NOTES
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
1 This is a pseudonym. Bolisat means “private company” in Lao.
2 Turnbull, Maps Are Territories, 19–27.
3 Latour, Science in Action, 2–7.
4 See, among many others, Arezki, Deininger, and Selod, “What Drives the Global Land Rush?”; Borras et al., “Land Grabbing in Latin America”; Li, “What Is Land?”
5 Alden Wily, “Looking Back to See Forward”; Klinger and Muldavin, “New Geographies of Development”; Nyíri, “Extraterritoriality”; White et al., “The New Enclosures.”
6 See, among others, De Koninck, “On the Geopolitics of Land Colonization”; Larsson, “Intertextual Relations”; Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics; Sassen, “Land Grabs Today”; Scurrah and Hirsch, “Land and Capital across Borders.”
7 Fairbairn, Fields of Gold.
8 Ban and Blyth, “The BRICs and the Washington Consensus”; Lee, “The Spectre of Global China”; Muldavin, “From Rural Transformation to Global Integration”; Oliveira, “Boosters, Brokers, Bureaucrats and Businessmen.”
9 Borras et al., “The Rise of Flex Crops”; Holt-Giménez, Patel, and Shattuck, Food Rebellions!; Fairbairn, Fields of Gold.
10 GRAIN, “Seized!”
11 Lacey, “Across Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger”; Holt-Giménez, Patel, and Shattuck, Food Rebellions!
12 Diouf, “The Food Crisis and the Wrong Solutions,” 8.
13 GRAIN, “Seized!,” annex.
14 Diouf, “TheFood Crisis and the Wrong Solutions,” 8.
15 Reguly, “The Farms Race”; Rice, “Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism?”; Borger, “Rich Countries Launch Great Land Grab.”
16 See, e.g., MacKinnon, “Resentment Rises.”
17 Economist, “Outsourcing’s Third Wave.”
18 Branford, “Food Crisis Leading to an Unsustainable Land Grab.”
19 MacKinnon, “Resentment Rises.”
20 Martin Stuart-Fox, quoted in MacKinnon, “Resentment Rises.”
21 Crispin, “Limits of Chinese Expansionism.”
22 Paul Cohen, for example, quotes a number of foreign development professionals who describe the rubber boom in northern Laos in terms of its “lack of regulation,” “ ‘wild west’ situation,” the lack of nearly “any kind of guideline in either agricultural, environmental, or legal respects,” and “land rights [that] are not secure, environmental assessment [that] is non-existent, technical extension [that] is weak, credit [that] is limited, regulation [that] is incomplete, and corruption [that] is rampant” (Cohen, “Post-Opium Scenario,” 427). Also see World Bank, “Rising Global Interest in Farmland.” I qualify the reference here to “frontier-type” development to exclude the excellent explanatory work (e.g., Barney, “Laos and the Making of a ‘Relational’ Resource Frontier”; Laungaramsri, “Frontier Capitalism”; Padwe, Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories; Patel and Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things; Tsing, Friction) using the concept of the frontier. Also see chapter 4.
23 Alden Wily, “Looking Back to See Forward,” 763; also see Peluso and Vandergeest, “Genealogies of the Political Forest.”
24 Alden Wily, “Looking Back,” 764–66; Cotula et al., “Land Grab or Development Opportunity?”; De Schutter, “How Not to Think of Land-Grabbing.”
25 Ong, “Graduated Sovereignty”; Whitington, Anthropogenic Rivers; also see below.
26 See, e.g., Borras, Fig, and Suárez, “Politics of Agrofuels”; Lavers, “ ‘Land Grab’ as Development Strategy?”; Lu and Schönweger, “Great Expectations”; McAlister, “Rubber, Rights and Resistance”; Li, “After the Land Grab.”
27 Edelman, “Messy Hectares,” 485.
28 Cotula et al., “Land Grab or Development Opportunity?”; Baines, “Fuel, Feed and the Corporate Restructuring”; Borras et al., “Rise of Flex Crops”; Fairbairn, Fields of Gold; Nyíri, “Extraterritoriality”; Wolford et al., “Governing Global Land Deals.”
29 Zoomers, “Globalisation and the Foreignisation of Space.”
30 Alden Wily, “Looking Back to See Forward.”
31 Nyíri, “Enclaves of Improvement” and “Extraterritoriality”; Ong, “Graduated Sovereignty.”
32 See, e.g., the special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies introduced by White et al., “The New Enclosures.”
33 Sassen, “A Savage Sorting of Winners and Losers,” 26; also see Harvey, The New Imperialism; Marx, Capital; Sassen, “Land Grabs Today.”
34 Sassen, “Savage Sorting,” 26.
35 Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish, 89–90.
36 Rostow, “Stages of Economic Growth.”
37 Li, “Centering Labor in the Land Grab Debate,” 281; also see Davis, Planet of Slums; Li, “To Make Live or Let Die?”; Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish.
38 Diouf, “Food Crisis and the Wrong Solutions,” 8.
39 For Laos, see Baird, “Land, Rubber and People” and “Turning Land into Capital”; Barney, “Ecological Knowledge and the Making of Plantation Concession Territories”; Kenney-Lazar, “Plantation Rubber, Land Grabbing and Social-Property Transformation”; Laungaramsri, “Frontier Capitalism”; Vongkhamhor et al., “Key Issues in Smallholder Rubber”; globally, see Alden Wily, “Looking Back to See Forward”; Anseeuw et al., “Creating a Public Tool”; White et al., “The New Enclosures.”
40 See, e.g., Burnod, Gingembre, and Andrianirina Ratsialonana, “Competition over Authority and Access” on Madagascar, and Lee, “The Spectre of Global China” on Zambia.
41 See, e.g., Guerrero and Manji, China’s New Role in Africa; World Bank, “Rising Global Interest in Farmland.”
42 Izikowitz, Over the Misty Mountains; Scott, Art of Not Being Governed.
43 De Koninck, “The Peasantry as the Territorial Spearhead of the State”; Peluso and Vandergeest, “Genealogies of the Political Forest” and “Political Ecologies of War and Forests.” This applies to the uplands of island Southeast Asia as well (see, e.g., Li, “Marginality, Power and Production”; Peluso, Rich Forests, Poor People; Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen). On landscape as a concept, see Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape; Mitchell, Landscape and Power.
44 Scott, Art of Not Being Governed, 4; also see Jonsson, “States Lie, and Stories Are Tools”; Li, “Marginality, Power and Production”; McCoy, Politics of Heroin.
45 This usage follows scholarship on critical geopolitics (e.g., Agnew, Geopolitics; Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics; Sneddon and Fox, “Rethinking Transboundary Waters”), as well as on the Southeast Asian uplands (e.g., De Koninck, “On the Geopolitics of Land Colonization”; Hodgdon, “Frontier Country”; Li, Will to Improve; Mahanty et al., “Unravelling Property Relations”; Milne, “Under the Leopard’s Skin”; Peluso, “Whose Woods Are These?”; Peluso and Vandergeest, “Genealogies of the Political Forest” and “Political Ecologies of War and Forests”; Vandergeest, “Racialization and Citizenship in Thai Forest Politics”; Vandergeest and Peluso, “Territorialization and State Power in Thailand”).
46 On geographers and governable space, see, e.g., Braun, “Producing Vertical Territory”; Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics; Watts, “Resource Curse?”
47 Winichakul, Siam Mapped, 49 and 81–110; also see Winichakul, “The Others Within.”
48 Alden Wily, “Looking Back to See Forward”; “Lavers, “ ‘Land Grab’ as Development Strategy?”; Wolford et al., “Governing Global Land Deals”; also see Klinger and Muldavin, “New Geographies of Development”; Oliveira, McKay, and Liu, “China’s Belt and Road Initiative.”
49 Sen and Grown, Development, Crises and Alternative Visions.
50 Berry, “Property, Authority and Citizenship”; Lund, Nine-Tenths of the Law and “Property and Citizenship”; Moore, “Crucible of Cultural Politics” and Suffering for Territory.
51 Mbembe, On the Postcolony.
52 See, e.g., Diepart and Sem, “Fragmented Territories”; Dwyer, “Micro-Geopolitics”; Li, “After the Land Grab”; Posluschny-Treuner, “Understanding Foreign Large-Scale Agricultural Investments”; Woods, “Ceasefire Capitalism.” For a differently scaled but complementary approach, see Hirsch et al., Turning Land into Capital.
53 See, e.g., Baird, “Resistance and Contingent Contestations”; Kenney-Lazar, Suhardiman, and Dwyer, “State Spaces of Resistance”; Sikor, “Tree Plantations”; Walker, “From Covert to Overt.”
54 I have found especially helpful the work of Sara Berry (“Property, Authority and Citizenship”), Hart (Disabling Globalization), Lund (“Property and Citizenship”), Massey (Space, Place and Gender), Mbembe (On the Postcolony), Moore (Suffering for Territory), Ong (“Graduated Sovereignty”), and Stoler (Imperial Debris).
55 Perelman, “Primitive Accumulation from Feudalism to Neoliberalism,” 45–49.
56 Among others, De Angelis, “Separating the Doing and the Deed”; Harvey, The New Imperialism; Robinson, Black Marxism.
57 Blaikie and Brookfield, Land Degradation and Society; De Soto, The Mystery of Capital; Sen and Grown, Development, Crises and Alternative Visions.
58 Marx, Capital, 873.
59 See, e.g., Fairhead and Leach, “False Forest History”; Neumann, Imposing Wilderness.
60 Perelman, “Primitive Accumulation,” 46. Other authors such as De Janvry (The Agrarian Question and Reformism) and Hart (Disabling Globalization) have discussed the same phenomenon.
