 Hey, welcome to the Southeast Asia seminar series. Today we have Dr. Mike Dwyer from Indiana University Bloomington. Mike Dwyer is a political ecologist who studies agrarian change environmental governance and infrastructure development in Southeast Asia. He's conducted fieldwork in Lawson, Cambodia, the social and legal geographies, as well as the policy trade-offs of large-scale land deals, land titling, Dew Road and energy infrastructure and carbon forestry. He teaches in the geography department at Indiana University Bloomington and holds a research affiliation with the University of Burns Barron's Center for Development and Environment. I would like to invite now, Mike, Dr. Dwyer to begin his talk. Thank you very much. Welcome. Super. Thanks, Michael, for the invitation and the introduction. Let me share my screen here and get my slides back up. All right, does that look okay? Can you see slides, everything? Yeah, that looks great. All right. I can keep the chat going here just in case so I can see things pop up. All right. Let's get started. Thanks, everybody, for coming this afternoon, this evening, wherever you are. It's great to see a couple of old familiar faces, Jean-Christophe Dupart and Sukhpia Young are friends and colleagues from long-term collaborations here. And it's also great to see a handful of folks who I've never met, so I look forward to interacting with you as best we can. It's always a little bittersweet to do talks online because you want to be in person, but it's also a wonderful chance to be able to do this at all, since I obviously can't travel to London mid-semester right now. So this is a chance for me to, this is the second time I've given a chance, I've had a chance to present my new book. The title of the book is Upland Geopolitics, Postwar Laos and the Global Land Rush. You can see a shot of the cover here in the lower right. The book came out last fall, so it came out in September from the University of Washington Press. For those of you who are Southeast Asianists in the group, you may know some other titles in the series, it's in a series called Culture, Place and Nature. So for example, Pam McElwee's book on Vietnam, Forest or Gold is in that series, as well as John Padway's Fragmented Memories, Disturbed Forests, as well as a book that I'll talk a little bit more about called Turning Land into Capital. I'll say more about that in a couple of minutes. Ordinarily, I am not a huge fan of talks that are read, and so I'm going to try to give as much of a spontaneous talk as I can. Since it is a book talk, I'm going to read a couple of excerpts, and I'm a little bit nervous about doing that because it showcases the prose of the book, which is a scary thing as an author. But I really have tried to write the book in a way that is, that moves narratively and that can be accessible and hopefully used in undergraduate and graduate classes. So I wanted to give you at least a flavor of some of the text, so I'm going to do that starting actually pretty soon. I'll say more about the project as a whole in a couple of minutes, but I wanted to start with the opening sketch of the book for an end to not preface it with too much framing for reasons that I think will be obvious once, once I read it. So let me start there. I gotta get my slides to advance. Here we go. So the passage I'm about to read is about this map that you're that you can see here. A large hand-painted map greets visitors to the rubber tree nursery just outside of Yang Pukah, a rural district capital in northwestern Laos, taking up much of the second story wall of the nursery's main building. The map itself is long and formal. Land use map of the 3000 hectare rubber planting promotion project, the Yang Pukah district of Bolisa LTD Yunnan Province People's Republic of China. Despite its size and prominent display, however, the map itself is easy to miss. Aside from its thickly painted title, little else is visible. Its thin black lines and faded yellow patches blend in with the weathered off-right background. The legend lightly sketched out in the in the maps bottom right corner has yet to be filled in at all. When my Lao colleagues and I first came across this map in 2007, it was barely legible. This was not simply because it was hard to see, even when the image came into view, it was still impossible to read. It makes sense because they contain symbols that tie or index them to the real world. This map had no visible indices, at least none that our team, a research delegation from Laos' National Land Management Authority, could make out. The cartography itself gave few visual clues about what the various lines or patches might represent, and no obvious symbols for roads, rivers, villages, or prominent landmarks linked its faintly drawn polygons to the landscape around us. You can see the faintly drawn polygons in a little bit more detail. The legend, the missing legend didn't help either. It was as if the whole thing had been drawn to announce the project's presence without actually giving away anything about its operations. Our confusion stemmed from the fact that we were seeing this formal geography of rubber plantation promotion for the first time. We were thus limited to the sorts of inquiries reserved for unprepared visitors. What was the project doing? Where was it working and with whom? How far along was it? When would the rubber trees mature? Had we understood the map, we might have asked why the project was targeting agriculturally zoned land for conversion to industrial tree crops, a violation of central government food security policy designed to prevent the replacement of food crops by industrial tree plantations. We might also have asked how the project was impacting local land holdings, since as we would later learn, the project's greatest conversions of food production land to rubber plantations were in the district's poorest and most socially vulnerable villages. Finally, we might have pushed harder to find out exactly what project planners and local authorities meant by rubber plantation promotion. The word in Lao is song sum. Since later, we would discover that this term meant different things in different places. These were the questions that mattered. As it was, however, the map confronted us as an inscrutable black box. Unable to open it, we could only ask the polite questions reserved for visitors. So this passage gives you a sense of both the ethnographic voice of the book, but also the key case around which the book is constructed, as well as two of the key themes that permeate the book itself. The key case is Chinese bilateral cooperation in Northwestern Laos. It took place largely over the last two decades. In the book I focused specifically on the year 2000. When China's going out policy began, and I ended in 2018, which is when I last was able to do fieldwork before having to submit the final manuscript. The themes that come through briefly but which I'll talk more about in the talk are first the unevenness of the enclosure process, but also the invisibility of enclosure itself or what I in the book I develop as the theme of bureaucratic illegibility or just the difficulties of figuring out where enclosures are taking place. In the book, I frame this in terms of an intervention into really two big questions around the phenomenon of transnational land deals that really began in the early to mid 2000s, and that were recognized later in the decades starting in around 2008 as a new global land rush or in some framings a new global land grab. And the two questions I frame here in terms of a reaction to a quote from a grand study scholar Mark Edelman, who in 2013 talked about the global land rush as an