New frontiers of land control: Introduction

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• land control
• agrarian questions
• tenure
• access

Introduction

What difference does land control make? … to old and new agrarian questions, to growers and landlords, to land managers with various goals: extraction, production, accumulation, conservation, and governance? The ‘land question’ has invigorated agrarian studies and economic history since Marx and early twentieth century writers on agrarian questions. Various transformative ‘moments’ have inspired and revived debates around land control: the spread of colonialism, the rise of nation-states and nationalisms, the invention and triumphalism of global markets, collectivizations, and privatizations. Issues of land use, labor practice, and forms of social control have animated these contexts and questions, including engendered production, slavery, tied labor, Green Revolutions, the purported end of the peasantry, the future of family farming, and wage labor. Land control, alienation, and dispossession have played classic and contemporary roles in primitive and on-going forms of accumulation, with new frontiers, various kinds of territories, and ethnic and racialized conflicts emerging at virtually all levels. Even the classic agrarian question of how agriculture is influenced by the capitalist economy has been reformulated multiple times (Aschmann 1988, Bernstein 2005, Byers 1991, Chayanov 1986, Kautsky 1988, Lenin 1956, Mann 1990, Watts and Goodman 1997). The creation of the idea of ‘natural resources’ and the mapping of state-controlled territories on the land for the purpose of their governance created new sorts of land control when they emerged, and have generated many pages in the literature.

By ‘land control’ we mean practices that fix or consolidate forms of access, claiming, and exclusion for some time. Enclosure, territorialization, and legalization processes, as well as force and violence (or the threat of them), all serve to control land. The mechanisms of land control need not always align, nor proceed in a singular, linear direction. They may be wielded in concert or competition with one another.

The papers in this collection demonstrate that land control continues to be important in the twenty-first century, even though the nature of its importance, how it is struggled over, and the effects of these struggles are largely products of their times and geographic locations. The relative importance of land control to household or individual economies changes in the wake of changing political economies and ecologies and with shifts in the historical trajectories of various actors and the sites within which they produce and trade. Agrarian environments have been transformed by so many processes: de-agrarianization, protected area establishment, urbanization, migration, land reform, resettlement, and re-peasantization. These and other processes have transformed land uses and the sites and sources of employment and income, reconfiguring access to and relative dependence on land for livelihoods (Rigg 1998, 2003). Our contributors reexamine some of these historical processes, policies and politics, pose new critical questions, and document entangled trajectories, thus reviving and producing new debates around the importance of land control.

New mechanisms of land control and new actors notwithstanding, practices and technologies of governance and control, subtle or violent, are still employed to acquire, secure, and exclude others from land in intense competitions over control. In many cases, the competition for land control has become no less important to its contenders with the passage of time. This may be so despite the changing contexts, terms of contestation, mechanisms, and stakes of control.

In this introduction we focus on our argument that new frontiers of land control are being actively created, through struggles involving varied actors, contexts, and dynamics. These created frontiers are not sites where ‘development’ and ‘progress’ meet ‘wilderness’ or ‘traditional lands and peoples’. They are sites where authorities, sovereignties, and hegemonies of the recent past have been or are currently being challenged by new enclosures, territorializations, and property regimes. What is new is not only land grabbing or ownership but also new crops with new labor processes and objectives for the growers, new actors and subjects, and new legal and practical instruments for possessing, expropriating, or challenging previous land controls. Inaddition, the collection contains studies that demonstrate new frontiers in the scholarship on land control. Topics that seem to have been timeless, or well understood, are challenged with new frameworks or new theoretical tools for exploring them. For example, land control can be understood as embedded within broader political struggles over identities – religious, ethnic, racialized, or gendered – and change the ways we think about enclosure, territorialization, and property as iterative processes productive of environmental subjects.

A few of the cases refer explicitly to what has been generally dubbed ‘the global land grab’, but most of them do not. The contemporary conditions for large-scale land acquisitions are certainly specific to our time, and their scope is daunting (Borras et al. 2011). Yet, we argue that there is no one grand land grab, but a series of changing contexts, emergent processes and forces, and contestations that are producing new conditions and facilitating shifts in both de jure and de facto land control. Moreover, while the ‘grab’ itself is important, it only marks the beginning of a process of gaining (or grabbing) access (Ribot and Peluso 2003).