61 Ong, “Graduated Sovereignty”; Robinson, Black Marxism; Scott, “Colonial Governmentality”; Stoler, Imperial Debris.
62 Edelman, “Messy Hectares”; Oya, “Methodological Reflections”; Scoones et al., “The Politics of Evidence.”
63 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population; Hannah, Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory.
64 See, e.g., the case of Peter Chan, discussed at length in Dwyer, “Building the Politics Machine.”
65 The mini-issue introduced by Scoones et al. (“The Politics of Evidence”) brought many of these debates together.
66 Edelman, “Messy Hectares”; Scoones et al., “The Politics of Evidence.”
67 I made a similar point about the politics of land-titling quantification in Cambodia in Dwyer, “The Formalization Fix.”
68 Scoones et al., “The Politics of Evidence,” 480–81.
69 Klinger and Muldavin, “New Geographies of Development”; Li, “After the Land Grab”; Oliveira, McKay, and Liu, “Beyond Land Grabs,” 324–28; Oliveira et al., “China’s Belt and Road Initiative.”
70 Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish; Li, “To Make Live and Let Die.”
71 Cotula et al., “Land Grab or Development Opportunity?”; Nyíri, “Extraterritoriality.”
72 Lee, “The Spectre of Global China”; Liu, Dunford, and Gao, “Discursive Construction of the Belt and Road Initiative.”
73 Lee, “The Spectre of Global China”, 36.
74 On this evolving diversity, see (among others) Borras et al., “Rise of Flex Crops” and the special issue of Globalizations introduced by Oliveira, McKay, and Liu, “Beyond Land Grabs.”
75 See, among others, Baird and Quastel, “Rescaling and Reordering Nature-Society Relations”; Goldman, Imperial Nature; Shoemaker and Robichaud, Dead in the Water; Whitington, Anthropogenic Rivers.
76 Cowen and Shenton, Doctrines of Development; Escobar, Encountering Development; Sachs, The Development Dictionary.
77 Kautsky, The Agrarian Question; also see Mann, Agrarian Capitalism; Akram-Lodhi and Kay, Peasants and Globalization.
78 Among published sources, McCoy, Politics of Heroin; Warner, Shooting at the Moon; and Gunn, “Resistance Coalitions” proved especially indispensable for navigating the northwest.
80 For Laos and its immediate surroundings, see Baird, The Rise of the Brao; Diana, “Roses and Rifles”; High, Fields of Desire and Projectland; Padwe, Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories; Pholsena, Post-War Laos; Singh, Natural Potency and Political Power; and Turner, Red Stamps and Gold Stars.
81 For a comparable approach, see Whitington, Anthropogenic Rivers.
1. WHERE THE RUBBER MEETS THE ROAD
Epigraph: Chinese rubber company, project proposal document for Luang Namtha Province, 2005, pp. 3–4 (author’s data).
1 Author interviews, July 2018; also see Shi, “Rubber Boom in Luang Namtha” and Thongmanivong et al., “Concession or Cooperation?”
2 Shi, “Rubber Boom” and “Rubber Boom in Luang Namtha: Seven Years Later”; Dwyer, “Trying to Follow the Money”; Su, “Nontraditional Security”; Hett et al., Land Leases and Concessions in the Lao PDR.
3 Wolford et al., “Governing Global Land Deals,” 190–91; see, e.g., World Bank, “Rising Global Interest.”
4 Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber.
5 Xu, “The Political, Social, and Ecological Transformation of a Landscape,” 254, 256.
6 Chanthavong et al., “Rubber Institutions in Ban Hat Nyao”; Sturgeon et al., “Enclosing Ethnic Minorities,” 65.
7 Shi, “Rubber Boom,” 17.
8 Scott, Seeing Like a State and Art of Not Being Governed.
9 Bryant, The Political Ecology of Forestry in Burma; Izikowitz, Over the Misty Mountains; Lu, “Tapping into Rubber”; Manivong and Cramb, “Economics of Smallholder Rubber”; Peluso, Rich Forests, Poor People; Scott, Art of Not Being Governed; Sturgeon, “Governing Minorities and Development”; Stuart-Fox, “The French in Laos”; Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen; Vandergeest, “Land to Some Tillers.”
10 McCoy, Politics of Heroin; Scott, Art of Not Being Governed; Sturgeon et al., “Enclosing Ethnic Minorities.”
11 Baird and Shoemaker, “Unsettling Experiences”; Chamberlain, “Participatory Poverty Assessment”; Rigg, Living with Transition; Vandergeest, “Land to Some Tillers”; also see chapter 5.
12 Manivong and Cramb, “Economics of Smallholder Rubber”; Chanthavong et al., “Rubber Institutions in Ban Hat Nyao”; Sturgeon, “Governing Ethnic Minorities.”
13 Alton, Blum, and Sannanikone, “Para Rubber in Northern Laos.”
14 Chanthavong et al., “Rubber Institutions in Ban Hat Nyao.”
15 Lu, “Tapping into Rubber.”
16 Sturgeon et al., “Enclosing Ethnic Minorities,” 63.
17 Nathan Associates, “Preparing the Northern Economic Corridor,” ch. 5, p. 36 (pagination repeats by chapter).
18 This $400 figure comes from an interview with a provincial official (June 2007); also see details below in table 1.1.
19 “Documents on Sino-Lao Cooperation Signed,” People’s Daily; Shi, “Rubber Boom,” 25.
20 Chinese rubber company, project proposal document for Luang Namtha province, 2005, pp. 3–4 (author’s data).
21 Ohmae, The End of the Nation State; Ong, “Graduated Sovereignty”; Walker, “Regional Trade in Northwestern Laos.”
22 ADB, “Technical Assistance for the Chiang Rai-Kunming Road Improvement,” 1, 2.
23 Gupta and Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture’ ”; Harvey and Knox, Roads.
24 Garnier, Travels in Cambodia and Part of Laos, 269. This section draws on ideas developed at greater length in Dwyer, “Upland Geopolitics: Finding Zomia in Northern Laos c. 1875.”
25 Garnier, Travels, 293, 294; cf. Scott, Art of Not Being Governed.
26 Walker, Legend of the Golden Boat.
27 Garnier, Travels, 294.
28 Ivarsson, Creating Laos.
29 Garnier, Travels, 295.
30 Brocheux and Hémery, Indochina; Evans, A Short History of Laos; McCarthy, Surveying and Exploring in Siam; Winichakul, Siam Mapped.
31 Stuart-Fox, “The French in Laos.”
32 Ivarsson, Creating Laos.
33 Gunn, Rebellion in Laos; Ivarsson, Creating Laos; Stuart-Fox, “The French in Laos.”
34 Miller, China’s Asian Dream.
35 Hirsch, “Globalisation, Regionalisation and Local Voices.” On the NEC in the BRI, see Dwyer, “ ‘They Will Not Automatically Benefit,’ ” 103.
36 Dheeraprasart, After the Logging Ban; Hirsch, “Globalisation, Regionalisation and Local Voices”; Innes-Brown and Valencia, “Thailand’s Resource Diplomacy.”
37 Jerndal and Rigg, “From Buffer State to Crossroads State.”
38 Walker, Legend of the Golden Boat and “Regional Trade.”
39 Dwyer, “ ‘They Will Not Automatically Benefit’ ”; Walker, “Regional Trade in Northwestern Laos”; for details, see ADB, “Technical Assistance”; SEI and ADB, “Strategic Environmental Framework for the Greater Mekong Subregion,” 36.
40 ADB, “Technical Assistance,” 2.
41 ADB, “Proposed Grant Assistance,” 8–9.
42 Project document, cooperative rubber development project, Luang Namtha, August 2000 (author’s data); Shi, “Rubber Boom,” 25.
43 Project document, cooperative rubber development project, Luang Namtha, January 2001 (author’s data).
44 The most famous statement of these is the “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence” outlined in the Sino-Indian Agreement of 1954.
45 See, among others, Barney and Souksakoun, “Credit Crunch”; IMF, “Lao People’s Democratic Republic”; Stuart-Fox, “Laos”; Su, “Rescaling the Chinese State.”
46 Alton, Blum, and Sannanikone, “Para Rubber in Northern Laos,” 97; also see Shi, “Rubber Boom,” 25.
47 See Lu, “Tapping into Rubber”; Lu and Schönweger, “Great Expectations”; and Shi, “Rubber Boom” on Chinese rubber companies in northern Laos; this matches the wider push for concessions across Laos documented in, among others, Baird, “Land, Rubber and People” and “Turning Land into Capital, Turning People into Labor”; Barney, “Power, Progress and Impoverishment” and “Laos and the Making of a ‘Relational’ Resource Frontier”; Kenney-Lazar, “Plantation Rubber” and “Governing Dispossession”; Laungaramsri, “Frontier Capitalism”; and Suhardiman et al., “Revealing the Hidden Effects of Land Grabbing.”
48 Cover letter, February 2005, Lao Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (author’s data).
49 Draft Plan for Cooperation in Rubber Planting between Lao PDR and the PR China, 2005–2007, pp. 1–2 (author’s data).
50 The Draft Plan specifies 667 and 2,667 hectares per year of company and smallholder plantation, respectively, in each of the three provinces (pp. 6–7).
