Fragmented sovereignty: land reform and dispossession in Laos

Abstract

Land reform, land politics and resettlement in Laos have changed people's land access and livelihoods. But these reforms have also transformed political subjectivity and landed property into matters for government to a degree hitherto unknown in Laos. The control over people, land and space has consolidated sovereignty in ways that make government an ineluctable part of people's relation to land. This transforms agrarian relations. Three cases demonstrate how rural small holders' access to land depends on the ways in which property and political subjects have been produced. As a consequence, agovernment institution's control over land does not represent or reflect pre-existing sovereignty. It producesit.

Keywords:

• Laos
• land reform
• property
• political subjects
• sovereignty

Notes

¹ Institution is a spacious semantic container. Some writers insist on a crucial distinction between institutions and organizations as a distinction between patterns of rules and relations, and (bodies of) players (see e.g. North 1990). However laudable such precision may seem, I find it a linguistic straightjacket, and worse, it suggests that a particular phenomenon – institution – has only, or primarily, a single meaning. This, in turn, may well obscure what is at stake in institutional competition and rivalry. Politico-legal institutions are, in this paper, configurations of actors acting to define and enforce collectively binding decisions and rules. An institution is represented by leaders who act and speak in its name. But such an institution is also an arena where competing social actors struggle to influence the way decisions are made. As arenas, the politico-legal institutions are also manifestations of structures; of power relations which, in the course of (some) time, establish a structure of entitlement and exclusion. Using the word institution like this obviously requires that it is clear what particular aspect of the institution (actor, arena or structure) is in focus in a particular analytical context.

²The three case studies are based on the work of others. Baird, Petit and Evrard all conducted extensive fieldwork on issues relating to policies of resource access, political control, resettlement and land reform in Laos. Their work offers rich analyses. Mine is based on a reading and gleaning of their work in order to understand the connections between property, political subjectivity and sovereignty, questions the three authors do not address in this way. Itis worth noting the general paucity of historical data on land use and local politics in Laos (cf. Rigg 2009).

³Scholarship across disciplines has questioned the classical notion of formal sovereignty very effectively from philosophy (Foucault 2003), political science and law (Hibou 2004, Werner and de Wilde 2001), and sociology (Sassen 2000, 2006), over history (Benton 2002, 2010), geography (Agnew 2005, Brenner 1999), anthropology (Appadurai 2003, Hansen and Stepputat 2006, Ong 2000) and development studies (Lund 2006).

⁴For a discussion of Griffith's idea of legal pluralism, see Merry (1988), Moore (2001), and Tamanaha (2008).

⁵Different schools of thought differ widely in their conceptualization of the state, however, as Grzymala-Busse and Luong (2002, 531–32) argue, while they see the state as either an ‘instrument of the bourgeoisie, a mediator between broad interest groups, a set of centralized, cohesive, and autonomous decision makers, or a revenue-maximizing ruler, they all share the assumption that there exists an identifiable set of actors and institutions that exert legitimate authority over a given territory’ [my italics].

⁶Honneth's work on the grammar of recognition focuses on so-called post-traditional societies. He operates with three dimensions of inter-subjective recognition: as an ‘intimate other’, a ‘legal subject’, and as an individual with ‘universal rights’ (Honneth 1995, 92–139). For our purpose, ‘simple legal recognition’ is the central feature in the production of state quality in recognizing institutions.

⁷While the bureaucracy and the party were technically distinct, in practice this distinction was blurred and the bureaucracy often functioned as a ‘highly politicized arm of the Party’ (Stuart-Fox 2004, 6).

⁸See e.g. Baird (2008, 2009), Baird and Shoemaker (2005, 2007, 2008), Baird et al. (2009), Barney (2009), Chamberlain et al. (1995, 1996), Chamberlain (2007), Ducourtieux (2004), Ducourtieux et al. (2004, 2005), Eggertz (1996), Evans (1995), Evrard (2004, 2006), Evrard and Goudineau (2004), Fujita (2004), Fujita and Phanvilay (2008), Fujita and Phengsopha (2008), Goudineau (1997), High (2008, 2009), Kirk (1996), Lestrelin (2010), Lestrelin and Giordano (2007), Mahaphonh et al. (2007), Petit (2006, 2008a, 2008b), Rigg (2005, 2006), Thomas (2004), Vandergeest (2003).

⁹Interview, August 2009, Anonymous.

¹⁰Personal communication with Peter Messerli, Centre for Development and Environment, University of Bern.

¹¹Around 90% of all land was classified as forest through this process between 1995 and 2004, and was thus largely out of bounds for agriculture. Studies agree that the entire process seriously reduced the agricultural area per capita thus forcing people to abandon fallow-based swidden farming (Evrard 2004, 24, Lestrelin 2010, 432).

¹²Decree no. 99 of December 12^th1992, here from Evrard (2006, 343). The decree also specified that if, for reasons of patriotic combat for national liberation, landowners had beenexiled for more than 10 years, exceptions could be made, and their claims would not be extinct.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christian Lund

I am particularly grateful to Ian Baird, Pierre Petit and Olivier Evrard for commenting on this piece. Their research provides important primary material to its argument. I am also indebted to David Lorenzo, Derek Hall, Henk Schulte Nordholt, Holly High, James Scott, Janet Sturgeon, Jesse Ribot, Michael Eilenberg, Mike Dwyer, Naseem Badiey, Nancy Peluso, Olivier Ducourtieux, Vatthana Pholsena, Veronica Gomez-Temesio, Woods, Yayoi Fujita, and You-tien Hsing for inspiration and comments on the work along the way. Finally, the Journal's two anonymous referees provided invaluable help and guidance. All shortcomings and mistakes are mine alone.