‘Land control’ directs our attention to how actors are able to hold onto the land, and to the institutional and political ramifications of access, claims, and exclusions. Furthermore, land control implies a historical dimension as ‘new’ frontiers challenge, transform, or extinguish previous ones. The extent and variety of the transformations involved or implicated in these created frontiers calls for, we argue, more in-depth understanding of the historical trajectories and specific tactics and instruments used by powerful and less powerful actors to enclose, exclude, territorialize, and challenge the moment's ‘common sense’. Indeed, this collection of studies reveals important nuances that should be recognized in making generalizations about global land grabbing. And, although we recognize that these components are deeply connected, we try in the remainder of this introduction to draw apart some of the mechanisms of land control discussed by this collection's contributors.

Creating frontiers of land control

New actors

A quick review of the key topics of our contributors provides an overview of the nuances in new relations of land control and suggests ruptures in processes that seem to be continuances of past relations. The importance of land use when large tracts are acquired to produce industrial crops for export is one such process that often combines with new sorts of actors brokering new practices and global relationships. Hall's article (2011) on ‘new’ boom crops in Southeast Asia is a case in point. Export crops are certainly not new to Southeast Asian fields nor to other sites that were agricultural colonies producing ‘tropical crops’ or crops of dependence and addiction, i.e. coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco and opium (Elson 1984, Fasseur 1992, Mintz 1983, Reid 1988, 1993, Wolf 1982). However, today's boom crops are as likely to be highly industrialized (rubber, pulp) or energy crops (oil palm, jatropha/castor oil). Today's landlords are more likely to be corporate or state actors rather than local elites, making them less known personally to land users, yet highly powerful claimants (Lucas and Warren 2003, McKeon, Watts and Wolford 2004). Producing trees as commodities takes on new meaning in forests that are ‘sold’ for their carbon content and are meant to provide income for growers who protect rather than cut them. As Osborne (2011, this collection) shows, this has serious implications for growers used to being decision-makers, who now see their land tied up for longer times by landlords far distant, sacrifice compensation at moments it is most needed, and often enable entrepreneurial middlemen (carbon traders and NGOs) to benefit from long distance land control. New actors, such as new kinds of globally operating NGOs, are playing (and creating) more roles in global transactions, brokering, and markets, thereby creating new terms of land control.

While some actors seem perennial participants in agrarian transformations, other actors in these dramas are different than those documented during either colonial agrarian adventures or the agrarian/peasant studies research period of the 1960s and1970s. In the historical shadows of these haunting figures, contemporary actors were in the process of establishing themselves – alternatively inching and leaping forward – or merely simmering and percolating during the authoritarian communist, socialist, and capitalist state-led development regimes dominant in the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, the nascent conservation movement produced the contexts for present interactions before it became Big Conservation (Corson 2011, Kelly 2011, and Ybarra 2011, all this collection); the emergent agrarian reformers were re-organizing before they became the Landless Workers' Movement (MST), Zapatistas, the Sundanese Peasants Union (SPP), or Via Campesina in and across post-authoritarian regimes (Bachriadi 2011; Borras 2007, Borras et al. 2008, Borras and Franco 2011, Kay et al. 2011, Rachman 2011; Wright and Wolford 2003). Small NGOs and pioneering human rights activists began with relatively ‘straightforward’ calls for human rights but soon added land control or land reform, privatization and ‘secure’ tenure, or even resource access, to the strategic tool kits they use in advocating for collective and individual social and economic rights in post-socialist and post-state-led development societies (Lund 2011; Woods 2011, this collection; Johanes and Riepen 1995, Lund 2008, Sikor and Lund 2009, Sturgeon 2005, Sturgeon and Sikor 2007, Verdery and Humphrey 2004). Agrarian advocate NGOs or new ‘peasant’ organizations began to emerge where they had been unimaginable before – in political forests, in war-torn countries, and among Islamic environmental subjects (Malhi 2011, Peluso 2011 and Ybarra 2011, all this collection; Edelman 2008, McMichael 2008, Peluso et al. 2008). For most previously underground or nascent movements, the late 1980s and 1990s were formative times, when they created alliances and strategies to oppose the oppressive elements of national land control regimes: to change them, not to topple them (McKeon et al. 2004). The current contexts and content of opposition, acquisition, allocation, and access have since become quite different thanthey were in those earlier decades. Today nation-states and institutions or individuals within nation-states make alliances that cut across national boundaries, defying old ‘state-to-state’ or ‘business-to-business’ combinations.

