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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.
Acknowledgments
This article was developed initially through a workshop in 2018 called “Land governance and rural transitions in Southeast Asia and the Pacific” at the Crawford School of Public Policy, funded by the College of Asia and Pacific of the Australian National University. The authors would like to thank Dr Michael Buehler and Dr Steve Heder for comments on earlier versions of this article. The manuscript also benefitted greatly from the feedback of three anonymous reviewers.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Mahanty (Citation2018) offers a more nuanced and contingent view of state sovereignty and territory in Cambodia’s borderlands.
2. The CNRP came onto the political scene as a result of the merger of two smaller parties in 2012. The CNRP was dissolved by the Supreme Court in 2017. The CPP did this by filing a complaint following an amendment to the Law on Political Parties made by the CPP while the CNRP was boycotting the National Assembly (The Phnom Penh Post, November 27, 2017).
3. Also known as BB01, where BB is short for bot bonchier, meaning “Order.” It is a form of legislation.
4. The Leopard Skin policy became the popularly used term for the land titling drive that resulted from Order 01. So-called because farmers’ land carved out of concessions would resemble the leopard’s spots.
5. It was suggested that ELC’s linked to the Chea Sim faction of the CPP were cancelled, while those aligned with Hun Sen’s network were left untouched.
6. We refer here to “rights” (setthi) within the vernacular as discussed by Norén-Nilsson (Citation2016b).
7. According to Article 58 of the constitution land is state property, the “control, use and management” of which is determined by law. Ownership categories are provided by the Land Law (2001).
8. This translates literally to: princely exalted supreme great commander of gloriously victorious troops.
9. Neef, Touch, and Jamaree (2013) also show how international aid agencies and other development partners were “instrumentalised” by the CPP in the formal displacement of rural Cambodians, through their engagement on social land concessions.
10. Polling conducted by an Israeli company, Shaviv, and leaked to the media in 2017 (see The Cambodia Daily, June 19, 2017). Documents are in Loughlin’s possession.
11. Information publicly available online (Open Corporates Citation2018).
12. These figures on ELC and protected forest area transfer are from the RGC in 2017, sourced from a former Ministry of the Environment official.