accelerated process of dispossession that was clearly in motion. One of the things that you see as you start to study it in the field is that it's highly uneven. And in terms of two of the words that I've already mentioned to that are you sometimes hear the word land rush and land grab. In terms off of each other in terms of one of the defining questions of the book, which is what turns a land rush in a general sense into a land grab or a particular or a series of land grabs in particular places in times. And then secondly, the second question really comes out of some of the findings of the first, which hinge on the state's involvement in creating space for enclosures. The second question is has to do with the difficulties of governments themselves in terms of keeping track of their own land deals. And that's why don't states themselves seem to know often where their own land grabs are. And this is one of the questions that really emerged to me, to me from some of the ethnographic field work that I was doing, not only out in the field, but with government officials in Laos. In the book. I really I take these questions in sequence. And in this talk, in order to keep things manageable. Mike asked me to talk for roughly an hour and I'm going to try to get in a little bit under an hour, but I'm really going to focus mostly on this first question of what turns a land rush into a land grab. In some cases, but not in others. I'm going to gesture a little bit to this second question about bureaucratic eligibility, and I'm happy to talk about it more in the q amp a, but that's not going to be a major focus of the talk. In the, the project. Let me just do an outline. I'm going to say a little bit about the project as a whole before I get into really two pieces that underlie the question, the answer to this, this first question. The first is to look at contemporary land deals along an area that I'll call the northern economic corridor in northwestern Laos. But the second requires backing up in time and to look at what I'll describe as denationalization of the law uplands that were that really stemmed from American Cold War intervention in Laos in the 60s and 70s. So if if the first part of the story that I'm going to tell today is essentially a Laos China story. The second part is actually a US allows us story. And it's the intersection of those things through the transition from the Cold War period to really the post Cold War period in the 90s and early 2000s that created the space for a lot of the land deals that I that I was studying. So, first, before we get into the details of the story, let me just start with a bit about the project. The project itself is going to look at these large Chinese rubber plantations in northwestern Laos that came out of this era of development cooperation. When I went to Laos, I actually was trying to study World Bank development assistance in the hydropower sector, and it was only through a series of events and delays and negotiations that I got pulled up to the north and traded western development for Chinese companies as the focus of my of my interest. And actually this was the result of a series of conversations that were happening within both the development, the international development community in Laos, as well as among law regulators in the capital, who I was getting to know through the course of preliminary my actual fieldwork, who were increasingly concerned about land deals that were taking place all over the country. And increasingly didn't really have good data about to sort of cross check with the stories that they were hearing about. One of the things that pulled me to the north was that in contrast to a lot of the large land concessions that were being given directly to companies in the central and southern parts of the country. There was allegedly a more cooperative mode of international plantation development cooperation that was taking place among with Chinese companies in Laos communities up in the north. And I'll say more a little bit about this in the second part of the talk, but this alternative to the large land grab was initially what pulled me to the north. As gestured to from the opening sketch things got a little bit more complicated and so what I was ended up looking at were actually quasi concessionary projects, but they were traveling under a different heading so I'll get to that in a little bit. As I mentioned in the, in the opening sketch I was collaborating with the, an institution called the National Land Management Authority, and my work with them was ultimately the thing that let me to be able to have the sorts of maps like you're seeing here. In fact, already you should see a contrast between the sort of fumbling around in the field that I described in the opening sketch and the precision of the data that you can see here on this map. This map was not available to us when we were doing our field work, and it wasn't really produced until around 2012 1314. This actually relies on data for a bunch of different sources but the whole process of producing this data is is actually part of the story that the book tries to show. So the wider context for this thing called the global land rush or the global land grab is partly represented here in a map from 2008 that was published in the Guardian, right as this thing called the global land grab was starting to take off. And what you can see here is lots of big numbers, but very low levels of precision. And it turned out that a lot of the data that came out of this, these early reports was actually pretty bad, but it was still pointing to things that were happening. But what has happened is that over the years, even as we've seen more precise maps emerge in particular places like Laos and here. There have been efforts to track land deals more broadly. And in many cases the same problems of poor data illegibility, what sometimes glossed as wheat governance has really stuck around and you see this this is from just from last year for a project that called a land matrix that's tried to keep track of these land deals all over the place. My work here you can see the book on the left, but I wanted to give a plug for another book project that I've been part of as well. And one of my co authors from this book is even in the talk here. And both of these books try to get underneath the numbers and really look at transnational land deals and transnational land access using a more regional and historical lens. And that's not to say that the numbers don't matter, but that even when the numbers are bad or confusing, there's there's a story there that we don't necessarily need to get good numbers to try to tell. And so if the story that I'm going to focus on today is mostly about Laos and it's mostly really about Northwestern Laos. There's also been some efforts to tell the story to tell a different version of this story at a regional scale. And so I wanted to at least plug this this book, turning land into capital that's essentially a parallel project about development and transnational possession in the Mekong region. Getting closer to to the field work and the story itself. As I said I got pulled north from initial from an initial interest in hydropower and ended up looking at this thing that you can see on this map called the northern economic corridor, which is a road that was actually followed an old caravan between Southern China and Northern Thailand that dates back hundreds of years, but that was really imagined as part of the northern. Sorry, as part of the, what the Asian Development Bank called the Greater Mekong sub region. During some regional connectivity efforts that started in the 90s, and have really taken off over the last