Several of the land authorities analyzed in the contributions to this collection play a dual role as regulators and rent seekers. Ministries of agriculture and forestry, or the military (e.g. in the cases of Burma, Guatemala, and Laos here), allocate land and resource rights, frequently in intimate collaboration with companies, international organizations, and transnational NGOs – all of whom want a part of the global terrestrial pie (Lund 2011, Woods 2011, Ybarra 2011, all this collection). However, many of these new actors are concurrently beneficiaries of more or less illicit transactions involving land concessions on not-so-empty land, timber trading of not-so-legally acquired logs, fulfillment of carbon sequestration quotas from deals with those who did not have the land rights nor would they bear the opportunity costs (Grajales 2011, Osborne 2011, both this collection; Lohmann 2006). Elites who control legislative, regulatory, and armed branches of the government apparatus can engineer oppressive land control, and they are by no means only part of ‘history’. Their power bases have shifted.

Capital venture funds and other corporate structures that deploy mazes of opaque financial instruments mask the actual interests and actors at work. In this collection, Woods (2011) poses questions about Chinese capital and the work it does in Burma, while the foresters in Peluso (2011) are actually embodied agents of state, corporate, and transnational capital. Many of these new assemblages of actors are seeking hegemony on what Gramsci (1971) might have called ‘the terrain of the global conjuncture’. The issue of land control under created frontier conditions is thus related to many of the dynamics of primitive accumulation, enclosure, and the multiple forms of territorialization that our contributors, and others outside this small group, are writing about.

Primitive accumulation, enclosure, and privatization

Primitive accumulation, enclosure, and privatization are important ways of establishing control of land and resources. Privatization has been the glue for these three concepts, making national parks or conservation areas seem to be public resources, outside the domain of private accumulation. Yet Kelly (2011, this collection) theorizes new frontiers of primitive accumulation, examining emergent commoditizations in and around national parks and other conservation areas. She brings an original view to the theoretical understanding of primitive accumulation, seeing the process as having more temporal dimensions and trajectories than was traditionally understood. In combination with the expansion of geographic areas set aside for wide-ranging animals and peculiar or endemic floristic habitats, she sees new space-time connections rendering different and longer-term accumulation possibilities inparks (see also Li 2008). Kelly's piece, and those by Corson, Ybarra, Malhi, andPeluso, bring together often separately analyzed technologies of ‘enclosure’ and ‘territorialization’, both of which have disciplining effects intended to produce land control.

The question of land controlled specifically as ‘reserves’ or ‘habitat conservation’ is particularly telling. On the one hand, parks and reserves allegedly take land out of commodification and primitive accumulation processes and set it aside for various ‘publics’, including scientists, viewers, and visitors. Much has been made of a global commons claim or global heritage on such unique spots. On the other hand, as Kelly shows, creating the park creates a new frontier of value, for the land in its vicinity as well as for new commodities, which might be species or products or services. Indeed, just as with carbon markets that organize the planting and protection of trees far from the actual sites of pollution, conservation rubrics such as ‘payment for environmental or ecological services’ unequivocally produce these natures and other ‘actors’ – including parts of the landscape – as commodities to enable accumulation at present or in the future (Robertson 2010, McAfee and Shapiro 2008). Though scientists and others planning parks or nature reserves may have originally thought of protection for protection's sake, the almost universal turn among ecologists toward the rendering of parks, ecosystems, and their components as commodities makes park creation a kind of pre-commodification (Kelly 2011, this collection; Brockington 2002, Buscher 2011, Igoe and Brockington 2007). Their forward-looking profiteering possibilities differ from the kinds of accumulation expected through other kinds of land acquisition. Yet from the prior (or contemporary) residents' points of view, expanding conservation land has the effect of removing land from their own and their children's future or reserve sites of production or accumulation, as is shown clearly in Corson and Ybarra's studies. As the idea of ‘payment for ecosystem services’ gains traction, or as it spreads to hitherto ‘uncommodified’ settings, we need to take seriously new ways of understanding primitive accumulation and territorialization (Corson 2011, Kelly 2011, Osborne 2011, all this collection; Glassman 2006, Heynen et al. 2007; McAfee 1999). Moreover, creating private property, political forests, and reserves, and allowing only certain ethnic subjects access, as explicitly shown in the Ybarra and Malhi cases, involves subject-making (by subjects themselves or others), and the policing of bodies as well as boundaries.

