Revisiting Political Ecology and Agrarian Studies in Southeast Asia

In September 2024, University of Utah Assistant Professor Jessica DiCarlo co-organized a writing retreat with Hilary Faxon (University of Montana) at the University of Utah’s Taft Nicholson Center, nestled in Montana’s picturesque Centennial Valley. The event was generously funded and sponsored by a Henry Luce Foundation Asia Response Grant and The Asia Center at the University of Utah. The gathering was designed around principles of slow scholarship, offering participants an opportunity to spend time, converse, and collaborate over several days. The retreat’s structure provided an environment for deep reflection and intellectual exchange, alongside many shared group walks, meals, and time around a campfire.

The theme, “Revisiting the Political Ecology and Agrarian Studies of Southeast Asia,” brought together a group of early to mid-career political ecologists. These scholars shared a long-term commitment to and in-depth research experience across Southeast Asia, for example, in Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Singapore. Their collective expertise spans a range of political ecology topics, approaches, and theoretical orientations.

 

The goal of the retreat—to offer fresh insights and push the boundaries of political ecology in Southeast Asia—will lead to two core outputs. The first is a Special Issue that explores how recent research in Southeast Asia has expanded, challenged, and reconceptualized political ecology. The issue contributes contemporary insights to updating analytical concepts, synthesizing emergent themes, and reflecting on changing practices within political ecology and agrarian studies, asking:

• How are grounded struggles from the region reformulating classic concepts in political ecology? 
• What emerging themes demand empirical attention and new theorization from political ecologists?
• How are changing practices of research, ethics and scholar-activism responding to contemporary socio-environmental challenges?

These questions are explored through the lens of the participants’ impressive body of work, from theorizing slow resistance to hydropower in Thailand (Fung and Lamb 2023) and ceasefire capitalism in Myanmar’s extractive borderlands (Woods 2011), to historicizing upland geopolitics in Laos (Dwyer 2022), and reflecting on being a “local researcher” in Cambodia (Chann 2023). Others center questions of questions of citizenship and statelessness in Thailand (Flaim et al. 2020), financialization of agrarian change in Cambodia (Green 2022; 2024), Chinese hydropower development in Laos (Harlan and Lu 2024), and transboundary governance of the Mekong (Yong 2022). Questions of land are central to many participants’ analysis, from the value of land and transformation of property relations (Kenney-Lazar 2013; 2020) and land control and appropriation through infrastructure (DiCarlo 2024; DiCarlo & Sims 2023) in Laos to theorizing relations between digital technologies and land politics in Myanmar and Indonesia (Faxon 2020; Wittekind and Faxon 2023; Faxon et al. 2024). Many build on Peluso’s (Peluso and Vandergeest 2001) foundational work on the political forest and territorialization.

 

The second output from the weekend will contribute to the Grassroots of the Journal of Political Ecology through a project entitled “Roots, Resistance, and Decoloniality: Political Ecology by, for, and of Southeast Asia.” This endeavor brings together emerging voices and new perspectives of political ecology within Southeast Asia and will model an alternative approach to writing and editing, including close mentorship between authors and editors.

 

Our hope from the workshop is that it will serve as a launching point for further collaboration within this group and beyond.

 

Participants included:

Jessica DiCarlo, University of Utah (organizer)

Hilary Faxon, University of Montana (organizer)

Michael Dwyer, University of Indiana Bloomington

Amanda Flaim, Michigan State University

Sopheak Chann, University of Kentucky

Vanessa Lamb, York University

Zali Fung, University of Melbourne

Tyler Harlan, Loyola Marymount University

Kevin Woods, East-West Center & University of Hawaii

Jesse Rodenbiker, Rutgers Unievrsity

Nathan Green, National University of Singapore

Miles Kenney-Lazar, University of Melbourne

Ming Li Yong, East-West Center

Kim Korinek, University of Utah

Bryce Garner, University of Utah

Nancy Peluso, University of California Berkeley

 

Abstracts for the Journal of Asian Studies

Introduction by Jessica DiCarlo & Hilary Faxon

Embodied Borderscapes and Ecological Materialities: Emergent Themes in the Political Ecology of Migration in Southeast Asia

