars and activists is ...how people can overcome fear so that alternative imaginaries might flourish. In this article, we argue for attention to the affective dimension of imaginaries; ideas of what land is and should be are co-constituted through the material and social, imbued with powerful emotions that enable imaginaries to be reproduced, to be challenged, and even to be transformed. We draw from long-term research projects in Cambodia—a country known for plantation-fuelled dispossession—where the Prime Minister’s surprise announcement of a land titling campaign in 2012 ruptured the wave of land grabbing, creating openings to imagine different outcomes that are rooted in the potential for legal recognition of smallholder claims. Although the campaign was an uncertain rupture in land imaginaries, these moments matter. Land claimants sought to create affective ties with volunteer land surveyors that embedded hopeful land imaginaries in rural areas and into the national cadastral system. The land title in this context is the material bearer of a land imaginary that centres on rural people’s connection to the land, and also reinforces rural people’s connection to the Cambodian state and the potential to gain the state’s protection. We contribute to an emerging literature that locates the formative effects of hope as an orientation and as a method by exploring the possibilities inherent in rupture.
Doing remote fieldwork is a ‘new normal’ in the COVID-19 pandemic era. It is challenging, but not impossible. With planning and preparation, comprehensive training and ongoing support for Research ...Assistants (RAs), researchers can overcome the challenges of remote fieldwork. In this article, we reflect on the experience of employing local RAs to support doctoral research involving in-depth household interviews and focus group discussions with ethnic minority people in upland Vietnam. The challenge of adapting to this ‘new normal’ provided us with an opportunity for a critical appraisal of the researcher–RA relationship. The approach to remote fieldwork we developed centres on frequent communication, feedback and building trusting team dynamics. We argue that this approach can overcome some of the power hierarchies between global north researchers and local RAs, and therefore, should not simply be seen as a temporary or inferior ‘Plan B’ for researchers, but should be embraced as a way of reimagining knowledge production. We discuss lessons learned in how to carry out remote fieldwork, present practical strategies and recommendations, and consider the strengths of this approach for knowledge production and the empowerment of researchers in the global south.
Communal lands and natural resources in rural Cambodia have transformed over the past 30 years as the country attempts to transition from conflict to liberal democracy and integrates into global ...agricultural value chains. We find that gender relations are changing as a result of land privatization and the ensuing social and ecological crises of production and reproduction. The forest has become a space for the articulation of new masculinities modulated through class and racialised power, while women are increasingly relegated to the private space of the home and village, negotiating expectations that they perform care, farming and food provisioning work while juggling household debt. We ground our argument in a large sample of qualitative interviews conducted between 2016 and 2020 in the upland provinces of Kampong Thom, Kratie and Ratanakiri that provide narrative accounts of the transformation of common forest and grazing lands, logging livelihoods and food provisioning practices. Using a feminist political ecology perspective, we highlight the contradictory processes of enclosure of the commons, which operate simultaneously as sites of violence, resistance, adaptation and continuity.
This paper draws on evidence from a field study of three organic agriculture development projects in Cambodia to look critically at the pursuit of organic agriculture as a rural development strategy ...in a context of rapid agrarian transition. I find that organic agriculture is a successful strategy for some households to improve the viability of land-based livelihoods as part of broader livelihood strategies, particularly within projects most closely aligned with an agroecological understanding valuing diversity and farmer knowledge. However, there are inherent contradictions in prescribing northern, market driven notions of farming success into the very different cultural and ecological settings of the Global South, and certification requirements, resource constraints and labor requirements can exclude some farmers. I argue that analysis of organic-farming as a rural development strategy needs to understand not just the direct economic returns, for the non-economic aspects, the broader socio-political contexts of uneven agrarian transition, and the ideology and practices of development agencies have a large bearing on the poverty reduction potential of organic farming.
Our efforts to research the land grab in Cambodia were thwarted on multiple fronts. This article emerges from our collective experiences of fear and intimidation to reconsider land grabs as a project ...that produces fear and is reliant on fear. Recent literature on resource conflict focuses on acts of physical violence, but for people who live near spaces of land grabs, the everyday is marked by a different kind of violence, an incoherence and pervasive fear that threatens people's sense of self and the entire social fabric of their worlds. We ground our analysis in insights from several years of ethnographic and survey research experience in land conflict areas in Cambodia, detailing how shadowy networks of actors involved in land grabbing layer memories of war and authoritarian regimes with new threats to control populations and facilitate capital accumulation. We argue that in this context, the "grab" is not just a physical enclosure of land but an affective grab that precedes, surrounds, and reverberates beyond the site of the grab itself. Our article seeks to make theoretical contributions in two ways: theorizing fear as a tool of governance that facilitates state control and capital accumulation and, through this analysis, broadening the ontology of land grabs by foregrounding affect in processes of dispossession to show how the grab reverberates beyond bounded sites. The researcher is also subject to violence, raising questions about what ways of knowing are possible as fear shapes the research process and the subjectivities of both researchers and research participants.
In 2012, Cambodia—an epicenter of violent land grabbing—announced a bold new initiative to develop land redistribution efforts inside agribusiness concessions. Alice Beban's Unwritten Rule focuses on ...this land reform to understand the larger nature of democracy in Cambodia. Beban contends that the national land-titling program, the so-called leopard skin land reform, was first and foremost a political campaign orchestrated by the world's longest-serving prime minister, Hun Sen. The reform aimed to secure the loyalty of rural voters, produce "modern" farmers, and wrest control over land distribution from local officials. Through ambiguous legal directives and unwritten rules guiding the allocation of land, the government fostered uncertainty and fear within local communities. Unwritten Rule gives pause both to celebratory claims that land reform will enable land tenure security, and to critical claims that land reform will enmesh rural people more tightly in state bureaucracies and create a fiscally legible landscape. Instead, Beban argues that the extension of formal property rights strengthened the very patronage-based politics that Western development agencies hope to subvert.
In this article, we build on a growing body of scholarship that seeks to understand what it means to be a student in the neoliberal university by investigating an element of students' lives that is ...often invisible to lecturers and administrators: students' paid and unpaid work commitments and their influence on student stress. We draw on a study we conducted with New Zealand university students in 2017-2018, comprising a survey of 131 students and in-depth interviews with 20 students. We find that the neoliberal policy changes in the tertiary sector, including the high costs and debt burden borne by students and their families, contribute to students' heavy paid and unpaid work commitments, high stress levels and entrenched class, gender and ethnic inequalities in people's experiences of studenthood. The neoliberal student subject emerges as a contradiction: an individual who desires both more and less engagement with the university as they struggle to find 'balance' between university study, paying the bills, caring for family members and cultivating their 'employability'.
Cassava has become a 'must have' crop for many Cambodian smallholders; yet, the market is volatile and yields are uneven. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Kampong Thom and Ratanakiri provinces, we ...analyse how farmers cope with volatility. We argue that multiple pathways have emerged: some farmers have ceased producing cassava; some have expanded production; while most farmers engage in 'ambivalent repeasantisation', striving to gain autonomy from market fluctuations through the survival work of everyday gendered labour, including investing family and community labour into cassava, shifting back to food crops, managing debt, and creating relationships with traders, while also imagining a life beyond cassava. Uneven fortunes with cassava contribute to land redistribution, deepening class, gender and ethnic divides. The case of smallholder cassava pathways in Cambodia shows us that agrarian transition is neither linear nor unidimensional, and dynamics of 'depeasantisation', 'repeasantisation', and 'intensification' through crop booms cannot be assumed a priori.
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