Consider the enclosures taking the form of land privatization all over the world today. These are otherwise known as ‘the property revolution’ or ‘the new enclosure movement’ or even ‘the de Sotoan revolution’ in reference to Hernando de Soto's influence on property rights titling programs, particularly those sponsored by the World Bank (de Soto 2000). Recent work on private property and ‘neoliberalization’ has morphed into the global-sized discourse on land grabs (Borras et al. 2011). But what is so new about ‘private property rights’? Or, for that matter, about ‘land grabbing’? Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and English colonizers were heavily engaged in both land grabbing and the creation of private property, titled as haciendas or scratched out according to the Torrens System. The ways officials implemented land controls differed from one colony to another, or differed by crop, by region of a colony, or by legal logic, and often changed over colonial times. Whatis new in the land grabs today are the new mechanisms of land control, their justifications and alliances for ‘taking back’ the land, as well as the political economic context of neoliberalism that dominates this particular stage of the capitalist world system (Borras et al. 2011, Heynen et al. 2007, Van der Ploeg 2010).

The maturation and spread of capitalism, and its own transformations in primitive and other forms of accumulation, including enclosures and the establishment of new forms of private, state, and communal property rights, provide some continuities; however these are not alien to ruptures and difference. By establishing fences – physical or institutional – around certain resources, enclosure and privatization are intended to secure access for the actors in control (Rose 1994). Enclosures take place at different scales, from the smallholder fencing in a plot, to logging and plantation companies establishing barbed wire and guarded compounds, to the monopolization of certain species, practices, or lands by governments. Historically, enclosures meant dispossession of certain users or the exclusion of some bodies and inclusion of others from rights of use and control. While enclosures have not fallen out of fashion, newer and more sophisticated forms have emerged and often mutually constitute or at least interact with spatial enclosures (Harvey 2005, Heynen et al. 2007, Nevins and Peluso 2008). Corson (2011), Hall (2011), Osborne (2011), and Peluso (2011, all this collection) analyze enclosures of not only land but also trees and other species. The forms of production and protection of these species vary and generate nuances in enclosure arguments. Several forms of enclosure might take place simultaneously, while concurrent territorializations intertwine with each other. In an example of how classic topics can be influenced by new approaches in scholarship, Malhi's case in nineteenth and earlytwentieth century Trengganu demonstrates how both enclosures and new territorialities create new subjects, as new property relations and new geobodies (‘Malaya’) force new relations between subjects and state actors (see also Agrawal 2005, Vandergeest 2008, Winichakul 1994).

Territorialization

Territorialization is another claiming and managerial practice long carried out by states and other entities (Brenner et al. 2009, Peluso and Vandergeest 2001, Sassen 2000, Vandergeest and Peluso 1995). Several contributors show that under neoliberal economic policies, the mechanisms by which state territorialization take place involve a variety of legal instruments and institutional alliances and agreements between state, non-state and parastatal institutions (Corson 2011, Lund 2011, Osborne 2011 and Woods 2011, see also Chapin 2004). However, even with reductions in state spending and regulation, state institutions and actors remain involved privately in land control and in land allocations for industrial agriculture, forestry, and conservation (Brockington et al. 2008, Corson 2011, this collection, Igoe and Brockington 2007, Heynen et al. 2007).