51 Project proposal document for Luang Namtha province, May 2005, pp. 3–4 (author’s data).
52 Project proposal document for Luang Namtha province, May 2005, p. 4 (author’s data).
53 Shi, “Summary and Analysis.”
54 Manivong and Cramb, “Economics of Smallholder Rubber.”
55 See, e.g., Brechin, Imperial San Francisco; Harvey and Knox, Roads; Tsing, Friction.
56 Harvey, “The Spatial Fix”; Glassman, “Primitive Accumulation” and Bounding the Mekong.
57 Clark, Fox, and Treakle, Demanding Accountability.
58 Himberg, “Comparative Review”; for more detail, see Dwyer, “ ‘They Will Not Automatically Benefit.’ ”
59 World Bank, “Operation Manual on OP 4.12.”
60 Nathan Associates, “Preparing the Northern Economic Corridor,” ch. 2, p. 6 (emphasis added).
61 ADB, “Report and Recommendation,” 32.
62 Chamberlain, “Participatory Poverty Assessment.”
63 Nathan Associates, “Preparing the Northern Economic Corridor,” ch. 6, pp. 7–8.
64 Nathan Associates, “Preparing the Northern Economic Corridor,” ch. 5, p. 36.
65 ADB, “Social Action Plan,” 22.
66 In addition to the documents cited, this section is based on conversations in late 2006 and early 2007 with development practitioners working on both of the schemes described below.
67 Lyttleton, “Build It and They Will Come,” 19.
68 ADB, “Report and Recommendation,” 32; ADB, “Social Action Plan,” 8.
69 Nathan Associates, “Preparing the Northern Economic Corridor,” ch. 6, p. 8.
70 The lack of security offered by the tax documents was also reflected by the fact that many of them covered parcels within twenty-five meters of the road’s centerline, which is the extent of the state’s right-of-way along national roads. These parcels, while eligible for tax collection, would thus be legally prohibited from being converted to titles at any point in the future (see, e.g., Dwyer, “ ‘They Will Not Automatically Benefit,’ ” fig. 3).
71 Fieldwork notes, November 2006.
72 The full listing is given in Nathan Associates, “Preparing the Northern Economic Corridor,” ch. 6, pp. 41–44.
73 Nathan Associates, “Preparing the Northern Economic Corridor,” ch. 5, p. 25.
74 Nathan Associates, “Preparing the Northern Economic Corridor,” ch. 5, p. 69. The Nathan study also referred (incorrectly, given subsequent events) to an unspecified future “loan to continue on” from the nine-village pilot, presumably aimed at the other villages in the corridor (ch. 6, 24; also see ch. 5, 69, ch. 6, 24–25; and ADB, “Proposed Grant Assistance”).
75 Fieldwork notes, November 2006.
76 Nathan Associates, “Preparing the Northern Economic Corridor,” ch. 4, p. 55. My reasoning here is based on the work of Brent Flyvbjerg and colleagues, who note the prevalence of highly optimistic estimates of benefits and costs in the infrastructure planning process (often bordering on “delusion and deception”), as well as the direct link between the magnitude of these estimates and projects’ estimated internal rates of return (Flyvbjerg, Bruzelius, and Rothengatter, Megaprojects and Risk; Flyvbjerg, Garbuio, and Lovallo, “Delusion and Deception”; Flyvbjerg and Sunstein, “Principle of the Malevolent Hiding Hand”).
77 Fieldwork notes, November 2006; government interviews, December 2007.
78 ADB, “Project Data Sheet for ‘Lao People’s Democratic Republic: Sustainable Agroforestry Systems for Livelihood Enhancement of the Rural Poor.’ ”
79 See sources in n. 47 above, especially Barney, “Laos and the Making of a ‘Relational’ Resource Frontier”; also see Schönweger et al., Concessions and Leases in the Lao PDR; Kenney-Lazar, Suhardiman, and Dwyer, “State Spaces of Resistance.”
80 On some of the more bureaucratic details, see GTZ, “Study No. 4”; Schönweger et al., Concessions and Leases; Lu and Schönweger, “Great Expectations.” I return to the politics of paperwork in the land-finding process in chapter 5.
81 Interviews and field notes, late 2006 and 2007.
82 Interview and field notes, Vieng Phoukha, December 2007.
83 Author’s comparison of location with local LFA map.
84 Interviews, Vieng Phoukha, April, June, and December 2007.
85 Interview, July 2007.
86 Vongkhamor et al., “Key Issues in Smallholder Rubber,” 39 (lightly edited for flow).
87 Minutes of the meeting about Chinese cooperative rubber planting between Luang Namtha, Oudomxai, and Bokeo provinces, October 10, 2005, authorized by the governor of Luang Namtha; article 2.2 (author’s data).
88 This was clear from fieldwork interviews in which local authorities and government technical staff would refer to rubber investment as being “3 + 2” or a similar variant like “cooperation with people” or “promotion” (songserm); it is also clear from contemporary published sources like Vongkhamor et al., “Key Issues” and Shi, “Rubber Boom.”
89 Baird, “Laos, Rubber and People”; Dwyer, “Turning Land into Capital”; “Authority Voices Concern” and “Govt Suspends Land Concessions,” Vientiane Times.
90 Interview, December 2007. For other examples of Chinese companies tapping into Lao networks, see Lyttleton et al., “Watermelons, Bars and Trucks”; Friis and Nielsen, “Small-Scale Land Acquisitions.”
91 Alton, Blum, and Sannanikone, “Para Rubber in Northern Laos”; Manivong and Cramb, “Economics of Smallholder Rubber”; Shi, “Rubber Boom”; interviews, July 2018.
92 These include the sources in the previous note, as well as Diana, “Roses and Rifles”; Kenney-Lazar, “Rubber Production in Northern Laos”; and Lu, “Rubber’s Reach.”
93 Interviews, December 2007, with village heads and provincial-level technical staff. This was confirmed in July 2018 interviews, where informants discussed “3 + 2” as the clearly suboptimal arrangement compared to independent production.
94 Shi, “Rubber Boom,” 25.
95 Thongmanivong et al., “Concession or Cooperation?,” 47.
96 Hett et al., Land Leases and Concessions in the Lao PDR; Shi, “Rubber Boom”; Vongvisouk and Dwyer, “After the Boom.”
97 Shi, “Rubber Boom,” 42.
98 Interview, June 2007; Shi, “Rubber Boom,” 46.
99 Schönweger et al., Concessions and Leases, 10 and 20.
100 Vongvisouk and Dwyer, “After the Boom.”
101 Luang Namtha Provincial Agriculture and Forestry Office, “Rubber Value Chain Concept of Luang Namtha Province (2013–25),” August 2013, unofficial translation (author’s data), p. 3.
102 “Rubber Value Chain Concept” (above, n. 101), pp. 2 and 11. Also see Shi, “Rubber Boom in Luang Namtha: Seven Years Later.”
103 Barney, “Laos and the Making of a ‘Relational’ Resource Frontier,” 150.
104 Lu, “Rubber’s Reach”; Lu and Schönweger, “Great Expectations.”
105 This distinction between public and hidden transcripts comes from Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance.
106 Lu, “Tapping into Rubber”; Shi, “Rubber Boom”; Su, “Nontraditional Security.”
107 Kramer and Woods, “Financing Dispossession”; on Thailand, see Alton, Blum, and Sannanikone, “Para Rubber in Northern Laos” and Shattuck, “Risky Subjects”; on Malaysia, see Sutton, “Agribusiness on a Grand Scale.”
108 Shi, “Rubber Boom”; Su, “Nontraditional Security,” 79.
109 Liu and Dunford, “Inclusive Globalization.”
110 Kramer and Woods, “Financing Dispossession”; Lu, “Tapping into Rubber” and “Rubber’s Reach”; Su, “Nontraditional Security.”
111 Guo, “Towards Resolution,” 52.
112 Baird, “Turning Land into Capital, Turning People into Labor”; Barney, “Laos and the Making of a ‘Relational’ Resource Frontier”; Kenney-Lazar, “Governing Dispossession”; Kenney-Lazar, Suhardiman, and Dwyer, “State Spaces of Resistance”; Laungaramsri, “Frontier Capitalism”; Suhardiman et al., “Revealing the Hidden Effects of Land Grabbing.”
113 Ducourtieux, Laffort, and Sacklokham, “Land Policy and Farming Practices in Laos,” 507.
114 Glassman, Bounding the Mekong; Hirsch, “Globalisation, Regionalisation and Local Voices.”
2. A REAL COUNTRY?
Epigraph: Quoted in Deitchman, The Best-Laid Schemes, 33.
1 Blaufarb, “Organizing and Managing Unconventional War in Laos.” On RAND in Southeast Asia more broadly, see Elliott, RAND in Southeast Asia.
2 Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era.
3 Blaufarb, “Unconventional War in Laos,” v and 32.
4 Blaufarb, “Unconventional War,” 2.
5 Kong Le’s coup and associated events are discussed in numerous sources; see, among others, Evans, A Short History of Laos; Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos.
6 Blaufarb, “Unconventional War,” v.
7 Blaufarb, “Unconventional War,” 2–3.
8 See, e.g., Henry Kissinger’s elaboration of the claim, made in the days after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, that “Afghanistan has never been a modern state” (Kissinger, “Why America Failed in Afghanistan”).
9 Blaufarb, “Unconventional War,” 32; also see Kurlantzick, A Great Place to Have a War; McCoy, Politics of Heroin; Warner, Shooting at the Moon.
10 See, e.g., Kurlantzick, A Great Place to Have a War; Warner, Shooting at the Moon.
11 Izikowitz, Over the Misty Mountains; Kunstadter, Chapman, and Sabhasri, Farmers in the Forest.
12 For a recent take on this, see Gordillo, “Terrain as Insurgent Weapon.”
13 Scott, Art of Not Being Governed, 4 and 20.
14 Examples abound, and often focus on the mix of infrastructuring and land zoning that seeks to render space abstract and governable; see, e.g., Brechin, Imperial San Francisco; Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis; Vandergeest and Peluso, “Territorialization and State Power in Thailand.”
