Turning Land into Capital: Development and Dispossession in the Mekong Region (Culture, Place, and Nature) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0295750464 ISBN 13: 9780295750460

Publisher: University of Washington Press, 2022

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Authors

Philip Hirsch is professor of human geography at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Development Dilemmas in Rural Thailand (Oxford University Press, 1990) and Thai Agriculture: Restructuring in the 1980s and 1990s (University of Sydney, 1990); and editor of Routledge Handbook of the Environment in Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2017) and Seeing Forests for Trees: Environment and Environmentalism in Thailand (Silkworm Books, 1997).

Kevin Woods is a fellow at the East-West Center, Honolulu, Hawai’i.

Natalia Scurrah is an independent researcher based in Thailand. She is coauthor of The Mekong: A Sociolegal Approach to River Basin Development (Routledge, 2016).

Michael Dwyer is assistant professor of geography at Indiana University Bloomington. A political ecologist by training, he received his PhD in energy and resources from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2012. This is his first book.

Kalyanakrishnan "Shivi" Sivaramakrishnan is Dinakar Singh Professor of India and South Asia Studies, professor of anthropology, professor of forestry and environmental studies, and codirector of the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0295750464
• ISBN 13: 9780295750460
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264
• Editor: Hirsch Philip, Woods Kevin, Scurrah Natalia, Dwyer Michael B.