If territorialization is a mechanism with many possible means for control of people and resources by controlling territory or land, it is a process that we can understand as part of both governance and the disciplining of practice associated with governmentality (Foucault 2007, Li 1999, Moore 2005). It also differs from the production of space – which is, nevertheless, also a politics-saturated process – in that territorialization explicitly involves claiming (Vandergeest and Peluso 1995). Amultiplicity of institutional and individual actors is increasingly found in the world of conservation, where expansive territorial control has long been a goal through various mechanisms and processes (e.g., Brockington and Igoe 2007, Chapin 2004, Peluso 1993). Corson (2011), Osborne (2011), and Ybarra (2011) show explicitly how territorialization and the goals of conservation can also create economic enclosures in ways that reflect the questions that Kelly (2011) raises in this collection.

Territorialization is and produces a bundle of powers and mechanisms for restricting access (Ribot and Peluso 2003, Peluso 1992). This is no less than power relations written on the land. In other words, territoriality produces and maintains power relations among governed environmental subjects and between subjects and authorities (Agrawal 2005, Lund 2006, Li 2007, Moore 2005). Territorialized powers include the abilities to draw boundaries around the objects and people within those boundaries, the ‘objects’ in this case defined as ‘resources’. Within these territories, resources and people have other controls imposed on them (Peluso and Vandergeest 2001, Sivaramakrishnan 1999) and, as Moore (2005) brilliantly pointed out, territorialized powers are able to inflict ‘terror’ on the populations living, working, or accessing those lands or resources. Territorialization is a claim; not always a state claim, but a collaborative claim. It is in some way a bundle of rights – as one says for other kinds of property – but it produces a ‘collectivity’ in some sense, even though it would not be incorrect to say that landed property held by an individual is also a territory. Because our use of the term territory has a collective aspect, it can be seen as an explicit move to ‘governmentalize’ space (Foucault 2007) – or as we are saying in this collection, ‘to control’ by claiming the power to govern territorially. Inother words, governance or control of territory constitutes a form of land control.

When land becomes titled in tracts, or when carbon trading policies make international commodities out of village woodlots, these new spaces become dominated by claims to them as ‘global’ or ‘national’ market goods: they are territories that are productive of commodities. The new labels constitute new discursive strategies for constructing new sorts of common sense, normalizing commodity or conservation logics, and what McAfee (1999) calls ‘selling nature to save it’. They immediately or eventually take away the rights and decision-making powers of earlier users. Hence, when international development agencies and NGOs hope to influence law and policy ‘from a distance’ it is not a discrete operation. Rather, a complex transformation in social power relations changes the forms of control. It may not happen immediately, but with the increasing creation of new fictitious commodities (Polanyi 1944), opportunities and benefit flows are created unequally for different groups.

Legalization

The institutionalization of private property and the physical fencing off of common or state land turns common property landholders into trespassers by the stroke of apen. Legalization and institutionalization of this new ownership dispossesses commoners or individual claimants without ‘legal titles’, and powerful, legitimized, or draconian enforcement turns ordinary people into ‘poachers and squatters’. Three hundred years after the first enclosures were legalized, the same processes continue in different parts of the world. However, new forms of enclosure are being added to the repertoire. Instead of fencing off space, certain land uses are ‘out of bounds’. Environmental policies address carbon sequestration farms as global goods, but whose trees were they to begin with? New technologies such as genetic engineering offer practically ‘elegant’ forms of exclusion. When seeds are designed not to reproduce, the reproductive capacity of people's property is being ‘fenced off’ by a combination of genetic engineering, market forces and law.

The drive among the powerful, and those aspiring to power, to use the idioms of law and formality is also striking (Foucault 1991, Hall et al. 2011, Roberts 2005, Sikor and Lund 2009). By laundering power as legitimate authority and by taking possession of land as property through government instruments of law and policy, the wealthiest landholders assume they are establishing immutable hegemonic positions of land control. When enclosures and evictions are sanctioned by law and development plans, and when (re-)possession of land is sanctioned by titles, concessions, and other instruments, property relations are expected to be stabilized. Efforts to formalize, legalize, and legitimate may all help to make decisions and power stick. However, the long term ‘stickiness’ depends on more than law. As we know, hegemony is neither static nor unchallenged; it is tentative, temporary, and incomplete (Gramsci 1971).