Amanda Flaim and Sopheak Chann

Migration dynamics across, within, into, and beyond Southeast Asia have long constituted a site of rich scholarship, given the region’s continued centrality in interrelated domains of global trade, colonial occupations and anti-colonial struggles, environmental and agrarian transformations, development planning and land grabs, and, increasingly, with respect to accelerating climate change. A political ecological approach to migration, which calls attention to the ways that changing patterns in human movement both reflect and shape broader dynamics in the global political economy and the environment, is proving especially productive in understanding and (re)theorizing migration shifts across and between a range of diverse sites in Southeast Asia. Indeed, the rapid growth of Southeast Asia’s megacities cannot occur without the agrarian transformations and attendant rural out-migrations and displacements that fuel them. In turn, urbanization is driving concomitant demands for food and energy produced at accelerating speeds in predominantly rural areas, thereby exacerbating conditions of rural livelihood precarity and local ecological degradation, both of which present new urgencies and opportunities to move. In this analysis we trace the theoretical legacies of Southeast Asian migration studies, highlighting how political ecological interventions in the field are productively unsettling conventional binaries in migration analysis like international versus internal migration, displacement versus labor migration, and rural versus urban livelihoods. Additionally, we briefly draw on the comparative cases of Vietnamese Cambodians as yet still residing on the Tonle Sap, and highland forest farming communities in Thailand to explore two emergent themes in the political ecology of migration in Southeast Asia: 1) the ecological materialities of mobility, or how people and ecologies move and shift (or not) in relation; and 2) embodied borderscapes, or how states’ uses of increasingly sophisticated and remote technologies of surveilling and managing migration intersect with and shape inequities in mobility as a livelihood option as well as access to land and increasingly imperiled resources.

 

Fluid Frontiers and Transboundary Natures: Aqueous Territoriality in Southeast Asia

Jesse Rodenbiker and Jessica DiCarlo

Political ecology in Southeast Asia has long been concerned with territoriality in terrestrial environments. Foundational work has examined political forests, for instance, and their layered histories of empire, colonial expansion, and capitalist frontier-making. Building on and extending a terrestrial genealogy of territoriality the region, we bring attention to aqueous forms of territoriality and the fluid frontiers and transboundary natures through which they are constituted. More specifically, we attend to volumetric materialities of water across surfaces, volumes, and depths from rivers to oceans. We argue that the material properties of water and their voluminous resource relations, shape territorializing techniques. Furthermore, we distinguish between terrestrial and aqueous forms of territoriality by empirically analyzing mainland Southeast Asia’s river management, as well as marine spatial planning and fisheries, artificial island-formation, and deep sea mining in the South China Sea. Ultimately, the paper illuminates novel directions for political ecological analyses of Southeast Asia and beyond.

 

Between Coercion and Consent: Variegated Land Dispossession in Southeast Asia

Miles Kenney-Lazar and W. Nathan Green

            Land dispossession has been a central concern of political ecology scholarship on Southeast Asia, especially over the past two decades. Much of this work has focused on land grabbing for large-scale agro-industrial plantations. Political ecologists have analyzed the ways that Indigenous Peoples and peasants have been excluded from their lands, forests, and territories, devastating rural livelihoods and contributing to rapid urbanization. However, political ecologists have also investigated dispossession in relation to land reform programs, conservation enclosures, and smallholder commodity production. While this scholarship has focused on processes of neoliberalization since the 1990s, it has increasingly drawn connections between contemporary developments and historical processes of dispossession under colonial rule. Engaging with this rich body of scholarship, this paper draws out conceptual linkages across a variety of dispossession dynamics to paint a broad picture of how and why people lose access to land across the region. Our key contention is that dispossession should not be conceptualized exclusively as a process that is enacted by state-led coercion. Instead, we advance a broader view of dispossession, which considers the diverse modes of land dispossession and their interrelationships. These include old and new capitalist political-economic forces, from resource extractivism to nature-based solutions for climate change, as well as other forms of social force, including manufactured consent. In painting this broad picture, we demonstrate how dispossession often operates in the grey area between consent and coercion. We build our argument by referencing cases from across the region, with a particular focus on our own areas of research: plantation concessions in Laos and debt-driven dispossession in Cambodia.

 

Political Ecology of Revolution: War and Environment in and beyond Myanmar

Kevin M. Woodsand Hilary O. Faxon 

            While political ecology has long critiqued simplistic understandings of the relationship between nature and armed conflict, today most scholarship is based on remotely-sensed land use and land cover change, quantified armed conflict dynamics, or abstract large-N analyses that often assume direct causal relations or overlook social relations entirely. These methodological approaches have helped capture higher-level trends and drivers of violent conflict, but at the expense of a relational reading of environmental change at the scale that armed groups operate and interact with nature and people. A political ecology approach, on the other hand, grounds analysis in the materiality and lived realities of particular landscapes and embeds acute political violence within a longer arc of history and political economy. These attributes make political ecology a good companion to area studies, particularly scholarship that draw out the particularities of place, politics, and culture in Southeast Asia. Based on the authors’ field research along Myanmar’s borders with India, China and Thailand, we apply a political ecology of revolution approach to offer new insight into Myanmar’s ongoing civil war that has escalated since the coup in February 2021. Such analysis provides a framework for understanding how acute outbreaks and chronic conditions of violence reshape nature-society relations, in and beyond Myanmar.