decade and a half. This led to the paving of this road that really took place during the piece of during during the extent of my field work so when I started field work in 2005. It basically looked like this is a road that as you can see from the map connects the borderlands of Southern Union to right near Chiang Rai in Northern Thailand. And over the course of its paving and straightening and development. Turn that trip from depending on when you were going either an all day drive or possibly an impassable drive entirely during parts of the rainy season into a pretty reliable. Three or four hour trip. Between down a paved bitumen straightened road and this this is what it looks like now. I got to study a lot of the, you could say the discussions with roadside communities that were going through the consultation process for the road development, and one of the big things that really jumped out at me from studying the process itself was that as sorry I have a map that I'll show I'll show you in a little bit. But there wasn't a whole lot of mitigation that was done proactively in terms of protecting the landscape that surrounded this road. And so in many ways, the paving of this road opened up a whole regional geography. There was a land rush that then took place in the general road corridor itself. And so that brings me to the second part of the talk, which is the first part of this answer to why do land grabs happen where they do and how they do. And this follows the theme of the phrase but in this case the literal phrase where the rubber meets the road. So here, I want to go back to the district. I mentioned in the, in the opening sketch that I read the district of being caught, you can see exactly where this is. And if you look at the inset map on the upper right here. And this is a district that is in the, the border province of long time talk, which Laos shares right on the border of China and Myanmar. And Yang Puka is an interior district it doesn't actually touch China. And so it's an area that was made newly accessible when this northern economic corridor was paved. And so, unlike some of the borderland communities up in the northern part of the province communities in being Puka hadn't really been experimenting with rubber. And so when this road was paved, there was a huge amount of interest in roadside lands for new rubber development, some of which were done by Chinese companies in ways that I'll describe a little bit more. And so this brings me to the second excerpt that I want to read from the text. It's a little bit longer than the first one. And it touches on a place that I'll, that I'm going to call Ketnam Fah and this is what Ketnam Fah looks like in 2008. The, the excerpt that I'm going to read takes place 10 years later when I when I went back to visit to, to do some follow up fieldwork. So on the table in front of us, the piece of tuber is roughly the size of an adult's fist. It is early July of 20 of 2018, and I am back in being Puka following up on the rubber planted here during the boom years of the mid 2000s. My informant is a Lao man of about 50, a village official who is telling me about his days as a labor broker for bullysot LTD the Chinese company whose plantations are at the center of the rubber boom here. I'm outside at a small wooden table under a sunshade next to the village's single dirt road. I've been here before a few times, mostly in the months after my colleagues and my run in with the company map recounted above. For all the changes that the last decade has brought to northern Laos, the village looks remarkably similar. The houses are still mostly old and wooden. The road is still unpaved, although the rain from the early morning, the rain from early this morning is thankfully keeping the house down. The upland and upland rice fields green with the this year's new growth still line the surrounding hills. My informant is telling me about the past and about the transition to the present. A few minutes earlier he had called over a child from the village and had had him go get something from a nearby house. This something it turns out is a piece of wild cassava or Manpa that he uses to punctuate his story. In 2000s my informant had been in charge of recruiting training and managing residents of this and the surrounding villages to work for bullies on LTD first clearing and terracing the land. As you can see in the photo here from 2008 and planting and weeding the company's young rubber plantations, but as the seedlings matured and planting and weeding gave way to rubber tapping. And here his account turn takes the turn that it must in order to accommodate the current situation. The jobs have gone largely to imported workers from a neighboring district. They're dormitory he gestures to a nearby rich is just over there down a feeder road that bisects one of the company's large plantations. Our village is Muser he says referencing one of the ethnic groups who live in the mountainous borderlands of Northwestern Laos. The term is from the Burmese word for hunter. It's literally based in the mountains in the forest moving from place to place and quote. He refers to the community inclusively our village, but from his description and his roles as a labor broker and village official, it is clear that he is himself an outsider, appointed by the district government to help bring development to a village that is seen as among the poorest of the poor. The people here are very poor, they do shift in cultivation he explains rehearsing the link between poverty and upland rice farming that one often hears across Southeast Asia and beyond. In terms of the community's relationship with boys that LTD, his account becomes pointed again. But this year, he says the rats came a lot to the upland fields, there are limited lands in the village because the company has a lot of the land, which limits agricultural production for households without lowland rice paddies and in this hilly landscape this means the majority. They have to eat wild cassava because of the rats. We're sitting in the middle in the middle of an area local authorities call ket num fa, a small upland valley and being from district located in Northwestern Laos is long and top province and go back to the locator map here. In Lao language ket means area or zone and the num fa is the local river tributary of the make on. And as you can see here on the map and the inset joins the larger make on river about halfway where it flows out of China and it's passage through the tri-border golden triangle, so called where Laos meet Thailand and Myanmar. Here and across northern Laos more broadly the rubber boom of the 2000s, supposed to embody the win win development cooperation, conjured in the Laos is so called three plus two development policy, a loose reference to contract farming formed around 2005 that I'll say more about in a minute. In the policy Chinese companies would provide the financing markets and technical training, the three in three plus two to allow farmers who would use their own land and labor, the two to grow rubber. A decade ago as I finished the bulk of the research for this book, this promise of cooperative development was already fraying as Chinese companies large as Chinese companies large plantations like this one had already by far outpaced smallholder contract in the intervening years, the land grab whose early stages I witnessed in 2006 seven and eight had been cemented into place. Well it's not LTD's plantations had matured and expanded rubber tapping had and processing had begun. And as already mentioned, the already limited wage work had gone increasingly to outsiders, the tuber on the table the man pa, some summed up this