Nancy Lee Peluso

Territorialization and state power in Thailand

Weber and many other theorists have defined the state as a political organization that claims and upholds a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force in a given territory.1 Writers who draw on this Weberian approach have devoted considerable theoretical attention to political organization, legitimacy, and physical coercion in the making of modern states. Until recently, however, the meaning of territory as a key practical aspect of state control has been relatively neglected by many theorists of the sources of state power. Territorial sovereignty defines peoples political identities as citizens and forms the basis on which states claim authority over people and the resources within those boundaries.2 More important for our purposes here, modern states have increasingly turned to territorial strategies to control what people can do inside national boundaries. In this article, we aim to outline the emergence of territoriality in state power in Thailand, formerly called Siam. In particular, we examine the use of what we call internal territorialization in establishing control over natural resources and the people who use them.

New frontiers of land control: Introduction

Land questions have invigorated agrarian studies and economic history, with particular emphases on its control, since Marx. Words such as ‘exclusion’, ‘alienation’, ‘expropriation’, ‘dispossession’, and ‘violence’ describe processes that animate land histories and those of resources, property rights, and territories created, extracted, produced, or protected on land. Primitive and on-going forms of accumulation, frontiers, enclosures, territories, grabs, and racializations have all been associated with mechanisms for land control. Agrarian environments have been transformed by processes of de-agrarianization, protected area establishment, urbanization, migration, land reform, resettlement, and re-peasantization. Even the classic agrarian question of how agriculture is influenced by capitalism has been reformulated multiple times at transformative conjunctures in the historical trajectories of these processes, reviving and producing new debates around the importance of land control. The authors in this collection focus primarily on new frontiers of land control and their active creation. These frontiers are sites where authorities, sovereignties, rights, and hegemonies of the recent past have been challenged by new enclosures, property regimes, and territorializations, producing new ‘urban-agrarian-natured’ environments, comprised of new labor and production processes; new actors, subjects, and networks connecting them; and new legal and violent means of challenging previous land controls. Some cases augment analytic tools that had seemed to have timeless applicability with new frameworks, concepts, and theoretical tools. What difference does land control make? These contributions to the debates demonstrate that the answers have been shaped by conflicts, contexts, histories, and agency, as land has been struggled over for livelihoods, revenue production, and power.

Genealogies of the political forest and customary rights in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand

How have national and state governments the world over come to “own” huge expanses of territory under the rubric of “national forest,” “national parks,” or “wastelands”? The two contradictory statements in the above epigraph illustrate that not all colonial administrators agreed that forests should be taken away from local people and “protected” by the state. The assumption of state authority over forests is based on a relatively recent convergence of historical circumstances. These circumstances have enabled certain state authorities to supersede the rights, claims, and practices of people resident in what the world now calls “forests.”

Policies, Political-Economy, and Swidden in Southeast Asia

For centuries swidden was an important farming practice found across the girth of Southeast Asia. Today, however, these systems are changing and sometimes disappearing at a pace never before experienced. In order to explain the demise or transitioning of swidden we need to understand the rapid and massive changes that have and are occurring in the political and economic environment in which these farmers operate. Swidden farming has always been characterized by change, but since the onset of modern independent nation states, governments and markets in Southeast Asia have transformed the terms of swiddeners’ everyday lives to a degree that is significantly different from that ever experienced before. In this paper we identified six factors that have contributed to the demise or transformation of swidden systems, and support these arguments with examples from China (Xishuangbanna), Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. These trends include classifying swiddeners as ethnic minorities within nation-states, dividing the landscape into forest and permanent agriculture, expansion of forest departments and the rise of conservation, resettlement, privatization and commoditization of land and land-based production, and expansion of market infrastructure and the promotion of industrial agriculture. In addition we note a growing trend toward a transition from rural to urban livelihoods and expanding urban-labor markets.

Political Ecologies of War and Forests: Counterinsurgencies and the Making of National Natures

We examine the significance of a specific type of political violence—counterinsurgency—in the making of political forests, providing a link between literatures on the political ecology of forests and the geographies of war. During the Cold War, particularly between the 1950s and the end of the 1970s, natures were remade in relation to nation-states in part through engagements with “insurgencies” and “emergencies” staged from forested territories. These insurgencies represented alternative civilizing projects to those of the nascent nation-states; they also took place in historical moments and sites where the reach of centrifically focused nations was still tentative. We argue that war, insurgency, and counterinsurgency helped normalize political forests as components of the modern nation-state during and in the aftermath of violence. The political violence also enabled state-based forestry to expand under the rubric of scientific forestry. Military counterinsurgency operations contributed to the practical and political separation of forests and agriculture, furthered and created newly racialized state forests and citizen-subjects, and facilitated the transfer of technologies to forestry departments. The crisis rhetoric of environmental security around “jungles,” as dangerous spaces peopled with suspect populations, particularly near international borders, articulated with conservation and other national security discourses that emerged concurrently. Counterinsurgency measures thus strengthened the territorial power and reach of national states by extending its political forests.