15 Stuart-Fox, “The French in Laos,” 133 and 136. Also see Ivarsson (Creating Laos) on both “the stereotypical dichotomy” of French Indochina—the racialized distinction “between the dynamic and industrious Vietnamese [and] the decadent and lazy Lao” (104)—and the relatively late French efforts (in the 1930s) to encourage emerging ideas of Lao nationalism (ch. 4).
16 Warner, Shooting at the Moon; also see Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars.
17 González, “Human Terrain”; Bryan and Wood, Weaponizing Maps; Gordillo, “Terrain as Insurgent Weapon.”
18 Given the scope and concerns of the book, my focus is on the lasting impact within Laos. But as recent scholarship emphasizes, this statement applies as well to the effects of Laos’s secret war on the CIA more broadly, including most famously its activities in Afghanistan before and during the “global war on terror” (Coll, Ghost Wars; Kurlantzick, A Great Place to Have a War; Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim; Mazzetti, Way of the Knife).
19 Sassen, “Land Grabs Today” and “Savage Sorting”; Nyíri, “Enclaves of Improvement” and “Extraterritoriality”; see introduction.
20 British Pathé News archive, https://www.britishpathe.com/video/president-kennedy-talks-on-laos.
21 Clausewitz, On War.
22 Prados, Vietnam, 13–19.
23 The political entity of South Vietnam—and the implied one of North Vietnam—grew out of Washington’s support for Ngo Din Diem’s scrapping of the plan, outlined in the 1954 Geneva Accords after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, to hold nationwide elections in Vietnam within two years. Contrary to Diem’s and Washington’s interpretation, the 1954 agreements did not create two sovereign nations of North and South Vietnam; rather, they created “regroupment zones” in northern and southern Vietnam (and northern and southern Laos) for the various sides, an arrangement that Washington read as a giveaway to the communists (Prados, Vietnam, 26–38).
24 Prados, Vietnam, 26–38.
25 Conboy and Morrison, Shadow War; Gilkey, “Laos”; Halpern, “Economic Development and American Aid in Laos”; Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos. For a comparison of the strategic-hamlet programs in both countries, see Phillips, Why Vietnam Matters; on the issue of regular military capacity, see Prados, Vietnam on South Vietnam and Conboy and Morrison, Shadow War and Warner, Shooting at the Moon on Laos; on urban corruption in wartime Laos, see Gilkey, “Laos” and Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos.
26 Warner, Shooting at the Moon, 7.
27 Gilkey, “Laos,” 92.
28 Rist, The History of Development, 80–92.
29 Greenstein and Immerman, “Letter to the Editor,” 363.
30 Blaufarb, “Unconventional War in Laos,” 5.
31 Conboy and Morrison, Shadow War; Jonsson, “War’s Ontogeny”; Kurlantzick, A Great Place to Have a War.
32 Conboy and Morrison, Shadow War, 6; Warner, Shooting at the Moon.
33 Trinquier, Modern Warfare.
34 Fall, “Introduction,” x.
35 Fall, “Introduction,” xiv. The term maquis (bush) seems to have originated in the Free French (guerrilla) resistance set up during the Second World War.
36 Conboy and Morrison, Shadow War, 59–60.
37 Warner, Shooting at the Moon; Conboy and Morrison, Shadow War.
38 Blaufarb, “Unconventional War,” viii.
39 Blaufarb, “Unconventional War,” 52–53; Robbins, Air America; Warner, Shooting at the Moon.
40 Blaufarb, “Unconventional War,” 6.
41 Conboy and Morrison, Shadow War, 90–91.
42 Nam Nyu is the English-language rendering of the contemporary Lao spelling. In many English-language historical sources it is spelled Nam Yu (e.g., Warner, Shooting at the Moon) or Nam Lieu (e.g., Morrow, “CIA’s Spy Teams inside Red China”).
43 Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 57–58.
44 Lintner, Burma in Revolt; McCoy, Politics of Heroin.
45 McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 306.
46 Warner, Shooting at the Moon; McCoy, Politics of Heroin.
47 McCoy, Politics of Heroin; Warner, Shooting at the Moon.
48 Jonsson, “War’s Ontogeny,” 131–32.
49 Gunn, Rebellion in Laos, 74.
50 Gunn, Rebellion in Laos, 61.
51 Taxes were calculated in cash and could be paid in kind via opium or corvée labor; see Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos and Gunn, Rebellion in Laos, which also discuss upland insurrections during the colonial period. Jonsson wrote: “Some of my contacts recall the hardship of French colonial taxation, when many Iu Mien were forced to sell off children in order to pay” (“War’s Ontogeny,” 139).
52 Gunn, Rebellion in Laos; Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos.
53 Jonsson, “War’s Ontogeny”; McCoy, Politics of Heroin.
54 Brocheux and Hémery, Indochina; Gunn, Rebellion in Laos.
55 McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 132.
56 Jonsson (“War’s Ontogeny”, 127) describes how allegiance and leadership hardened in times of war, and in this setting in particular, because of the control that authorities like Chao Mai and Chao La wielded over refugee processing and relief services.
57 Evans, Politics of Ritual and Remembrance; Dwyer, “Upland Geopolitics.”
58 Warner, Shooting at the Moon, 126.
59 McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 335–49. Unless otherwise indicated, my information about Nam Nyu’s espionage program and Young’s family history comes from McCoy, who interviewed Young in 1971. Roger Warner, who also interviewed Young, confirms the basic outline of events, if not the precise details, related here (Warner, Shooting at the Moon).
60 McCoy, Politics of Heroin; also see Shackley and Finney, Spymaster, 191–2.
61 The first front was the Korean War, which started in 1950 as well.
62 McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 339.
63 Theodore Shackley, CIA station chief in Vientiane in 1967, gave the following tallies for “irregular” forces in Laos in 1967 (from Shackley and Finney, Spymaster, 157):
Long [Ch]eng (north) | 21,741 |
Nam [Ny]u (northwest) | 6,843 |
Pakse (south) | 4,232 |
Savannakhet (central) | 3,535 |
Luang Prabang (north central) | 2,502 |
Total | 38,853 |
64 McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 336.
65 Air America’s Facilities Data (Texas Tech archives); US Defense Mapping Agency Topographic Center, Washington, DC, compiled 1975, map series 1501, 3rd ed., 1:250,000 scale (accessed via https://911gfx.nexus.net/sea-ao.html).
66 McCoy, Politics of Heroin; Robbins, Air America; Warner, Shooting at the Moon.
67 Blaufarb, “Unconventional War,” 6.
68 Blaufarb, “Unconventional War,” 32.
69 Warner, Shooting at the Moon, 352.
70 Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars, 1972; Warner, Shooting at the Moon.
71 Blaufarb, “Unconventional War,” 50. These ranged between a high of 14,181 in January 1970 and a low of 3,567 in September 1970. Only seven of twenty-three months shown had fewer than 10,000 sorties.
72 Blaufarb, “Unconventional War,” 51.
73 Blaufarb, “Unconventional War,” 33.
74 Blaufarb, “Unconventional War,” 33 (emphasis in original).
75 Johnson, “War’s Ontogeny”; Prados, Vietnam.
76 Phillips, Why Vietnam Matters.
77 Phillips argues that even though the US government espoused nation-building, Americans in Laos were not actually doing much of it in the late 1950s. Despite being inspired by what he called “the Magsaysay experience” in the Philippines, Phillips describes his naive disappointment when he was received as a “spook” in Laos, and his efforts in May 1958 to “create a link [between villages and] the Lao government and thus forestall a [communist] election landslide” were hamstrung less by conditions on the ground than by opposition within the American aid community. When, later, a “crash village-aid program, using mainly air drops of construction materials and tools” did actually get off the ground, the whole thing lasted a month and reached about a thousand rural villages. “Nothing on this scale had ever happened before in Laos” (Why Vietnam Matters, 95–96).
78 Blaufarb, “Unconventional War,” 2.
79 See, e.g., Gunn, Rebellion in Laos; Ivarsson, Creating Laos; Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos.
80 Blaufarb, “Unconventional War,” 2.
81 Blaufarb, “Unconventional War,” v–vi.
82 Godley and St. Goar, “The Chinese Road in Northwest Laos,” 291.
83 Godley and St. Goar, “Chinese Road,” 291.
84 Godley and St. Goar, “Chinese Road,” 285.
85 Godley and St. Goar, “Chinese Road,” 285.
86 Godley and St. Goar, “Chinese Road,” 285.
87 CIA, “Central Intelligence Bulletin,” June 3, 1965 (p. 6); CIA Directorate of Intelligence, “Developments in Indochina,” [precise date illegible] May 1973 (p. 6). Accessed via CIA Records Search Tool archives, College Park, MD, May 2012 (hereafter CREST).
88 CIA Office of Current Intelligence, “Weekly summary,” December 3, 1965, p. 10 (accessed via CREST archives).
89 Godley and St. Goar, “Chinese Road,” 292.
90 Godley and St. Goar, “Chinese Road,” 286 and 294.
91 Godley and St. Goar, “Chinese Road,” 294.
92 See, e.g., Stern, “Deeper CIA Role in Laos Revealed” (accessed via CREST archives).
93 “Laos: April 1971” (the Symington Committee investigation by Lowenstein and Moose), as read into the Congressional Record (p. S 12966) by Senator William Fulbright on June 7, 1971 (accessed via CREST archives).
94 Godley and St. Goar, “Chinese Road,” 307–8.
95 CIA Directorate of Intelligence, “Developments in Indochina,” May 1973, p. 7 (accessed via CREST archives).
96 Evans, “Introduction,” 1 (all quotes in this paragraph).
97 Dommen, Conflict in Laos; Fall, Anatomy of a Crisis. Fall is well-known for his analysis of American “overreach” during the “Laotian crisis,” which Dommen—famous for characterizing Laos as the geostrategic “keystone of Indochina”—witnessed firsthand (Evans, A Short History of Laos, 116).