transition poignantly. This is what it looked like when I when I went back in 2008 you can see the rubber canopy has closed. There's still the, the remnants of shifting cultivation fields here on the horizon. Many of these have been pushed into a national protected area so, in addition to making local communities work, walk farther farther in order to get to their subsistence farming land. They were also increasingly being criminalized by being displaced into a protected area. So, I want to focus here for a second on this policy that I mentioned on what was called three plus two cooperation. And I want to read a quote here that I spend a bit of time unpacking the book that comes from a provincial agreement between the province of long time as well as three of the other provinces here in the northwestern part of the country, the province of long time as well as Udom Sai and Bokeo, which together sort of made a block of the provinces at the gateway to China. And the policy outlined a vision for plantation development that was actually supposed to be the opposite of large scale plantation concessions to companies, and it went like this, the cooperative agreed to be the three plus two policy, namely investors are responsible for three aspects capital technique and marketing villagers are responsible for two aspects labor and land in accordance with state land management. So, as I mentioned, this is a model that sort of evokes contract farming where companies provide inputs and communities actually do the growing, and then they produce the commodity under an outrower scheme. And as it happened though there was actually a fair bit of debate about first how to operationalize this policy. And the more I learned the more it became clear that this policy itself was in effect, an effort to try to settle a debate between provincial officials who wanted a more smallholder friendly business model to this cooperative investment to sorry to transnational rubber development cooperation, compared to companies who really wanted land concessions, and wanted to be able to control the land themselves. What you can see here is, this is from a proposal. Back and forth series of negotiations between Lao provincial officials and Chinese companies that took place in 2004 or five and six. And what what this was really about was the extent to which plans for large scale cooperation. We're going to be divided between these two business models of contract farming on the one hand versus concessions directly to companies on the other hand. There was an agreement that had been made essentially at the bilateral level. So the top level of the law government in cooperation with Chinese authorities to develop roughly 10,000 hectares of rubber plantations cooperatively in each of the three provinces. But as things then trickled down to the provincial and district levels, there was real pushback by local officials in terms of how these 10,000 hectares were going to be allocated to these different business models. What you can see here is that Lao minute Lao Lao ministry officials said that there was plenty of land plenty of labor, and it should it should not be a problem to develop these 30,000 hectares of rubber in the northwest. And as you got closer and closer to the ground, and in particular the details for these two different modes of development were a real sticking point through much of the early 2000s. And one of the ways that this came through to me was in rival proposals from the Lao Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, and a company that was incorporated in Laos as the Sino Lao rubber company, which I'm not going to go through the details here. The numbers but what you can see is that there are very different sets of valuation in terms of what Lao officials compared to Chinese companies thought it would cost in order to develop a plantation of of a hectic a one hectare rubber plantation. Because the valuation of inputs to a plantation to a hector of plantation, say a lot in terms of the ownership of that ultimate of the ultimate plantation. Because if you look at the Lao Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry's calculations, they actually see a lot of the value of that development in the labor of Lao smallholders. If you look at some of the numbers in terms of the on the right side, the value from smallholder labor on the company side as you can see here captured in the statistics at the bottom here the summary at the bottom is 36% in the company proposal whereas it's almost two thirds in of the value in the in the ministry's proposal. What I just gestured to was an effort to really essentially kick the can down the road and to kick it down to the village level. In terms of companies negotiating with village authorities and with district authorities in terms of where these projects were actually going to go. The overall dimension of this whole setup for the uneven land grabbing that resulted. I gestured to this before but I wanted to come back to this map. This is a map from the Asian Development Bank's mitigation scheme for the building or the paving of this road. The idea is that most of the mitigation work when it comes to land compensation and land planning happened directly in the road corridor within about 50 meters of the center line so immensely close to the center line. What didn't happen in is everything that's sort of within an economically viable distance of the road but outside this immediate center line. All of these villages that were opened up by the paving of of the road corridor were essentially ripe for a land rush that were essentially forced to rely on existing land and property relations in those villages, which often varied significantly. And this is what brings me to the second part of the answer to this question. Which takes place via the, you could say the intersection of the property rights that existed in to in the early 2000s, and the longer trajectories of resettlement that stemmed from the whole recovery and resettlement period after the Cold War. To come back here. Let me start with the map that I showed you here before. This is where the plantations actually ended up. But in order to get to this point, we need to think about Northwestern Laos in a very different way. So I want you to forget for a couple seconds not only about the plantations, but even about the roads and the development corridors and all the stuff that make this landscape the contemporary connected development landscape that it is today. And now I want to take you back to 1972. This is a representation of the northern part of Laos. And I want you to focus here on specifically the area that's represented here is military region one in northern Laos. And as you can see here, there are no roads to speak of whatsoever that show up in this area. This is a period when Laos was engulfed in the by by this point the end stages of the wider what is often in the US called the second inner China war sometimes called the Vietnam War in Laos this is often called the secret war. In 1972 it was not. It was much less than secret secret it was it was pretty well known. But this map comes from a report that was commissioned by the Rand Corporation in the mid 60s action in the early 70s in order to make sense of the Laos is sorry of the US secret war in Laos. And the key thing here is that even though there was a lot of action around this area the plane of jars and northeastern Laos, in ways that you may be familiar with if you if you've studied the secret war. There's actually a fair bit going on up in the northwest as well. And all of this stuff turned on on the the geography of roadlessness or remoteness. This is the period. And you