Agrarian Angst and Rural Resistance in Contemporary Southeast Asia

Caouette, Dominique; Turner, Sarah

doi:10.4324/9780203874943

Cited by 39 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…Further supporting evidence for our arguments here, and a range of relevant Southeast Asian case studies, can be found in our edited volume (Caouette and Turner 2009).…”

supporting

confidence: 83%

Agrarian Angst: Rural Resistance in Southeast Asia

Turner

Caouette

2009

Geography Compass

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Southeast Asia has witnessed dramatic transformations in the rural sector over the past 60 years, first with the Green Revolution, and more recently with diverse multi‐scalar economic and socio‐political processes including the growth of cash crops, export processing zones, land conversions, genetically modified crops, free trade agreements, and the growing complexity of rural‐urban connections. With such a multiplicity of changes, many directly linked to globalisation, come numerous forms of resistance, as individuals and communities struggle against what they see as unjust consequences. These different resistance measures to rural transformations are the focus of this article. While critiquing the literature on different conceptualisations of resistance, from rural resistance at the micro level, through to collective action and open protest, revolutionary movements, and even regional and global transnational movements, we propose three core arguments. First, in order to capture the diversity of forms of contemporary rural resistance, one needs to use a multi‐scalar approach. Previous analytical constructs such as ‘local’ and ‘global’ are inadequate to examine and explain the forms of resistance taking place. Second, rural resistance comes in a complexity of forms, is diversifying rapidly, and is never static. Resistance measures are context contingent, shaped by different worldviews and shift according to local circumstances, the opening and closing of opportunities structures, and the endogenous peculiarities of resistance dynamics. Third, a focus on resistance to contemporary agrarian change in Southeast Asia must recognise agency. We demonstrate that there is much to be gained by taking an interactive standpoint, arguing that local, national, regional, and even global resistance has as much to do with how the actors’ themselves define their field of protest as with the specific nature of their targets.

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“…Further supporting evidence for our arguments here, and a range of relevant Southeast Asian case studies, can be found in our edited volume (Caouette and Turner 2009).…”

supporting

confidence: 83%

Agrarian Angst: Rural Resistance in Southeast Asia

Turner

Caouette

2009

Geography Compass

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“…Other studies were either edited volumes focusing on particular places, for example De Koninck et al . () on Borneo, or on particular themes such as resistance (Caouette and Turner, ), or were co‐authored interdisciplinary volumes such as Hall et al . 's () study of land relations.…”

Section: Revived Agrarian Studies: Part IImentioning

confidence: 99%

Reviving Agrarian Studies in South‐East Asia: Geography on the Ascendancy

Hirsch

2012

Geographical Research

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This paper examines the recent revival of agrarian studies in the social science scholarship of South‐East Asia following a period of decline from the 1980s onward. The hiatus provides an opportunity to examine the changed empirical contexts and theoretical framings of agrarian change in the intervening period. Renewed interest in rural agricultural and social change is also marked by a disciplinary shift, with the centre of gravity moving away from anthropology and political science and towards a geographical focus. This is explained both by institutional factors, as a large international research programme based in (but not limited to) geography has taken the lead on the revival, and also by the substantive shift in agrarian studies away from narrowly local village ethnographies or broad‐based scholarship inspired by Cold War concerns, towards a multi‐scale and contextualised approach in which environment, globalisation, migration, territorial expansion, spatial inequality, and other key geographical themes have framed explorations of agrarian change.

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“…The frontier then becomes a kind of 'tabula rasa', a blank page on which the implementation of developmental agendas can be written or from which resources can be extracted (McCarthy and Cramb 2009, 113). As documented by several studies, large-scale government interference and top-down development plans have in the past been contested and met with violence from rural communities in the Indonesian uplands and elsewhere in Southeast Asia (Li 2007, Caouette and Turner 2009, Peluso 2009. The rapid closure of the resource 'frontier' along the West Kalimantan border has resulted in increased local conflicts in the last decade and has intensified the scramble for natural resources and 'free' land.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Frontier constellations: agrarian expansion and sovereignty on the Indonesian-Malaysian border

Eilenberg

2014

The Journal of Peasant Studies

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Borderland regions in Southeast Asia have increasingly been reimagined as resource-rich, unexploited 'wastelands' targeted for large-scale development schemes for economic integration and control. Common and overlapping features of these regions are processes of resource extraction, agricultural expansion, population resettlement and securitization, and the confluence of these dynamic processes creates special frontier constellations. Through the case of the Indonesian-Malaysian borderlands, I explore how processes of frontier colonization through agricultural expansion have been a recurrent product of Indonesian development and security policies since the early 1960s. I argue that frontier development accelerates and intensifies when national discourses of security and sovereignty and state-led agrarian expansion intersect along national borders. The study generates new insights into how contemporary statecapitalist processes of agricultural expansion in the borderlands of Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia are justified through discourses of national sovereignty and notions of 'untamed' and 'wild' resource frontiers. I highlight the multiple meanings and notions associated with regions where resource frontiers and national borders interlock. The study offers an explanation of how frontiers as discursive constructs and material realities play out along national borders.

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Agrarian Angst and Rural Resistance in Contemporary Southeast Asia

Cited by 39 publications

References 0 publications

Agrarian Angst: Rural Resistance in Southeast Asia

Agrarian Angst: Rural Resistance in Southeast Asia

Reviving Agrarian Studies in South‐East Asia: Geography on the Ascendancy

Frontier constellations: agrarian expansion and sovereignty on the Indonesian-Malaysian border

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