The rock, the beach, and the tidal pool: People and poverty in natural resource‐dependent areas

Abstract Explaining why poverty exists in natural resource‐dependent areas (NRDAs) presents a formidable challenge, given variability in the nature, spatial manifestations, and social character of human well‐being. Nonetheless, there are structures and processes unique to NRDAs, including resource degradation, increasingly restrictive public land use policies, concentrated land ownership, and high rates of occupational injury that create the potential for impoverization in NRDAs. Given this complex context, we examine two theories of poverty. We find processes such as the shift from labor to capital‐intensive resource extraction, profit squeezes, and increased capital mobility identified in advanced capitalism theory help to explain NRDA poverty. In addition, processes identified in the theory of internal colonialism such as unequal exchange, the clash between traditional and secular cultures, and the control of public agencies by powerful private interests are more basic forces in creating NRDA poverty.

Empires of Forestry: Professional Forestry and State Power in Southeast Asia, Part 1

This paper examines the origins, spread, and practices of professional forestry in Southeast Asia, focusing on key sites in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Part 1 challenges popular and scholarly accounts of colonial forestry as a set of simplifying practices exported from Europe and applied in the European colonies. We show that professional forestry empires were constituted under colonialism through local politics that were specific to particular colonies and technically uncolonised regions. Local economic and ecological conditions constrained the forms and practices of colonial forestry. Professional forestry became strongly established in some colonies but not others. Part 2, in a forthcoming issue of this journal, will look at the influence on forestry of knowledge and management practices exchanged through professional-scientific networks. We find that while colonial forestry established some management patterns that were extended after the end of colonialism, it was post-colonial organisations such as the FAO that facilitated the construction of forestry as a kind of empire after World War Two. As a sector, forestry became the biggest landholder in the region only after colonialism had ended.

Frontiers of Commodification: State Lands and Their Formalization

Formal property rights are integral to contemporary global- and national-scale land transactions, and prerequisite to international institutions’ recognition of any state, private, or nonprofit land holdings. We argue that state lands constitute todays frontiers for capitalist expansion. Using cases from Ethiopia, Cameroon, and Indonesia, we show how practices, institutions, and laws that expunge local rights and claims to land and replace them with state rights have been fundamental to the creation of “new” frontiers. We argue that historical formalizations of state land created the enabling conditions for todays large-scale, international, and national acquisitions of land, in ways that were unanticipated at the time of state acquisition.

Introduction: New directions in agrarian political economy

For four decades, The Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) has served as a principal arena for the formation and dissemination of cutting-edge research and theory. It is globally renowned as a key site for documenting and analyzing variegated trajectories of agrarian change across space and time. Over the years, authors have taken new angles as they reinvigorated classic questions and debates about agrarian transition, resource access and rural livelihoods. This introductory essay highlights the four classic themes represented in Volume 1 of the JPS anniversary collection: land and resource dispossession, the financialization of food and agriculture, vulnerability and marginalization, and the blurring of the rural-urban relations through hybrid livelihoods. Contributors show both how new iterations of long-evident processes continue to catch peasants and smallholders in the crosshairs of crises and how many manage to face these challenges, developing new sources and sites of livelihood production.

Violence, Decentralization, and Resource Access in Indonesia

The decentralization of resource management emerges from, and reconstitutes, regimes of accumulation, as well as governance. The forms of access to and control over resources change under decentralization, affecting the ways different institutional and individual actors derive benefits, shoulder costs, and make claims. These changes create conditions where conflict is likely, while a lack of steps for realizing the redistributive goals of decentralization aggravates the tensions and potential for violence. This has been the experience in Indonesia. Where effective controls to prevent or mediate conflict do not exist, and where the stakes are high enough, that is where resources are valuable and or abundant; where violence already characterizes the management and control of resources, we should anticipate violence with decentralization. Those provinces in Indonesia where resources were most valuable and state power had already been contested or imposed violently experienced the most violence under decentralization. Decentralization creates new forms of territorial governance, and the terms of territorial or spatialized governance and conflict shift with it. With land-based resources, enclosure is a physical, as well as an administrative, act. Enclosure of resources and the exclusion of individuals, or groups with alternative claims to those resources, have long been recognized as sources of violence. The enclosure of resources by Indonesian central state institutions and the state’s failure to reinvest in the source regions was a major bone of contention in Indonesia under the Suharto regime (1966– 98). In particular, the passing of sectoral resource laws that bypassed the authority of the Basic Agrarian Law and its administering institutions created the legal mechanisms for a massive jurisdictional shift to resource Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, 19:23–32 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN 1040-2659 print; 1469-9982 online DOI: 10.1080/10402650601181840