can see in the background here this map from when President Kennedy was spoke about the Laotian crisis in 1962. Similarly there's there's no there's no infrastructure that's reaching up into the northwest part of Laos. And this really exemplified in the extreme, the way that American policymakers understood Laos as a country. And part of what the book goes into is the ways in which this imagining led to a series of military interventions in northern Laos during the 60s and 70s, which in many ways were were predicated on isolation, and what I call the denationalization of upland territory in Laos. And this had to do with imagining Laos as something other than a real country. So I want to read just an excerpt here from Bloufard from this is Douglas Bloufard's report that contained the map above called unconventional war in Laos. History and terrain have divided the land into separate regions with little to bind these together. The population is a mixture of races and religions of primitive hill tribes and lowland paddy growing Lao peasants who regard each other with fear and hostility. Although in control of the government and its military forces, the ethnic Lao comprise less than half the population. And this Lao minority is a collection of rival clans who share a little in the sense of national purpose, but regard the government and the public service as an arena where they compete for influence and power to enrich themselves. The country as a whole is underdeveloped in every way, a limited road network connects the main towns along the Mekong River, but with few exceptions avoids the hinterland, a rugged road less expansive jungle hills and limestone ridges. And that description was really written to describe Laos as a whole and in many ways underlay the US's shift from engaging in the urban political milieu of Laos, and in electoral politics from the mid 1950s until around the time of the so called crisis in 1962, at which point, the US really shifted gears, got out of the urban milieu of politics and really started working with upland minority groups in very in strategically located parts of the country. For those of you who know something about the history of this period in Laos, the Mong were what one historian called the right tribe in the right place at the right time, because they lived around this area known as the Plain of Jars in northeastern Laos. But up in the up in the northwest, the US was doing something similar, not to fight the battles with the North Vietnamese Army, but to keep an eye on the roads in China, because as part of the US's escalation strategy in Vietnam. We were trying to push gently in term toward escalation but to do so without bringing China into the war. This is taking place in an era before satellite observation. And so much of what was going on in the Northwest stemmed from a CIA base that was established in 1962 at a place right in the heart of the borderlands between what is now Luang Nam Ta and Bokeo provinces that was called Nam Nhu. And the base at Nam Nhu was essentially built to spy on Southern China and to watch the roads to make sure that the Chinese army wasn't mobilizing militarily to either invade northern Laos or to come down into Thailand, which would have been from from the US and its allies perspective even worse. So, in order to get us back to the land deals that took place, roughly 30 years later, I want to zoom us in on this area that that you can see here in in the in the red rectangle. And here I want to bring in a map from Al McCoy's book, The Politics of heroin, where he really helped to help my research a lot in terms of outlining the geography of what Blauphar called the tribal program in Laos, which he also described as a rather complex organization designed to avoid outright conflict with the Geneva Accords of 1962, which under international law made Laos a neutral country. So, part of what took place in the aftermath of the Geneva Accords took place through the US Agency for international development through private airlines that were known, one of which was called Air America. Which worked essentially outside of the legal definitions of military intervention but in ways that were very much military intervention. And I'm going to zoom in in a minute further on this square on this additional red square. What you can see here is before I zoom in, a series of trajectories that connected Northwestern Laos into the borderlands of Southern Union and an Eastern Burma to carry out these road watch operations that allowed the US to keep track of what was going on in Southern China. But if any of these teams had been discovered to have plausible deniability, because they were using people from ethnic groups that were that lived on multiple on on all three sides of the tri-border area. So these were ethnic groups that were found in Laos as well as in Burma, Sean State as well as in Southern Union. And if you zoom in more closely here you start to get back to the landscape scale at which these rubber projects were taking place. And I want to talk you through this map first and then I'll show us another map that was from the book in a minute. This map here that you're seeing is from a US military map that was made in the 1970s that shows in red the secret landing sites that underlay this infrastructure of moving road watch teams around northern Laos and sending them into China and into Burma. LS stands here for landing sites. And I want to alert your attention to landing sites 118 and 118 a in the lower left here in what is now Bokeo province of northwestern Laos, and this is the 118 a is the CIA base that I mentioned at a place called now new, but scattered in this landscape with these other landing sites are other names of villages that have since disappeared from the landscape. In the lower center you can see Ban Meo Nua, northwest of that a little bit you can see Kha's Kuiz, you can see Ban Mua Sua, you can see Ban Yao and lastly you can see Ban Ka. These are all American renderings of upland village names that evokes a different, different upland ethnicities of people who were subsequently resettled involuntarily out of this region, and either fled as refugees into Thailand, and many, many of whom subsequently ended up as refugees or for people who stayed, they were resettled to the east, and ended up in this area right around LS 152, which is the district center of being Puka, which is now a district center where where the road passes through and I'll show you that last thing to point out about this map is that you can see shaded here in the polygon that is the same rough shape of the rubber project that I started out with back earlier in the talk. And now as I switch the slides you can see this a little bit in a little bit more detail. This is a map from the book that shows both the resettlement that I just gestured to, which is, you can see this resettlement that says to Khetnam Phat this is people who were who were settled resettled forcibly. From what became the frontier between Long Nam Ta and Bokeo province. These resettlements took place in a series of years, some in the 1980s, some in the 1990s, some even in the early 2000s. There were repeated resettlements. Sometimes they were responses to local forms of anti government activity. Sometimes the resettlements were failures and led people to leave and move back to some of their old villages. And that was essentially a repeated process that led government officials from being caught to try to move people in to this area that was subsequently known as Khetnam Phat. So to put it briefly Khetnam Phat ended up as a resettlement zone for people and descendants of communities who had been involved in being in the