The peasants in turmoil: Khmer Rouge, state formation and the control of land in northwest Cambodia

Abstract

Over the past 15 years, northwest Cambodia has seen dramatic agrarian expansion away from the central rice plain into the peripheral uplands fuelled by peasant in-migration. Against this background, we examine the nature of relations between the peasantry and the state. We first show the historical continuities of land control processes and how the use of violence in a post-conflict neoliberal context has legitimised ex-Khmer Rouge in controlling land distribution. Three case studies show the heterogeneity of local level sovereignties, which engage the peasants in different relations with authority. We examine how these processes result in the construction of different rural territories along the agricultural frontier and argue that, in this region of Cambodia, the struggles between Khmer Rouge and neoliberal modes of land control are central to state formation processes.

Keywords:

• peasants
• agrarian change
• Khmer Rouge
• land control
• Cambodia

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CORRIGENDUM

We are grateful to Prof. P. Lebailly (Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech, Université de Liège), Prof. J.-P. Peemans (Université Catholique de Louvain) and to Prof. E. Wolff (Anageo, Université de Bruxelles) for their unwavering support. During our field work, we received great assistance from the Battambang Spatial Planning Working Group (supported by GIZ) and in particular from Tri Sothi. We also want to express our gratitude to Prof. John Pilgrim, Laura Schoenberger, Jérémie Dulioust and Ron Jones who provided us with insightful comments on the first draft. An earlier version was presented in May 2013 at the “Property and Citizenship in Developing Societies” conference in Copenhagen where we received constructive remarks from organizers and participants. Finally, the Journal's three anonymous referees made excellent comments, which greatly helped strengthen the paper. All remaining mistakes are ours. This article was originally published with errors.

Notes

1 A man named Keo, a Sino-Khmer assigned by the Thai to the position of Samraong district chief (in the northwest), was an important trade figure between Cambodia, Thailand and China in the nineteenth century. His grandchild, Kao Tak, a trader between Cambodia and Thailand and also an ally of the Thai, would become a close collaborator of Son Ngoc Thanh, working across the entire northwest (Kiernan 2004).

Additional information

Jean-Christophe Diepart has worked as a scientific collaborator with the Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech, Université de Liège (Belgium) for the past five years. His research examines agrarian dynamics in Cambodia and focuses on the transformations of household production systems, the political economy of agricultural colonisation in the Northwest Cambodia and the resilience of peasant communities to environmental changes. In 2014, he works as research associate at UMR Prodig/Comparative Agriculture Unit, AgroParisTech (France).

David Dupuis received his PhD in 2014 at the Department of Geography, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. His doctoral dissertation examined the role of peasantries in the agrarian expansion in the Northwest Cambodia and in particular the intricacies between land control and state formation processes. Email: [email protected]