Over the past 10 years, transnational land grabs for rubber tree plantations have proliferated across Laos. Plantation concessions are being established on village lands that are represented as ‘degraded’ and legally classified as ‘state forests’, expropriated by government officials in the name of poverty alleviation with promises that plantations will provide new wage labour opportunities for those dispossessed.
Concessions granted to investors in Cambodia have generated a deep sense of insecurity in rural forested areas. Villagers are not confined to a passive “everyday resistance of the poor,” as mentioned by James Scott, insofar as they frequently engage in frontal strategies for recovering land. Such has been the case in the northeastern provinces, where indigenous livelihoods are recurrently threatened by foreign and national companies. But what happens when a land conflict ends up in a stakeholder dialogue?
Since ceasefire agreements were signed between the Burmese military government and ethnic political groups in the Burma–China borderlands in the early 1990s, violent waves of counterinsurgency development have replaced warfare to target politically-suspect, resource-rich, ethnic populated borderlands. The Burmese regime allocates land concessions in ceasefire zones as an explicit postwar military strategy to govern land and populations to produce regulated, legible, militarized territory.
"Logging in Muddy Waters" analyzes the boom in forest exploitation that characterized the 1990s in Cambodia, focusing on the instrumentalization of disorder and violence as a mode of control of forest access and timber-trading channels. The article examines tensions existing between the aspirations of Cambodians for a better life, the power politics of elites, and the hope of some in the international community for a green and democratic peace.
WEBSITE INTRODUCTION: This book examines large-scale land acquisitions, or ‘land grabbing’, with a focus on South-East Asia. Thematic papers and detailed case studies put this phenomenon into specific historical and institutional contexts, analysing transformations in livelihoods, human rights impacts, and potential remedies.
The government of (post)socialist Laos has conceded more than 1 million hectares of land—5 percent of the national territory—to resource investors, threatening rural community access to customary lands and forests. However, investors have not been able to use all of the land granted to them, and their projects have generated geographically uneven dispossession due to local resistance.
The paper is based on an on-going 3-year study in the wetland communities of Kampala. The study uses participatory methods and aims to contribute to (i) the development of low-income wetland communities, (ii) to prepare these communities to become less dependent on wetlands without receding into poverty, and (iii) the better management of the wetlands. The communities in direct dependence and intimate interaction with Nakivubo wetlands are mainly poor, live and work under hazardous conditions, and their activities pose a threat to the ecological function of the wetlands.
Political reactions ‘from below’ to global land grabbing have been vastly more varied and complex than is usually assumed. This essay introduces a collection of ground- breaking studies that discuss responses that range from various types of organized and everyday resistance to demands for incorporation or for better terms of incorporation into land deals. Initiatives ‘from below’ in response to land deals have involved local and transnational alliances and the use of legal and extra-legal methods, and have brought victories and defeats.
As the world continues to experience a severe food crisis, with over one billion people going hungry, land grabbing – the purchase or lease of land by wealthy, food-insecure nations and private investors from mostly poor, developing nations in order to produce food crops for export – is gaining momentum. Some governments and international agencies believe that the in? ux of money and technology can turn land grabbing into a win–win situation for all involved. But is this really the case?
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