wrong side of the war. The main set of arrows that you can see here are labeled with this, the terms to bad, the words to bandang and to ban a dome. And these are two villages that I talked about a fair bit in the book. These are very different sets of resettlement. And these are resettlements that were voluntary and that were offered to members of communities that were seen as being on the right side during the war. So, being on the side of the Patet Lao, and the ultimately victorious side of the Lao People's Democratic Republic. And some communities that were essentially offered land that had been made available by the forced resettlement of people out of the Western frontier between these two provinces. And so you get these two sets of resettlement one coerced one voluntary that are happening roughly in parallel. And there's back and forth there's sequences that I get to in more detail in the book. There's two people resettling into these villages of bandang and ban Udom, the, and the former of which is one of the ones that ended up in the rubber project. And, as I mentioned earlier, there was this debate that was sort of taking place at the provincial scale about whether Chinese rubber companies should be offered concessions or contract farming schemes that would be more pro small and the way that that debate got resolved was essentially at the village scale. So many of the villages that were enrolled into this project were villages that were exemplified by bandang here. And these were the villages that essentially got the pro smallholder contract farming schemes. And in contrast, the people who ended up in bandang got much more enclosure heavy concession like that are schemes that were framed under under this contract farming language but that were essentially coerced concessions. So this brings me to the last excerpt that I want to read from the book here, and this is from much later in the book, where I'm talking about this geography in more detail and this is this is Kenham. Kenham Faw's land base was made was not made available to bully sat LTB, the bully sat LTB, despite the president, the presence, sorry, of local residents, but because of them. They're relatively recent resettlement from the district's Western frontier meant that Kenham Faw's residents were treated as de facto awards of the state to whom government officials and technical staff had a special obligation, however self interested in paternalistic. This is the livelihood development paternalism features widely in many in many development contexts, both in and out of Laos in Kenham Faw this took an especially exaggerated form. If residents displacement from the frontier had been in the interest of wider security concerns, keeping them in Kenham Faw was seen to be part of the same suite of objectives. The closures created there were thus aimed at least initially, not just at making land available to bully sat LTB, but at bringing much needed capital to an ongoing sedentarization and livelihood reconstruction effort. In my interviews with local officials, it quickly became clear that this effort was a fraught one, taking land from communities that were already seen to be among the if not the poorest of the poor was both an outcome and an impression that local officials were keen to avoid. As district agriculture and forestry officials thus echoed the three plus two policy rhetoric in noting their general preference for contract farming over concessions, and they took great care to explain that the four plus one plantations in Kenham Faw were something other than concessions. In multiple accounts, their emphasis was not on land being taken but on the financial and technical resources that rubber investment was bringing to a landscape where villagers attachment to the land was already tenuous at best. One district official thus insisted to me that rubber plant this is the quote rubber plantation is helping coolie people. This is one of the ethnic groups that was resettled because it's giving them 30% of the new plantation by developing land that they won't use anyway. They go to the forest cut a new Sweden make a new house plant and harvest the rice and then move on and do it all again in the next in a different place the next year. Another official explained the situation similarly linking the land allocation to bullies on LTD to the specific challenges confronting the effort to establish permanent livelihoods in Kenham Faw quote the reason for four plus one here as opposed to three plus two elsewhere. The four plus one is is the more concession like variant wherein the land was taken from the cup from villages and the management of the production was organized by the companies themselves in concession like fashion. The reason for four plus one here as opposed to three plus two contract farming elsewhere is because these villages are our minority ethnic groups without permanent settlement they shift from place to place depending on their Sweden farming. So according to central government policy and district policy to help this group have consistent villages and permanent houses. State officials asked the company to invest in these villages specifically to plant rubber because rubber is a permanent isn't is it is permanent farming. It was hard to land that's the end of the quote. It was hard to have a land grab the rationale seemed to be if the social link between the village and the land was missing in the first place. This was certainly spin but it was not merely that just as the resettlement of this ethnic ethnic group. It was referred to by the district officials as the Kui but by themselves as the lahoo. So just as lahoo resettlement had been tenuous and ambiguous on the Western frontier. So it remained in Ketnam Faw. Ketnam Faw exemplified this extreme structural poverty that has become associated with the with with what is called focal site development in Laos. The perspective resettlement that as one development worker explained to me in 2007 had occurred without the full consent of those involved and had resulted in high levels of post resettlement mortality. Up with up to 20% of villagers dying in the first couple of years after the move and old people and children suffering most of all resettlement here the same informant continued was a multi temporal process pursuit pursued. So he was speaking about 2007 with an avowed development rationale but in the past seemingly associated more with issues of national national security and quote. This was echoed in other accounts as well, such as the one described in Ketnam Faw's origins in the 1996 government efforts to resettle groups of lahoo who returned to the Western frontier after an after an initial early, earlier resettlement after the war didn't last. In my informants a rural development consultant with long term experience in the area captured this dynamic in describing one of Ketnam Faw's settlements as a failing village. People don't stay here he told me trying to explain the extreme poverty in a part of the country that was already very poor. They sell rice, they sell the rice land they receive from development projects, and they don't know how to raise livestock. They don't know how to raise the livestock that projects give them the army periodically goes out to the forest rounds them up brings them back and leaves, after which they trickle out again. Sorry, bullysot LTD's efforts thus fit, at least initially within a popular management scheme within a population management scheme aimed at keeping Ketnam Faw's residents anchored in place. There were a mix of wage work, the provision of rubber seedlings and a long term plan to allocate them 30% of the company's plantation lands under