Events

Across Asia, struggles over land are intensifying. Land grabs for capitalist agriculture continue to erode customary land ownership and agro-food systems, while natural habitats are being rapidly destroyed by the combined pressures of large-scale plantations and smallholder encroachment. In response, state and corporate actors have introduced a range of solutions to address these problems—including private land titling programs, new types of protected areas, sustainable agriculture schemes, and carbon forestry projects.

Yet these efforts have largely failed to promote a more just and sustainable future for people living on the land. As a result, rural and Indigenous communities continue to find themselves caught between the dual enclosures of capitalist agriculture and conservation. These overlapping regimes have dispossessed people of land, deepened vulnerability, and undermined food sovereignty.

Although questions about land in Asia have garnered significant scholarly attention over the years, relatively little research has analyzed these processes in relation to settler colonialism. This oversight is attributable, in part, to the political and theoretical difficulties of applying a settler colonial lens to the Asian context, where the notion of Indigeneity raises complex and contested questions about definitions of colonialism and the colonizers-colonized dyad. However, the lack of attention to ongoing settler-colonial structures of capitalist land use in Asia risks limiting understandings of the conjuncture of violence, domination, and racialization that shape contemporary land politics in the region today.

Hence, this workshop rethinks the future of land in Asia by foregrounding settler colonialism as a key analytic for understanding these dynamics. It views settler colonialism as a persistent political-economic structure that shapes how land, labor, and natural resources are appropriated in support of capitalist extraction and settler-state dominance. Settler colonialism encompasses a diverse set of forces that underpin various forms of land dispossession and environmental degradation in Asia, which can include internal and historical forces of appropriation irreducible to European colonialism.

This workshop brings together cutting-edge research on contemporary land struggles in Asia, especially where agriculture, food sovereignty, and environmental conservation intersect. It recenters Asia within settler colonial studies, highlighting the region’s colonial histories and capitalist transformations as central rather than peripheral to global patterns. Moreover, by featuring regionally grounded scholar-activist research, it grounds theory in lived struggles and opens space for decolonial futures. The workshop will engage the following questions and more:

• How have colonial and capitalist land regimes evolved, and what futures do they envision?
• In what ways do state conservation and market-based environmentalism reproduce settler-colonial and capitalist logics?
• How are Indigenous practices and movements advancing food sovereignty, land justice, and decolonial futures?
• How does the articulation of race, gender, and violence shape access to land and agro-food systems?
• What forms of environmental and climate reparations support Indigenous sovereignty and land repatriation?

By bringing together interdisciplinary scholars to grapple with these questions, the workshop will open new conceptual and political horizons for imagining more just and decolonial futures of land.

SUBMISSION OF PROPOSALS

The Call for Proposals is now closed.

Authors of selected proposals will be notified by early November 2025. The Asia Research Institute will offer full or partial airfare funding to overseas participants, as well as three nights of accommodation in Singapore. Workshop presenters will be required to submit short draft papers (between 3,000-5,000 words) by 28 February 2026. 

WORKSHOP CONVENORS

Dr Nathan W. GREEN | Department of Geography, National University of Singapore
Dr Ting Hui LAU | Department of Sociology & Anthropology, National University of Singapore
Assoc Prof Jamie S. DAVIDSON | Asia Research Institute & Department of Political Science, National University of Singapore