 

Slow resistance, gender and ‘behind the scenes’ anti-dam activism

Vanessa Lamb and Zali Fung

There is a wealth of work in political ecology on social movements and community responses to unfair and unjust development and extraction of natural resources. In authoritarian contexts where overt protest entails risks and repercussions, we revisit this work and consider how new concepts around time, temporality and gender/social difference are key for rethinking resistance. We develop the notion of “slow resistance” to account for a range of temporal-political strategies that emerge against unjust developments over time and in doing so, we draw on over a decade of fieldwork in Southeast Asia’s Salween River Basin, where dams and diversions have been proposed, and resisted, since the late 1970s. We also draw on insights from feminist political ecology to examine women’s ‘behind the scenes’ food preparation efforts for large anti-dam gatherings. In doing so, we reveal how such 'behind the scenes' work is crucial for sustaining longer-term civil society movements and more overt actions such as protest. Using a critical temporal and gendered lens, our work expands conceptualisations of resistance by highlighting how different forms, temporalities, and generational strategies of resistance support one another.

 

The persistence of state territoriality: thinking with hydro-powersheds in Southeast Asia

Mike B. Dwyer and Tyler Harlan

Echoing the work of critical political and economic geographers,political ecologists working in Southeast Asia have helped develop useful and highly influential concepts around state territoriality and territorialization – the strategies and processes that state actors undertake in their efforts to actually control the land under their formal jurisdiction. Using the lens of “political forests”, Vandergeest and Peluso’s work on state territoriality is perhaps the best known , but there are by now many threads of state-territorial analysis in the Southeast Asia literature and elsewhere that that concept is by now so ubiquitous that it is often uncited. Territorialization’s utility comes from the concept’s highlighting the struggles and processes by which state-spatial hegemony is made, contested, remade, etc. rather than simply existing by virtue of formal jurisdiction. Another way to put it, drawing on the lens of legal pluralism, is that the formal realm of state-territorial practice is often more dynamic and much weaker than sometimes assumed. Our paper seeks to build on this literature by applying the concept of territorialization to the socio-spatiality of energy – and specifically electricity – systems, which are highly territorial in their marshalling of land and terrestrial resources, yet have often been outside the main scope of the literature noted above. Our interest is less in marking out an entirely new arena (excellent work by Hirsch and Baird & Quastel, for instance, have already applied state territoriality to energy systems in mainland Southeast Asia); rather, we seek to use the passage time to illustrate the ongoing salience of the original focus on state territoriality, even as interest in non-state actors and transnational territoriality has proliferated in the previous decade-plus.

 

Closing Commentary by Nancy Peluso

Roots, Resistance and Decoloniality: Political Ecology by, for, and of Southeast Asia

Special Issue in Journal of Political Ecology Grassroots

Source: Sreymao Sao, commissioned by Mekong Culture WELL Project

 

Titles of contributions

1. Inverting the infrastructural inversion: An agroecological decolonial spatiality
2. Embracing slow life in the field: Navigating research delays and politics as early career scholars of Southeast Asia
3. จิตสำนึก/The (common) sense
4. At the Margins of Land and Water: Placemaking for Elder Hmong Men in Rural Northern California
5. Utang: Reflections on Debt and Decolonizing Political Ecology in the Philippines (and Beyond)
6. Not transferring land ownership, but exercising state control over indigenous land via communal land titles.
7. So you want to come do research here? Rethinking research collaborations in Southeast Asia and their decolonial possibilities – Case studies from political ecology research in Bali, Indonesia
8. Gendered struggles and the everyday politics of the Pak Mun Dam, Thailand
9. Art-based Storytelling as a tool in interpreting Environmental Justice of Mae Ngao River: the case study of the Bhumibol Reservoir Inflow Augmentation Project in Mae Ngao Village
10. ‘Unpacking’ Migration: Material Geographies and Visual Storytelling with Myanmar refugees in an Upstate NY town
11. Rare Earth Mining in Myanmar’s Civil War
12. Contested Territorializations, Shifting Public Authority, and Acts of Everyday Resistance in Tanintharyi Region, Myanmar Before and After the 2021 Coup
13. Understanding the Salween Peace Park as an Indigenous Conservation Initiative within the Global Debate on Conservation and Indigeneity
14. Armed Power as a Guarantor: Rights Reclamation in a Frontier of State and Power

 

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