98 Fall, “Introduction.”
99 Phillips, Why Vietnam Matters, 95–96.
100 Halpern, Aspects of Village Life.
101 Halpern, “Economic Development and American Aid in Laos,” 153.
102 Halpern, “Economic Development”; also see Gilkey, “Laos.”
103 Halpern, “Economic Development,” 168–70.
104 Halpern, “Economic Development,” 171.
105 Evans, “Introduction,” 1.
106 Deitchman, The Best-Laid Schemes. Project Camelot’s widely assumed regional target was Latin America, and its downfall shares some similarities with the more recent controversy over the so-called Bowman Expeditions (see Bryan and Wood, Weaponizing Maps).
107 Deitchman, Best-Laid Schemes, 23–24.
108 Deitchman, Best-Laid Schemes; Elliott, RAND in Southeast Asia; Klare, War without End; Wakin, Anthropology Goes to War.
109 For example: responding to a 1962 National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM 162, Development of U.S. and Indigenous Police, Paramilitary and Military Resources, https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKNSF/337/JFKNSF-337-001), the CIA’s Geography Division undertook what its acting chief described as “a broad project … which is intended to study 11 critical countries to identify minority groups having an exploitable paramilitary potential” (“Geography Division support for CIA Counterinsurgency Action,” July 12, 1962, accessed via CREST online: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80B01083A000100100030-1.pdf). More generally, see Kurlantzick, A Great Place to Have a War, 1–2.
110 Wakin, Anthropology Goes to War, 57.
3. THE GEOGRAPHY OF SECURITY
Epigraph: Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” 23.
1 All quotes in this paragraph from “Instruction on stepping up population management work, issued by the Lao PDR’s Council of Ministers and signed by Nouhak Phoumsavan, vice chairman of the council,” February 1, 1988; translated by the United States’ Foreign Broadcast Information Service (hereafter FBIS). Texas Tech University Vietnam Center and Archives, Vietnam Veterans Association Project—Laos; box 30, folder 4; accessed March 11, 2009.
2 Quoted in Scott, “Colonial Governmentality,” 202; also see Foucault, Discipline and Punish and Security, Territory, Population.
3 Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos.
4 Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos.
5 Gunn, “Resistance Coalitions in Laos.”
6 “Instruction …” (n. 1).
7 Evrard and Goudineau, “Planned Resettlement”; Rigg, Living with Transition.
8 Stuart-Fox, “The French in Laos,” 134.
9 National Geographic Service of Viet-Nam, “Economic map of Indochina.”
10 US Army, “Army Service Forces Manual,” 28.
11 USAID, “Termination Report, Laos,” 184, 225, 326, and 341–43.
12 Persson, “Forestry in Laos,” 52–53.
13 Goppers and Bergström, “Elephants Don’t Rust,” 11–12.
14 I reproduce Persson’s map below as part of map 3.1, but omit the following data (from Persson, “Forestry in Laos,” 38) about “development partners”:
SFE | AREA ALLOCATED | PARTNER | ||
SFE 1 | 530,000 ha | Sweden | ||
SFE 2 | not fixed | Vietnam | ||
SFE 3 | 420,000 ha | Sweden (originally Hungary) | ||
SFE 4 | 460,000 ha | USSR | ||
SFE 5 | not fixed | Bulgaria | ||
SFE 6 | not fixed | Czech. | ||
SFE 7 | not fixed | — | ||
SFE 8 | not fixed | (IBRD) | ||
SFE 9 | 420,000 ha | ADB |
15 Goppers and Bergström, “Elephants Don’t Rust.”
16 Goppers and Bergström, “Elephants Don’t Rust,” 11.
17 Goppers and Bergström, “Elephants Don’t Rust,” 10.
18 Goppers and Bergström, “Elephants Don’t Rust,” 9–10.
19 Goppers and Bergström, “Elephants Don’t Rust.”
20 Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” v.
21 Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” 20 (emphasis in original).
22 Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” 3.
23 Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” 3.
24 USAID, “Termination Report, Laos,” 184–85.
25 Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” 3–4 and 11–12. This landscape was hardly unique in Southeast Asia; see Kunstadter, Chapman, and Sabhasri, Farmers in the Forest for other examples of shifting cultivation being taken up by economically and politically displaced populations who had not traditionally practiced it.
26 Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” 2–4.
27 Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” 11–12.
28 Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” 20.
29 Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” 20.
30 Goppers and Bergström, “Elephants Don’t Rust.”
31 Marx, Capital, 875.
32 Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” 29.
33 Even in the mid-1980s, Sweden was sensitive to accusations of forced labor in its aid projects in Vietnam and Laos. Although it denied these in the latter, it took them seriously and deemed them worthy of rebuttal (see Goppers and Bergström, “Elephants Don’t Rust,” 37–39).
34 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population.
35 Elden, “Governmentality”; Huxley, “Geographies of Governmentality”; Scott, “Colonial Governmentality.”
36 Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Scott, Seeing Like a State.
37 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population; also see Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers.
38 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population; Patterson, Slavery and Social Death.
39 STOL site locations have been sourced from the US Defense Mapping Agency Topographic Center, Washington, DC, compiled 1975, map series 1501, 3rd ed., 1:250,000 scale; accessed online via Jim Henthorn’s excellent map collection for Laos (https://911gfx.nexus.net/laos.html).
40 Goppers and Bergström, “Elephants Don’t Rust”; Hansson, “Swedish Correspondent Views Problems with Aid Project”; Trankell, On the Road in Laos.
41 Goppers and Bergström, “Elephants Don’t Rust,” 29.
42 Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine; Li, The Will to Improve.
43 Evans, A Short History of Laos; Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos.
44 Hansson, “Swedish Correspondent Views Problems with Aid Project” (translated by FBIS).
45 “Vietnam’s Rebellious ‘Colony,’ ” Far Eastern Economic Review. In his Short History of Laos, Grant Evans makes this point more broadly. Describing “Vietnam’s mission civilatrice” in the early postwar years, he gestures to the hypocrisy that was plainly visible to many Lao citizens: “The major role played by the Vietnamese communists at key levels of the state appeared to contradict Lao People’s Revolutionary Party claims to have fought against the Royal Lao Government for ‘true independence,’ against the ‘new colonialism’ it said the old government was part of. To many Lao, the new regime seemed equally part of a ‘new colonial’ system, especially following the signing of the 20-year treaty between the two countries” (189).
46 Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” 23.
47 Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” 23.
48 High, “ ‘Join Together, Work Together’ ”; also see GTZ, “Study No. 11,” 18.
49 Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” 23.
50 Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” 27 and 43.
51 Cullather, The Hungry World, 159–79; Phillips, Why Vietnam Matters.
52 Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” 29.
53 Dove, “Living Rubber, Dead Land.”
54 Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” 23 and 29.
55 Trankell, On the Road in Laos, vii.
56 Trankell, On the Road in Laos, 80–81.
57 Trankell, On the Road in Laos, 17.
58 Trankell, On the Road in Laos, 17 and 65.
59 Bolikhamxai Provincial Authority, “Bolikhamxai Province Socio-Economic Profile,” 18.
60 Trankell, On the Road in Laos, 17.
61 Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” 2.
62 Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” 38.
63 Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” 38 (emphasis in original).
64 Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” 39.
65 Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” 80–84.
66 Thongphachanh and Birgegard, “Muong Paksane Regional Development Study,” 32.
67 See Baird and Shoemaker, “Unsettling Experiences,” 875.
68 The Bolikhamxai authorities are quoting the “Official Government Document” presented at the May 1998 Sixth Roundtable Follow-up Meeting on the National Rural Development Program, a process mandated by a Geneva Roundtable meeting with international donors in June 1997.
69 Bolikhamxai Provincial Authority, “Bolikhamxai Province Socio-Economic Profile” (subsection “Bolikhan District Profile,” pp. 18, 19, 21). The document refers to the combined areas of Muang Houng and Muang Bo, an adjacent area just to the west, as a single focal site named “Pha Muang”; to reduce confusion, I refer to both areas collectively as Muang Houng.
70 Bolikhamxai Provincial Authority, “Bolikhamxai Province Socio-Economic Profile” (subsection “Bolikhan District Profile,” p. 20).
71 Bolikhamxai Provincial Authority, “Bolikhamxai Province Socio-Economic Profile,” 17–18.
72 Bolikhamxai Provincial Authority, “Bolikhamxai Province Socio-Economic Profile,” 17–18.
73 Messerli et al., Socio-Economic Atlas of the Lao PDR, 131–35.
74 On the Paksan Regional Project, see Goppers and Bergström, “Elephants Don’t Rust,” 29; on SFE devolution, see chapter 5.
75 Bolikhamxai Provincial Authority, “Bolikhamxai Province Socio-Economic Profile” (subsection “Bolikhan District Profile,” p. 2); Hodgdon, “No Success Like Failure.” (See especially Hodgdon’s map on p. 39; Muang Houng sits in the white space between provincial forestry areas 34 and 36. A “provincial land use planning map” included in MCTPC and IUCN’s “Bolikhamxai Province Environmental Inventory” [32] shows this same geography, but not as clearly.)
76 Bolikhamxai Provincial Authority, “Bolikhamxai Province Socio-Economic Profile” (subsection “Bolikhan District Profile,” p. 10).
77 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 43–44.
78 Evrard and Goudineau, “Planned Resettlement”; Rigg, Living with Transition.
79 Baird and Shoemaker, “Unsettling Experiences”; Barney, “Laos and the Making of a ‘Relational’ Resource Frontier”; Evrard and Goudineau, “Planned Resettlement”; Rigg, Living with Transition; Vandergeest, “Land to Some Tillers”; also see chapters 1 and 5.
