Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Michelle Miller, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

PROGRAMME

ABSTRACT

This roundtable explores the governance, politics, and social lives of land via a discussion of Miles Kenney-Lazar’s book Socializing Land: Plantations, Dispossession, and Resistance in Laos (University of Hawai’i Press). The book examines how Chinese and Vietnamese pulpwood and rubber plantations during the global land rush intersected with the lands of the Indigenous Brou people in southern Laos. While the Lao state has offered rural land to investors, framing it as “empty”, “available”, and “degraded”, such land is full of social ties that create friction when plantation projects seek to secure access to it. The book conceptualizes the socialization of land, or the web of social relationships that land is enmeshed within, which shape its control and use. Such social relations can be transformed in different ways, toward the interests of plantation capital but also the peasantry. The “state land” that the government seeks to concede is a far more contested category than it seems at first glance. Plantation companies, district officials, and rural landholders contend to lay durable claims to landscapes of rice fields, reserved fallows, and forestland. Struggles over how to socialize land have profound implications for the uneven geographies of plantation development and changes in rural livelihoods and environments. The speakers will reflect on how these ideas might apply to different contexts and trajectories of land across Southeast Asia.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Miles Kenney-Lazar is Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (SGEAS) at The University of Melbourne. His scholarship investigates the political ecologies of land, plantations, forestry, and agrarian change in Southeast Asia, especially in Laos and Myanmar. His latest research conceptualizes projects of “sustainability capitalism” in Southeast Asia, especially the pursuit of sustainable natural rubber and forest carbon credits. His work has been published widely in Geography, Agrarian Studies, and Southeast Asian Studies journals. His monography, Socializing Land: Plantations, Dispossession, and Resistance in Laos was published by the University of Hawai’i Press in 2025.

Tania Murray Li is Yusof Ishak Professor of Social Sciences in the Department of Malay Studies, National University of Singapore (NUS), and Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her publications include Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier (Duke University Press, 2014), Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia (with Derek Hall and Philip Hirsch, NUS Press, 2011), The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Duke University Press, 2007) and many articles on land, labour, class, capitalism, development, resources and indigeneity with a particular focus on Indonesia. Her latest book Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation of Indonesia’s Oil Palm Zone (Duke University Press, 2021) is co-authored with Pujo Semedi (Gadjah Mada University). For more information, please visit: https://www.taniali.org/.

Vatthana Pholsena is Head of the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore (NUS). She served for over a decade as a tenured Research Fellow in the National Centre for Scientific Research, based at the Institute of East Asian Studies in Lyon and later at the Southeast Asia Centre in Paris. Her research fields include memory studies, war and revolution in mainland Southeast Asia with a particular focus on Laos, Cold War history, citizenship studies, and borderland studies. She is the author of Post-War Laos: The Politics of Culture, History, and Identity (ISEAS and Cornell University Press, 2006). She has published in journals including Critical Asian Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Memory Studies, and War & Society. She has also co-edited two books: Interactions with a Violent Past: Reading Post-Conflict Landscapes in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, (with Oliver Tappe, NUS Press, 2013) and Changing Lives in Laos (with Vanina Bouté, NUS Press, 2017). Her current research investigates contemporary experiences and the afterlives of the Cold War in the Lao-Thai borderlands.