While paperwork and bureaucracy were part of legalization before, these are almost universal now. Every community forest or carbon forest must have its management plan, every community conservation program or land reform program involves contracts and agreements, and so on. All these legal forms have to be done via bureaucracy and documents, with, but mostly without, ‘local participation’. Having it all on paper does not guarantee that the land looks as it is described on that paper or that control has been achieved as legally desired (Corson 2011, Kelly 2011, Lund 2011, Osborne 2011, all this collection; see also Hall et al.2010, Moore 1978, Ribot and Peluso, 2003, Rose 1994, Sikor and Lund 2009).

Recent years have seen an increasing tendency by governments and international agencies to invoke the ‘rule of law’. Agencies such as the World Bank push a particular take on the rule of law in their reports on ‘Initiatives in Legal and Judicial Reform’ (World Bank 2004). However, as Sundar (2009) argues, defining the rule of law in postcolonial societies involves ‘mapping the terrain of politics: who defines the laws, who implements them, who contests them and why?’ Mattei and Nader (2008) demonstrate that rule of law frequently legalizes and legitimates the dispossession ofthe powerless. In many instances, government agencies and their corporate associates operate with virtual impunity, while weaker actors may see rights whittled away in the name of formalization, standardization, the global common good, or state territorialization.

Violence

In addition to legalizing forms of property and territorialization, political violence and militarization are important forms of land control in newly created frontiers today. The military state in Burma is actively reinventing enclosure, primitive accumulation, and its own territorialities with graduated (Ong 2000) or fragmented sovereignties (Lund 2011, this collection) through what Woods (2011, this collection) calls ‘ceasefire capitalism’. The violence preceding and accompanying ongoing plantation and concession development are evident in Woods's piece, as are the changing roles and practices of military actors and their occasional allies, Chinese business investors. Lund's article (2011, this collection) charters how the unprecedented expropriations and resettlements in Laos also come in the wake of long-term militarized upheavals, during the Indochina wars with France, the US, and other nations; and during civil strife in the wake of Lao independence. Moreover, Malhi demonstrates how putting down an uprising over land and forest control was part of state-making and regimes of property and subject-making, simultaneously producing ‘the Malay peasant’ and ‘the Malay smallholder’. Violence and its threat in colonial-era Malaya enabled early colonial state moves against swidden cultivation and the separation of forests from agriculture (Vandergeest and Peluso 2006a, 2006b).

A recent issue of Journal of Agrarian Change on violence and war seeks to bring agrarian relations back into the analytics of armed conflict (Cramer and Richards 2011). This is important as it grounds war in structural and material interests, and makes it less of a capricious, anarchist, ‘cultural’ phenomenon (see e.g. Le Billon 2001, 2010, Peluso and Vandergeest 2011, Peluso and Watts 2001). We believe it is equally important to bring violence into the analytics of property and land control (Blomley 2003). Violence is alien to few property regimes, and while it may be present only as ominous potentiality, a memory, in small scale, or appear in erratic, irregular forms, it frequently shapes access to and exclusion from land. Agrarian history has led us to expect violence in land reform struggles and over the unnatural division of tropical landscapes into discrete agriculture and forest zones; these are taking new forms with changes in forest cover, agricultural production and practice, and the land control dimensions of forestry, agro-forestry, and agriculture. Forest occupations, discourses of claiming, and struggles over permanent political forests are addressed in these terms by Malhi (2011) and Peluso (2011); they are closely connected, however, to all the other pieces in this collection. These two, however, alsoaddress land use, forest conversion and conservation, and the basic question of ‘what is a forest?’