80 Lao radio, September 7, 1988, “Heighten Vigilance against Enemies’ New Schemes”; translation by FBIS.
81 Lao radio, September 7, 1988, “Heighten Vigilance against Enemies’ New Schemes”; translation by FBIS.
82 Lao radio, April 1, 1989, “The Open-Door Policy Is Linked to the Maintenance of Internal Security”; translation by FBIS.
4. MICRO-GEOPOLITICS
Epigraph: Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 88.
1 The Lao National Tourism Authority describes the museum this way on its website: “The provincial museum has a variety of artifacts made by Luang Namtha’s multi-ethnic people. Of particular interest is the extensive collection of indigenous clothing as well as many agricultural tools and household implements used in daily life. The museum has an excellent collection of Buddha images, bronze drums, ceramics and textiles. Also of interest are the traditional hand-made weapons on display that were once used for hunting and national defense.” http://www.tourismlaos.org/web/show_content.php?contID=42 (accessed December 1, 2011).
2 Anderson, Imagined Communities, ch. 10; also see Cohn, “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification”; Hannah, Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory; Scott, Seeing like a State.
3 Izikowitz, Over the Misty Mountains, 74–75, 95–102; also see Hanks and Hanks, “Ethnographic Notes on Northern Thailand”; Schliesinger, Ethnic Groups of Laos; Young, “Hill Tribes of Northern Thailand.” My use of ethnic-group terminology in this paragraph follows the English-language labels on the map. A number of these names (“Lao Theung,” “Yao,” “Kui”) are exonyms, labels used by state authorities that differ from the labels that groups use to refer to themselves (autonyms). As elaborated below, “Kui” (like “Muser,” in ch. 1) refers to Lahu, while “Yao” refers to Iu Mien.
4 Key sources include Action Contra le Faim, “Summary of Reports on Resettlement”; Baird and Shoemaker, “Unsettling Experiences”; Chamberlain, “Participatory Poverty Assessment”; Ducourtieux, Laffort, and Sacklokham, “Land Policy”; Evrard and Goudineau, “Planned Resettlement”; Ireson and Ireson, “Ethnicity and Development”; and Vandergeest, “Land to Some Tillers.”
5 Rigg, Living with Transition, 126.
6 Vandergeest, “Land to Some Tillers,” 52.
7 The dynamics described below are similar to those described in postwar upland Vietnam by Andrew Hardy (Red Hills) and Rodolphe De Koninck (“Geopolitics of Land Colonization” and “Peasantry as the Territorial Spearhead of the State”).
8 Robinson, Racial Capitalism; Ong, “Graduated Sovereignty.”
9 Particularly important to my thinking have been De Koninck’s land-centric approach to geopolitics (cited above, n. 7); the work of Robinson and Ong (cited above, n. 8); and Stoler (Imperial Debris) on the ways that racialized forms of social difference continue to facilitate capitalist accumulation.
10 Marx, Capital, ch. 1. Marx’s critique of the commodity fetish, focusing on the need to uncover the social relations that underpin the production of commodities, has much similarity to Foucault’s approach to power described here.
11 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 28, 30.
12 Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine; Rigg, Living with Transition; see, e.g., Chamberlain, “Participatory Poverty Assessment”; Cohen, “Post-Opium Scenario.” Also see ch. 5.
13 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 30.
14 Fieldwork notes, April 2007.
15 Shi, “Rubber Boom.”
16 See, e.g., Barney, “Power, Progress and Impoverishment”; Hunt, “Plantations, Deforestation and Forest Sector Aid Interventions”; Laungaramsri, “Frontier Capitalism”; Obein, “Assessment.”
17 This was the concession in Ban Sopdut; see Shi, “Rubber Boom,” 30. For more on Yunnan Rubber, also see Lu, “Tapping into Rubber”; Lu and Schönweger, “Great Expectations.”
18 Fieldwork notes, June 2007.
19 Village-head survey and key informant interviews in twelve Vieng Phoukha villages, December 2007 and January 2008.
20 Whitington, “Beleaguered Village Leader”; also see Baird, “Rubber, Land and People”; Laungaramsri, “Frontier Capitalism.”
21 Hunt, “Plantations, Deforestation and Forest Sector Aid Interventions.”
22 Village interview, December 2007.
23 This is clear from the LFA map of the village, both the signboard version posted in the village itself (photographed June 2007 by the author, map dated “year 1999–2000”) and the paper version held in the local district Agriculture and Forestry office (author’s data).
24 Hodgdon, “No Success like Failure,” 39; Walker, Legend of the Golden Boat, 20–23, 57–62.
25 Ireson and Ireson, “Ethnicity and Development,” 933; also see Goudineau and Evrard, “Resettlement,” vol. 2; Gunn, “Resistance Coalitions.”
26 Fieldwork notes, December 2007.
27 What he was explaining is more along the lines of how state-managed resettlement worked in upland Vietnam (Hardy, Red Hills; De Koninck, “Theory and Practice”).
28 Fieldwork notes, December 2007. I had heard about one of these other district-level boundary negotiations and village movements from another informant almost a year earlier (fieldwork notes, November 2006).
29 This is a pseudonym, meaning “Red Village,” which I use to note the parallels to Andrew Hardy’s work on upland Vietnam (Hardy, Red Hills).
30 Author’s data: Vieng Phoukha district LFA statistics (detailed, 2005); Luang Namtha provincial LFA statistics (summary); cf. Barney, “Grounding Global Forest Economies,” 289 (~1,800 ha); Thongmanivong et al., “Concession or Cooperation?,” 33 (826 ha); Hunt, “Plantations, Deforestation and Forest Sector Aid Interventions,” 138 (435 ha) and 141 (~3,000 ha).
31 Fieldwork notes, December 2007.
32 Summary of Land and Forest Allocation 2004–5 in Ban [Deng], Vieng Phoukha Agriculture and Forestry Office (author’s data).
33 An image of this appears in Dwyer, “Micro-Geopolitics,” 392.
34 Summary (above, n. 32).
35 Goudineau and Evrard, “Resettlement,” vol. 2, 23 and 26. Goudineau and Evrard use the terminology of left bank and right bank, which correspond roughly to the Namtha’s east and west banks, respectively; the river flows first south and then southwest (see map 4.2).
36 Goudineau and Evrard, “Resettlement,” vol. 2, 23.
37 Fieldwork interview, 2007.
38 Fieldwork interview, July 2007. On debates about resettlement in Laos, see Baird and Shoemaker, “Unsettling Experiences”; Evrard and Goudineau, “Planned Resettlement.”
39 US Defense Mapping Agency Topographic Center, Washington, DC, compiled 1975, map series 1501, 3rd ed., 1:250,000 scale, sheet NF 47–16 (“Luang-Namtha, Laos; Thailand; Burma”).
40 In addition to these examples, compare Ban Na Woua, an Iu Mien village discussed by McCoy (Politics of Heroin, 336) that appears on the US map and has since disappeared.
41 Lao PDR 1987 topographic map series (based on 1986 aerial imagery), National Geographic Department, Lao PDR, sheets F-47 xxix and F-47 xxxv (author’s data). Compare “Laos population and ethnic groups,” 2005 census (available on Laofab.org).
42 Fieldwork interview, July 2007.
43 Hodgdon, “No Success like Failure,” 39 (plus geo-referencing by the author); village LFA map (author’s data).
44 Village Histories Survey, 2006 (author’s data, anonymized); Siphavanh et al., “Main Causes of High Repetition Rate,” 12.
45 Village Histories (above, n. 44); Survey of [details removed] Villages in Vieng Phoukha District, Luang Namtha Province, 2004 (author’s data, anonymized).
46 Fieldwork notes, 2007, 2008.
47 On the latter, see Lyttleton, “Relative Pleasures”; Lyttleton et al., “Watermelons, Bars and Trucks”; UNODC, “Laos Opium Survey.”
48 Survey (above, n. 45), p. 47.
49 Survey (above, n. 45), pp. 17, 47.
50 There is a longer history here of the official dissolution of the older tasseng (subdistrict) administrative level in 1991 owing to its perceived threats to central-state power and its subsequent reconstitution (still for political and administrative purposes) as first the khet (“area” or “zone”) and, more recently, the village group or cluster (kum-ban). For a partial elaboration, see Stuart-Fox, “The Political Culture of Corruption”; Foppes, “Knowledge Capitalization.”
51 Fieldwork interviews, June 2007 and December 2007. On the narrative that the uplands are untaxed, see Dwyer, “Building the Politics Machine,” 314–21.
52 Fieldwork interviews, June 2007 and December 2007.
53 Shi, “Rubber Boom,” 14.
54 Plantation area numbers are difficult statistics for reasons discussed briefly in chapter 1 and elaborated in chapter 5. A development project report from early 2007 described Bolisat Ltd.’s plantation in one part of Khet Nam Fa as “a 500 hectare rubber concession” (Project report [details removed] 2007, p. 6). Plantation ages reported during 2018 fieldwork as well as a key informant (anonymous pers. comm., 2018) imply continued planting in the company’s plantations throughout the latter 2000s.
55 At prevailing assumptions, a 1,000-hectare plantation would have owed (conservatively assuming 400 trees per hectare; MAF and Sino-Lao assumed 495—see ch. 1) roughly $300,000 per year once tapping began. While actual taxation rates seem not to have materialized anywhere near this rate (see Hett et al., Land Leases and Concessions, 110, 114, 122), the tax-based logic of replacing upland swidden fields with corporate rubber plantations would nonetheless have been significant.
