After the Grab? Land Control and Regime Survival in Cambodia since 2012

Abstract

The global land grab has played out vividly in Cambodia, giving rise to rural upheaval and new political dynamics. This article explores how the Cambodian government has dealt with the social and political consequences of this land grabbing, with the aim of exploring state formation in the context of socio-environmental disruption and dispossession. When a moratorium was declared in 2012, the ruling Cambodian People's Party faced one of its strongest political challenges, fuelled in part by land and resource conflicts. In this article, the focus is on the responses to this challenge, noting the recursive relationship between land administration and state formation. The analysis shows three tactics of land control used by the regime to ensure its survival after the grab: reform, repression and re-territorialisation. These tactics operate in parallel and sometimes contradictory ways, being highly performative in nature. We reveal a regime that uses political theatre to construct legitimacy and authority on the one hand, while deploying coercion and violence on the other. These observations complement typical diagnoses of Cambodia's politics as neo-patrimonial, highlighting the performative and symbolic nature of government actions, particularly in the land sector.

Routledge Handbook of Community Forestry

“…Meanwhile, jurisdictional reforms in 2016 transferred 74 ELCs from the Ministry of Environment (MoE) to MAFF and 18 protected forests and production forests from MAFF to MoE. These reforms are seen as another tactic by the ruling party to exert its control over land (Loughlin & Milne, 2021). This may, in turn, change the significance of community forestry for MAFF.…”

‘Land for my children’: Gendered moral economies, social reproduction and resistance against land grabs in rural Cambodia

“…This article begins with the premise that peasants' collectively held notions of justice continue to offer a critical lens towards understanding the contemporary era of peasant struggles against dispossession or ‘global land grabbing’ that emerged from multiple crises linked to the global political economies of food, energy and finance in 2007–08. In Cambodia—a country where, over the last two decades, nearly 2.2 million hectares of land have been transferred to corporate entities and political elites—struggles over land have been vividly present in the public sphere and closely intertwined with the dynamics of authoritarian state formation (Loughlin & Milne, 2021). Cambodia's land grab narrative is centred on the profound changes to the system of land tenure in the last two decades that have enabled violent forms of dispossession and represent a seismic shift in agrarian social relations of production (Diepart & Sem, 2018).…”

“Now the Forest Is Over”: Transforming the Commons and Remaking Gender in Cambodia's Uplands

“…The government's strategic deployment of legal norms to expropriate commons resources articulates with transnational investments to legitimize dispossession and the privatization of communal land (Springer, 2012;Brickell, 2020). Rural Cambodians who previously saw themselves as rightful owners or custodians of land have become "illegal settlers" as state public land is rezoned into state private land to be leased to investors, or as public conservation areas (Springer, 2010;Loughlin and Milne, 2020). People now face fines, arrests and state-sanctioned violence for performing everyday livelihood and food provisioning practices on communal forest land.…”