this model that I've called four plus one. The mix of land partition and wage work exemplified the concession like nature of the scheme, contrasting with the three plus two model in ways that exemplified my provincial informants concerned that these projects were not actually contract farming projects despite being labeled as such. But the four plus one schemes also differed from the concession model, occupying an intermediate position on the enclosure spectrum between contract farming and concessions, because of the planned partition of plantation land. This partial enclosure was a key piece of why tree or land division was attractive to allow authorities throughout the Northwest. It enticed companies to invest and provides wage work in the short term, like the concessions, but it also offered the promise of a transition to smallholder contract farming once the partition took place. The plan returned in 2018, however, although much had changed this initial plan to keep village to keep villagers in place had not been forgotten. Even as the promise of rubber based livelihoods had all been evaporated. One village head I spoke to recalled that bully sought LTD had been part of the district opium eradication plan with seedlings provided only to families who had agreed to stay in the village. He summarized the argument that villagers had heard at the time from district officials and company representatives. If you come out of the forest and stop growing opium you will have better livelihood options. So that as should be clear from the excerpts that I have read was part of a promise that was made back in 2008 to try to do rubber in this collaborative way. That as 2008 gave way to the years that immediately followed really gave way to essentially a concession model, where despite the promise of dividing these plantations and giving communities 30% of the land. That never happened. The, this non happening took place differently in different villages. But when I returned, as I recall, as I recounted in 2018. The plantation were essentially being cared for by wage workers who had been brought in from other places. And such was the long term trajectory of enclosure that it was clear to me that this. It was really these earlier and very differently driven sets of migration and resettlement processes that were to a substantial degree, driving the property relations in these different villages, especially in the absence of the formal land of entitling or zoning that you might expect a longer a new road corridor. So, I'm here I want to talk briefly about just a few final thoughts. The first is just, I think to close in terms of saying that I think it's likely that legacies of earlier political conflict underlie various forms of what I've called. Socially uneven. The, the intersection of what I call in the book, the intersection of property and citizen and effective citizenship. And this is especially the case in landscapes that don't have a lot of formal documents that are documenting property rights in a legal sense. I haven't really talked about the last third of the book here which gets into the legal geography of land titling and zoning. And the, the story that comes out of that is partially that the absence of strong legal property rights is what allows these earlier legacies to come through when it comes to the fights over property ownership. The story turns out to be a little bit more complicated than that, in the sense that these zoning maps actually help create some of the obfuscation for the poor numbers that as I mentioned before underlie continuing statistical measurements of the global land rush. And so that legal geography is what allows me to then come back to these larger efforts to keep track of land deals, both within Laos and the by extension and implications elsewhere across the global south. And that there's a whole geography of ongoing property formalization that in some cases comes out of the development world of international development cooperation and land titling projects. To some extent, it also comes out of local and internal government efforts to keep track of land itself, and to fight over jurisdiction for internal territory. Often this has to do with the management of timber and the allocation of timber rents. This is a story that I tell in the second part of the book in much more detail, I haven't had time to go into it here. Anyway, the timber economy is the tail that's wagging the dog of land use zoning that's getting in the way of keeping track of all of the statistics here. Lastly, that I think one of the things that I think this case helps us think a little bit more about is the role of the state. The era where neoliberalism, especially in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis has increasingly developed a bad name. And in the story that I've told state intervention, by and large, has resulted in some pretty bad things in terms of the management of the resettlement process by the law government, as well as the role of zoning. In terms of creating space for land grabs in these especially vulnerable communities. One of the things that I didn't talk about in the talk though is the way in which there was actually a pretty big subsidy program that underlay a lot of the Chinese rubber projects that were coming into northern Laos, the northwestern, or northeastern Myanmar as well, that sought to subsidize Chinese companies in ways that would help them work with communities in order to stem the tide of opium into China's heroin market. And this is actually a much, I think, more positive spin on post neoliberal development and the potential role of the state in terms of helping development close the gap between corporate interests and the livelihood needs of the communities that they're working with. And here this this gestures to some work that I've done in the book but also some ongoing work that I've done with my colleague Juliet Liu, in terms of looking at this opium replacement subsidy program. I'm going to tell not only the ways that it didn't work but what could have been had these subsidy monies been regulated by the Chinese government a little bit more carefully in terms of stemming that gap and allowing companies to collaborate with Lao communities more along the lines initially imagined by this three plus two contract farming scheme. The reason that the three plus two scheme broke down was because the companies weren't really offering terms that were good enough for many of the farmers who wanted to participate in rubber to actually make it worth their while. So, this is the, you can see there, there was a slippage from the low uptakes of the three plus two schemes into the more concession heavy enclosure heavy deals, like took place in in Vietnam far, but had there been a little bit more over the subsidy program, there actually could have been a very different story going on here. And so I think we're still very much in an era where the hand of the state is going to be present in in somewhere and although the this is in many ways a cautionary tale in terms of the way that that hand has has pushed in the wrong direction. I think there's a lot of interesting counterfactual here that we could talk more about in terms of how it could have been done better and hopefully in the future with a little bit more oversight from various corners could be could move in a more positive direction. So, I want to stop there. And let's me turn it over to Michael for a little bit, and then hopefully we'll get into some q amp a. Oh, thank you very much Michael is very interesting presentation. I'm not going to have all those specifics to give you very detailed questions to begin with but maybe we can