56 “Landownership: Land of the Lao PDR is under the ownership of the national community as prescribed in Article 17 of the Constitution in which the State is charged with the centralized and uniform management [of land] throughout the country” (2003 Land Law, article 3, emphasis added).
57 For Laos, see Baird and Shoemaker, “Unsettling Experiences”; Chamberlain, “Participatory Poverty Assessment”; Laungaramsri, “Frontier Capitalism”; Vandergeest, “Land to Some Tillers,” among many others. Nonetheless, this is hardly one-sided; there is much give-and-take, as is clear from literature on land politics in general, and resistance in particular, in authoritarian countries; see, e.g., Walker, “From Covert to Overt” on China; Sikor, “Tree Plantations” on Vietnam; and Baird, “Resistance and Contingent Contestations”; Kenney-Lazar, Suhardiman, and Dwyer, “State Spaces of Resistance”; and McAllister, “Rubber, Rights and Resistance” on Laos.
58 Interviews, December 2007.
59 Baird and Shoemaker, “Unsettling Experiences”; Chamberlain, “Participatory Poverty Assessment”; Daviau, “Resettlement in Long District” and “Update 2003”; Ducourtieux, Laffort, and Sacklokham, “Land Policy”; Lyttleton et al., “Watermelons, Bars and Trucks.”
60 Project report, 2007 (author’s data, anonymized); quotes are from pp. 5 and 6.
61 Report on Resettlement in Vieng Phoukha District, Luang Namtha Province 2004 (author’s data, anonymized), pp. 2–3.
62 Interview, February 2008.
63 Interviews with village heads in Khet Nam Fa, December 2008.
64 Interview, July 2018.
65 Interviews, July 2018.
66 Interviews, July 2018.
67 Village interview, December 2008 (cf. Marx, Capital, 874).
68 Interview, July 2018. One informant reported a not-insignificant figure of 90 million Lao kip (about $10,000) in unpaid wages from planting work, saying that the company had asked villagers to wait until tapping began. While impossible to verify, this figure is not unrealistic given the size of the plantation (a few hundred hectares, with roughly 400–500 trees per hectare and piecework rates in the range of a few hundred kip per tree).
69 Lu and Schönweger, “Great Expectations”; also see Kenney-Lazar, “Governing Dispossession.”
70 Dwyer, “Micro-Geopolitics”; Juliet Lu makes a similar point on the resettlement-based logic of China’s opium-replacement program; see Lu, “Tapping into Rubber,” 742.
71 Jie, “China: Facilitating Cooperation”; Kramer and Woods, “Financing Dispossession.”
72 Dwyer, “Trying to Follow the Money”; Shi, “Rubber Boom”; Su, “Nontraditional Security.”
73 My language here draws explicitly on C. K. Lee’s concept of encompassing accumulation, which the author uses to describe Chinese capital’s effectiveness at accommodating host-country political and economic demands, especially when that capital is state-owned (Lee, “Spectre of Global China,” 36).
74 UNODC, “Southeast Asia Opium Survey”; interview, July 2018.
75 Creak, “Laos in 2013,” 152–55.
76 Crispin, “Limits of Chinese Expansionism.” The article, which raised “questions about how far China has gone to manage its investment image,” intimated that the Chinese government had been involved as well.
77 See, e.g., Schipani, “Ecotourism as an Alternative to Upland Rubber.”
78 Tuffin, “Letter Re: Shawn Crispin’s ‘The Limits of Chinese Expansionism.’ ”
79 Tuffin, “Letter.”
80 Dulles, War or Peace.
81 Zhai, “1959: Preventing Peaceful Evolution.”
82 Brenner and Elden, “Henri Lefebvre on State, Space, Territory,” 367.
5. PAPER LANDSCAPES
1 Ducourtieux, Laffort, and Sacklokham, “Land Policy,” 507 (quoted in ch. 1).
2 Rose, Property and Persuasion; Wood, Fels, and Krygier, Rethinking the Power of Maps.
3 EIA and Telapak, “Borderlines”; Hodgdon, “No Success like Failure” and “Frontier Country”; “Poor Accounting Hollows Out Timber Revenues,” Vientiane Times.
4 Baird, “Quotas”; Stuart-Fox, “Political Culture of Corruption”; Walker, Legend of the Golden Boat.
5 See, e.g., Barney, “Power, Progress, and Impoverishment”; Ducourtieux, Laffort, and Sacklokham, “Land Policy”; Evrard and Goudineau, “Planned Resettlement”; Lestrelin, Castella, and Bourgoin, “Territorialising Sustainable Development”; and Vandergeest, “Land to Some Tillers.” Important exceptions that this chapter builds on include Baird and Shoemaker, “Unsettling Experiences”; Chamberlain, “Participatory Poverty Assessment”; and LCG, “Existing Land Tenure and Forest Lands Study.”
6 Vandergeest, “Land to Some Tillers,” 48.
7 Baird and Shoemaker (“Unsettling Experiences,” 873) are an important exception here in that they connect the rise of LFA to the Tropical Forestry Action Plan process launched by the World Bank in the late 1980s. This is true but hardly the whole story; while LFA did emerge in the wake of Laos’s TFAP process, as this chapter shows, there is much more to it than the impetus of foreign donors and lenders.
8 Eilenberg, At the Edges of States; Kain and Baigent, Cadastral Map in the Service of the State; Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 80–119; Scott, Seeing like a State, 11–52.
9 Rigg, Living with Transition, 101; also see West, “We Are Here to Build Your Capacity.” For examples of the “policy implementation gap,” an important variant on the undercapacity narrative in Laos, see Chamberlain, “Participatory Poverty Assessment”; MAF, “Forestry Strategy 2020.”
10 Evans, A Short History of Laos; Goldman, Imperial Nature; Mongkhonvilay, “Agriculture and Environment under the New Economic Policy”; Rigg, Living with Transition; Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos; Than and Tan, Laos’ Dilemmas and Options; UNDP, “National Human Development Report”; Walker, Legend of the Golden Boat.
11 Texas Tech University Vietnam Center and Archives, Vietnam Veterans Association Project—Laos; box 30, folder 2; accessed March 11, 2009. From an unattributed English-language document (“Present Situation in Laos, February 1987”) found with missionary materials.
12 Texas Tech Archives (above): Vientiane Pasason, “Order on the Free Market” (August 6, 1987; translated by FBIS).
13 Texas Tech Archives (above): Vientiane Pasason, “The Posts and Telecommunications Company and the Bridge and Road Company Change to Businesses” (May 18, 1987; translated by FBIS); Vientiane Pasason, “State Publishing House Attains Business Autonomy” (August 24, 1987; translated by FBIS); Lao Radio, “Development Company Granted Autonomy” (December 1, 1987; translated by FBIS).
14 These were given as fourteen enterprises under the Ministry of Transport and Post, eight each under Industry and Handicraft and Agriculture and Forestry, six under Construction, and one each under Health and Interior. At the provincial level, the figures were seventy-one in Vientiane, fourteen in Champasak, thirteen in Savannakhet, and eight in Luang Prabang (Texas Tech Archives [above]: Lao Radio, “Report on Production Increases by Chairman of the State Planning Committee Sali Vongkhamsao,” March 5, 1988; translated by FBIS).
15 Texas Tech Archives (above): Kaysone Phomvihane, “Renovation and Development,” Pravda (1988; translated by FBIS).
16 Baird, “Quotas”; MAF, “Forestry Strategy 2020”; Walker, Legend of the Golden Boat.
17 Anonymous, “Aspects of Forestry Management”; Hodgdon, “No Success like Failure” and “Frontier Country”; MAF, “Forestry Strategy 2020.”
18 Stuart-Fox, “Political Culture of Corruption,” 61; Walker, Legend of the Golden Boat, 178.
19 Ireson and Ireson, “Ethnicity and Development,” 930.
20 Texas Tech Archives (above): Vientiane Mai, “Before a Forest Is Cleared” (August 24, 1988; translated by FBIS under the title “Rationale for, Exceptions to Logging Export Ban Discussed”).
21 Anonymous, “Aspects of Forestry Management,” 7.
22 Texas Tech Archives (above): Vientiane Pasason, “Turn All Activities into the New Management Mechanism” (March 29, 1989; translated by FBIS).
23 MAF, “Forestry Strategy 2020,” 4; the quoted language refers to Prime Ministerial Decree no. 117 of October 1989.
24 MAF, “Forestry Strategy 2020,” 5–6.
25 The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry’s “Forestry Strategy 2020” acknowledged this cryptically: “The [1991] logging ban was well implemented, causing log production in 1992 to fall to half of that of the previous years, with much of the remaining production coming from old logs or trees felled in the previous years. In 1993, however, log production increased dramatically to levels in excess of those recorded before the ban in 1991” (p. 6).
26 In 1999 Nathan Badenoch, then with the World Resources Institute, reported that “8,000 villages out of a total of 20,000 have participated in land allocation, and the number is expected to reach 12,000 in 1999” (Badenoch, “Watershed Management and Upland Development,” 6). Five years later, a German development assistance report cited government estimates that between 1995 and 2003, “district agricultural and forestry staff ha[d] conducted LUP/LA [Land-Use Planning/Land Allocation, the formal name in English for LFA] activities in a total of 5,400 villages in all provinces,” and that this represented “approximately half” of the nation’s total villages (GTZ, “Study on Land Allocation,” vi, 1, 12). Not only do these figures differ substantially but they also come from very different baselines, with GTZ’s total number of villages just over half of Badenoch’s (10,800 versus 20,000). Research on “internal resettlement” in Laos by Chamberlain (“Participatory Poverty Assessment”), Evrard and Goudineau (“Planned Resettlement”), Lyttleton et al. (“Watermelons, Bars and Trucks”), Baird and Shoemaker (“Unsettling Experiences”), and others highlights the fact that LFA was frequently used in combination with involuntary village resettlement, often involving the consolidation of rural villages. This helps explain why, despite very different sets of numbers, there is widespread belief that LFA took place in roughly half the villages in the country.