Violence, the on-going threat of it, and its memory as a residual threat, is, these articles show, a major component in the making of territory, property, and, of course, the state. Violence in parks, resettlement areas, and plantations is connected to productions of new environmental subjects and to state-making itself (Malhi, Peluso, Ybarra, Woods, this collection; Agrawal and Sivaramakrishnan 2001, Brockington 2002, Evans et al. 1985, Kosek 2006, Li 2007, Moore 2005, Peluso and Vandergeest 2011, Peluso and Watts 2001, Sivaramakrishnan 1999). Political violence is used to ‘address’ – and complicate – many different kinds of conflicts over land, including those caused by state actors and institutions and those that come out of ‘restitution’ programs meant to reduce land conflict. In war zones or post-conflict areas, the contentiousness of land control is especially pronounced. Land ownership and primitive accumulation are processes to which conflict and violence – actual and threatened, physical or structural – are integral (Blomley 2003, Glassman 2006, Perelman 2000, 2005, Watts et al. 2010). Benjamin (2004) compares law-making violence and law-preserving violence, seeing one as revolutionary, the other as institutional, one seemingly abrupt whereas the other appears systematic or subtle. This distinction, though difficult to validate empirically, points to the fact that violence is as important in establishing and upholding territorialization or enclosure processes and institutions as it is in challenging them.

The violence of enclosure and primitive accumulation – the making of property– has been long understood and documented. Yet, with territorialization, violence is also often present. It goes without saying that both ‘the rifle and the title’ (Grajales 2011, this collection) are part of state repertoires of governing. Where the brutal violence of war has been re-written on the land, it can be read by tracking access and tenure relations back to social relations during war-time, as is shown by the discussions on Burma, Guatemala, Indonesia, and Laos in this issue (see also Agnew and Corbridge 1995, Barber and Schweithelm 2000, Cramer and Richards 2011, Feldman 1991, de Jong et al. 2007, Le Billon 2001, Moore 2005, Neumann 2004, Peluso and Vandergeest 2001, Watts 2004). If war is regarded as the continuation of state policy by other means, pace Clausewitz, so is violence an integral element of land control; not an exception, not a measure hors catégorie. Even if state powers or allied authorities (or their hired thugs) do not kill their citizens and subjects, they can lock them away. Being locked up in prison is another form of bio-power; a spatialized and territorialized one, demarcated, bounded, and patrolled to keep subjects in the prison rather than outside (Foucault 1991).

Concluding remarks: new subjects and new frontiers of land control

E.P. Thompson once wrote that conflicts over land in the forests, parks, and commons of seventeenth century England were not over land use per se, but rather over ‘power and property right’ (1975). The contributions in the present collection confirm and extend this proposition. Contemporary forms of land control have been made possible by globalizing political economies, patterns of investment, movements of labor, capital, and ideas; but are also driven by the particularities of their situated histories and geographies, the biophysical characteristics of particular environments, and the historical moments where violence may be ending or just beginning (Haraway 1988, Hart 2004, Peluso and Watts 2001).

The confluence of territorialization, property rights, and commoditization of land, resources, and space-making enables spatial and more complex forms of enclosure. Enclosures and territorializations bound spaces and identities and create new kinds of environmental subjects, who produce, accept, or contest new sorts of common sense. When people accept land allocation or carbon forestry or community conservation, they must recognize – at least by implication – the authority of the institution allocating land to them, which shifts the terms of hegemony and sovereignty. Land control can thus change the repertoires of possible action, not to mention the material underpinnings of the aforementioned ‘common sense’ (Gramsci 1971, Lund 2006, Moore 2005).

So, land control still matters. But old and newer forms combine in complex ways;newly formed environmental subjects perform their own translations of what is expected. Spatial enclosure and possession remain important, but efforts to institutionalize control through territorialization and legalization can entrench inequalities and ignore what is really happening on the ground. Moreover, the sophistication of mechanisms and the increased complexity of the actors and society-environment relations have not made land appropriation, exclusion, and control any less violent.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nancy Lee Peluso

The editing and introduction of this collection is the result of joint and equal editor- and authorship; the order was decided by tossing the caber on the Isle of Bute. We wish to thank Denise Leto for her editorial assistance and all the anonymous referees for their contributions.