Variegated transitions: Emerging forms of land and resource capitalism in Laos and Myanmar

Abstract

Since the mid- to late- 1980s, Laos and Myanmar (Burma) have gradually and unevenly opened their economies to capitalist relations of accumulation. Both countries have done so by granting state land concessions to private capital for resource extraction and land commodification projects, particularly since the early 2000s. Yet, resource capitalism has manifested in distinct ways in both places due to the ways in which capital has interacted with unique pre-capitalist political-economic and social relations as well as the diverse political reactions of Lao and Myanmar people to capitalist transformations. In this paper, we analyze such differences through a conceptualization of ‘variegated transitions’, an extension of the variegated capitalism framework, which investigates the political economic transitions towards capitalism in marginalized, resource extractive countries of the Global South. In Myanmar, the transition from military to democratic rule has been marked by protests and land occupations combined with center-periphery fragmentation and ongoing civil wars, all of which have led to a heavily contested process of land concession granting. In contrast, a stable, comparatively centralized political system in Laos that restrains popular protest has enabled an expanding regime of land concessions for resource extraction projects, albeit hemmed in at the edges by sporadic, localized forms of resistance and appeals to the state.

Gillian Hart in Beijing: Negotiating capitalist models at the World Bank–China nexus

“…A key injunction from this literature is the necessity for conjunctural approaches that assume no universal form of either the state or the market. Consequently, its problematization of institutional diversity and sociospatial complexity has helped to dislodge convergence narratives of post-socialist transition and subnational restructuring paths through cases in east and southeast Asia (Kenney-Lazar and Mark, 2021; Lim, 2019; Mulvad, 2015). A complementary “macro-constructivist” strand of geographical political economy employs Trotsky's notion of uneven and combined development to position China's state-led late industrialization in dialectical tension with the U.S.-led liberal international capitalist order, with attendant emphasis on geopolitical and inter-societal interaction (Peck, 2021: 12; see Dunford et al, 2021; Rolf 2021).…”

An Anatomy of Participation of Pastoralists in Land Governance

“…Literature on participation of pastoralists in land governance worldwide suggests limited inclusion of pastoralists, which affects their socio-cultural status of land, historical memory, and identity (Kenney-Lazar & Mark, 2021;Po & Heng, 2019). Such a situation is attributed to the status of pastoralist lands, and land use practices associated with their shifting cultivation and wandering for pastures (Flintan, 2020;Massoi, 2019).…”

“…The Maasai pastoralists, including those in Kondoa and Chemba, are affected by land-related conflicts with farmers revolving around land acquisition and use which affects their socio-cultural status of the land, historical memory, and identity as purported by Kenney-Lazar & Mark (2021). It is only logical to look into how pastoralists in Kondoa and Chemba participate in finding solutions to the problems in governance circles that provide space for them to do so.…”

Fruit booms and investor mobility along the China-Myanmar and China-Laos borders

“…The widely discussed issue of mobility [7] includes domestic and transnational relocation of investors to boom areas as well as transportation of products and boom-related migration. Institutionally and structurally, these movements reflect national policies with the aim to capitalize agriculture through domestic or foreign investment (Yan and Chen 2015, Ye 2015, Suhardiman et al 2019, Kenney-Lazar and Mark 2021. Many studies have also explored how crop booms cause local populations to migrate, in the hope of finding better wages (Baird and Fox 2015, Bouté 2018, Hall 2011b) while transferring land to newcomers (Hall et al 2011).…”