27 See, e.g., Baird and Shoemaker, “Unsettling Experiences”; Chamberlain, “Participatory Poverty Assessment”; Ducourtieux, Laffort, and Sacklokham, “Land Policy”; Evrard and Goudineau, “Planned Resettlement”; Vandergeest, “Land to Some Tillers.”
28 Barney, “Power, Progress, and Impoverishment”; Lestrelin, Castella, and Bourgoin, “Territorialising Sustainable Development”; Rigg, Living with Transition.
29 Prime Ministerial Decree no. 03, “Instruction on the expansion of land management and land and forest allocation” (June 25, 1996); the passages quoted here are based on two unsourced translations (author’s data).
30 Decree no. 03, article 5.
31 Decree no. 03, article 6. On the plan to transition to a “rule-of-law” state, see Dwyer, Ingalls, and Baird, “The Security Exception”; MoJ, “Legal Sector Master Plan”; Wong, “In the Space between Words and Meaning.”
32 Decree no. 03, article 6.
33 Resolutions of the First Nationwide Review Conference on Land Management and Land-Forest Allocation (July 19, 1996), unsourced translation found in the International Union of the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) library, Vientiane (author’s data), p. 2.
34 Through the 1990s, ad hoc timber allocations for both high-level private individuals and specific holes in the state budget were a recurrent theme in the forestry sector (Anonymous, “Aspects of Forestry Management”); and well into the 2000s, the allocation of land and resources in return for “national revolutionary tasks” remained such a problem that a six-page decree “on Implementation of Privileges towards Persons with Outstanding Performance and Good Contribution to National Revolutionary Tasks” (Prime Ministerial Decree no. 343, November 2007) was deemed necessary (GTZ, “Study No. 12,” 72–77).
35 Resolutions (above, n. 33), p. 3.
36 Resolutions (above, n. 33), pp. 4–5 (English corrected from original translation).
37 Resolutions (above, n. 33), pp. 5, 6.
38 Resolutions (above, n. 33), p. 5.
39 These were named as Luang Prabang, Vientiane, Savannakhet, and Champasak provinces.
40 Resolutions (above, n. 33), p. 5.
41 Resolutions (above, n. 33), p. 8.
42 Resolutions (above, n. 33), p. 6.
43 See, among others, Baird and Barney, “Political Ecology of Cross-Sectoral Cumulative Impacts”; Barney, “Power, Progress, and Impoverishment” and “Laos and the Making of a ‘Relational’ Resource Frontier”; Blake and Barney, “Structural Injustice, Slow Violence?”; Boer et al., The Mekong.
44 Statistics on LFA implementation, Vieng Phoukha, undated (author’s data, collected 2007). For more detail on the cartographic genealogy described in this section, see Dwyer, “Building the Politics Machine,” 323–26.
45 The following example is from a German land-sector report:
In general there is poor registration and management of land allocation data at district level. Copies of [plot-scale land certificates] and land use maps are stored in district agricultural offices without any specific protection or classification. Hardly any of the data has been registered in computerized files. This entails a high risk that within the next years all relevant data form the LUP/LA [LFA] activities will disappear.… [In the cases observed, LFA] documents and maps were in most cases either incomplete or lost altogether. There is no systematic record system in place at [district Agriculture and Forestry offices] to check that all relevant documents elaborated during LUP/LA [LFA] are kept according to a filing system. (GTZ, “Study on Land Allocation,” 18, 39)
46 Interview in company’s Luang Namtha office, December 2007.
47 The concept of purification in this sense of the term is from Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.
48 Also see, among others, Laungaramsri, “Frontier Capitalism”; Lu and Schönweger, “Great Expectations.”
49 Fieldwork notes, June 2007.
50 See, among others, Baird, “Land, Rubber and People”; Dwyer, “Turning Land into Capital”; Kenney-Lazar, “Plantation Rubber.”
51 Fieldwork notes, May 2007.
52 Fieldwork notes, June 2007.
53 Fieldwork notes, June 2007.
54 Schönweger et al., Concessions and Leases, 19.
55 Voladet, “Sustainable Development in the Plantation Industry,” vii.
56 “Poor Accounting,” Vientiane Times.
57 Order no. 15/PM, “On Strengthening Strictness of Timber Harvest Management and Inspection, Timber Transport and Business,” Vientiane Municipality (unsourced unofficial translation; author’s data).
58 Dwyer, “Land and Forest Tenure”; Hett et al., Land Leases and Concessions.
59 Shi, “Rubber Boom,” 14.
60 Dwyer and Vongvisouk, “Long Land Grab”; anonymous pers. comm., July 2018.
61 Fieldwork notes, July 2018. The statistics in question were dated 2017.
62 This figure is based on the area estimate reported in chapter 1, combined with a conservative assumption of four hundred rubber trees per hectare (see ch. 1).
63 Fieldwork notes, July 2018. Such reticence is not limited to local governments. The update to the 2012 concession inventory discussed above notes the extensive slippage between the areas allocated to various land deals on paper and the areas actually developed in the field (Hett et al., Land Leases and Concessions, 24–25, 47–50). While the results vary widely by context (not surprisingly), it is telling that the maps in the published version show only the initial plan (“area granted”) rather than what has actually occurred.
64 Shi, “Rubber Boom,” 27 (original figures in renminbi).
65 Latour, Science in Action, 219–25; also see Turnbull, Maps Are Territories.
66 Harley, The New Nature of Maps; Pickles, A History of Spaces.
67 Rose, Powers of Freedom, 39.
68 Stuart-Fox, “Political Culture of Corruption,” 66.
69 Stuart-Fox, “On the Writing of Lao History,” 14.
70 Quoted in Hodgdon, “Frontier Country,” 63.
71 Mitchell, Rule of Experts.
72 Brenner and Elden, “Henri Lefebvre on State, Space, Territory”; Lefebvre, The Production of Space.
73 Elden, “Missing the Point,” 8.
CONCLUSION
1 Image available in Dwyer, “Building the Politics Machine,” 310; original available at http://www.laofab.org/document/view/263.
2 Crispin, “Limits of Chinese Expansionism,” quoted in introduction.
3 Fullbrook, “Beijing Pulls Laos into Its Orbit”; also see Gray, “China Farms the World”; McCartan, “China Rubber Demand Stretches Laos”; Schuettler, “Laos Faces Thorny Land Issues.”
4 Hanssen, “Lao Land Concessions”; MacKinnon, “Resentment Rises.” Over the years that followed, these estimates would include 3.5 million hectares “and growing” (Glofcheski, “Turning Land into Capital,” 7), and five million hectares, over 20 percent of Laos’s national territory (Wellmann, “Discussion Paper”).
5 Glofcheski, “Turning Land into Capital,” 7.
6 Hett et al., Land Leases and Concessions.
7 Hett et al., Land Leases and Concessions, xiv; cf. Schönweger et al., Concessions and Leases, 20. Also see GTZ, “Study No. 4.”
8 Oya, “Methodological Reflections,” 503.
9 Li, “After the Land Grab.”
10 Lu and Schönweger, “Great Expectations.”
11 Dwyer, Polack, and So, “ ‘Better-Practice’ Concessions?”
12 Edelman, “Messy Hectares,” 497.
13 Stoler, Imperial Debris.
14 Ong, “Graduated Sovereignty”; also see introduction.
15 Hett et al., Land Leases and Concessions, 120–22.
16 Hett et al., Land Leases and Concessions, 122.
17 Cowen and Shenton, Doctrines of Development; also see Bebbington, “NGOs and Uneven Development”; Biddulph “Tenure Security Interventions”; Hart, Disabling Globalization; Polanyi, Great Transformation.
18 Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish.
19 These politics of uneven citizenship appear in the literature on the global land rush in, among other places, Colombia (Ballvé, “Everyday State Formation”), Myanmar (Woods, “Ceasefire Capitalism”), Cambodia (Biddulph, “Geographies of Evasion”; Work, “ ‘There Was So Much’ ”), Ethiopia (Lavers, “ ‘Land Grab’ as Development Strategy?”; Posluschny-Treuner, “Understanding Foreign Large-Scale Agricultural Investments”), and Mozambique (Borras, Fig, and Suárez, “Politics of Agrofuels”).
20 On the Beijing Consensus, see Ramo, “The Beijing Consensus”; Klinger and Muldavin, “New Geographies of Development.” Also see Nyíri, “Enclaves of Improvement” and “Extraterritoriality.”
21 De Angelis, “Separating the Doing and the Deed”; Harvey, New Imperialism; Marx, Capital, 873; Perelman, “Primitive Accumulation.”
22 See, e.g., Eilenberg, At the Edges of States; Watts, “Resource Curse?”
23 Cotula et al., “Land Grab or Development Opportunity?”; NLMA and FER, “Summary Report”; NLMA and GTZ, “Findings.”
24 Baird, “Quotas”; Stuart-Fox, “Political Culture of Corruption.”
25 Abrams, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State”; Foucault, “Governmentality.”
26 Benda-Beckmann, “Forum Shopping”; Sikor and Lund, “Access and Property.”
27 Dwyer, “Formalization Fix.”
28 See, e.g., FAO et al., “Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment.”
29 De Soto, Mystery of Capital, 219; cf. Latour, Science in Action.
30 In addition to the material presented here, see Kain and Baigent, Cadastral Map in the Service of the State; Scott, Seeing like a State and Art of Not Being Governed.
31 E.g., Fischer et al., “Global Agro-Ecological Assessment,” 80.