keep it very broad. And it just seems part of this is of what's happening obviously is the kind of thing James Scott is talking about with states not liking mobile populations. And I wonder if this is the part of the motive for Laos here is that do they, is this a larger problem in Laos with these different groups. Another thought I had was that you have also have tribal groups on the Chinese side of the border and I'm wondering if Chinese business businesses have operated the same way on the Chinese side of the border as you are with these land grabs in the Laotian portion. One thing is that, of course, what we, when, when those of us who don't deal with Laos, hear about loss is mostly about the damming of the may con and the ecological damage done being done there. I'm not seeing this come out with the land grabs so much because it's rubber I would imagine is not as ecologically damaging but is this is something that's happening on land paralleling the ecological ecological damage being done to the river way. Great questions. Okay, let me try to take these in turn. Yeah, Scott. James Scott's both seeing like a state and also his more recent. What's the 2009 book the art of not being governed. In many ways are unavoidable if you want to write about up in Southeast Asia and Laos in particular. Mobile populations is a tricky one. One of the chapters that I didn't talk about here is about the 80s and 90s in Laos is timber landscape, and that has a sort of a simpler Scott type narrative in terms of how communities are seen as mobile in the way resisting state intervention and need to be moved out of the way in order to make space for timber and for state forest management. In in the story that I was telling here, there are bits of that but they're actually, and this is why I took such pains to make that map with that with the dual sets of trajectories. One of the things that I spend a good bit of time talking about in the book is the way that upland populations are not only a hindrance for the state but they're also really important resources for the state. And in that sense, there's, it's pushing back a little bit on that. I would say the oversimplified version of state simplification that simply sees people as needing to be rooted in place. And in the case that I talk about this has to do with a few different things. One is if you have people who are nailed down too much in a sort of Scotty and framework of high degrees of state legibility. It's very hard to create land availability for companies and hydropower projects and mines without giving large amounts of compensation. And so Laos is like a lot of governments in the global south here on the on the one hand, trying to keep track of its population. But in, but also trying to do so in ways that doesn't nail it down too much in terms of making land acquisition too expensive. One of the things that I've started thinking more about in terms since I've since I've finished the manuscript, because I don't talk a lot about the ways in which the government keeps track of populations through things like the household census books that are maintained at the village level and the household level and ID cards. Laos is very well inventoryed. Let's talk a little bit about this in an opening sketch at the beginning of chapter four with with a map that shows up in the, in the, in the provincial museum. But this inventorying is also mirrored on the other hand with a pretty loose set of representations when it comes to least legal, legal land zoning and property. There, there's some of that, trying to nail people down but also the extent to which mobile. So available land and also mobile labor is a is a huge resource for district government officials. And to some degree provincial ones. One of the anecdotes that I didn't talk about but that I talk about in the book has to do with district officials recruiting villages. They live in national protected areas to move to the borderlands of the province, in order to essentially grab land from the neighboring provinces because the provincial boundaries are not very meaningful when it comes to the actual access of the timber that sits in those remote areas. There's there's a lot of population mobility that is also deployed by government officials in terms of trying to do their own business deals. That sort of pushes back on that on the, the Scott type approach but there is very much a Scotty and dimension to to the sort of upland mode upland mobility as a security threat. So what's going on on the Chinese side of the border. So, in many ways, the rubber deals that have happened in northern Laos and northern Burma have sought to replicate the Chinese model by bringing in Chinese companies and re you could say having having resettlement be part of that process. One of the key differences though is that is that in China the rubber market is actually heavily protected. And so a lot of the smallholders who have been involved in small holding schemes in China have actually benefited pretty significantly, because they have more reliable pricing of their rubber this is the same way. In China manages it relatively similar to Thailand and Malaysia which are also success stories when it comes to smallholder rubber development, often very heavily state managed. But the difference is in Laos, they're essentially getting the state management when it comes to the plantation schemes but not the price supports. And so the, the Chinese side is actually a, in many ways it's a happier story when it comes to the involvement and the re the managing. Well, I should have backed up a little bit in in China the, the, the plantations really started out as a state owned plantations that people were brought on to work through the through also upland consolidation and the force stabilization of shifting cultivation. But in the last, say 15 or so years, those, a lot of a lot of the laborers who were initially brought on to the state plantations have then been allowed and encouraged to develop their own small holdings. But still there's a, the protection of the Chinese rubber market makes it pretty different on the Chinese side of the border. And then the ecological damage question this is this is actually a really good question and it's one that I don't have as satisfactory an answer to as I would like to. You can certainly hear a lot of critiques of rubber in general and Chinese rubber in particular in the north for causing deforestation. And yet, the, the particular story that I saw was of active this gets back to this active role of local government in terms of shaping where the plantations happen. In the, in the research that I was conducting and in the cases that I saw the government officials were very deliberately and directly trying to keep the Chinese rubber plantations out of the national parks, and to protect the good forest and to direct the plantations into the cultivation fallows which were seen as degraded forests of the people who were on the so called beneficiary. But I would say the receiving and often the victimization and of these of these plantation schemes, because it was their farmland. So, the, the ecological destruction story you're right is not the same as it is often for the may come story be precisely because the plantations were directed into these Sweden lands which are already widely seen as reject as as degraded. So there's, this is this is part of a direction where I'm where I'm trying to go now by looking at some new research that's looking at forests and red plus and new plantation schemes. So I don't have as good an answer to that question as, as I would like and I think you're, you're on the right track by asking it. So we have three comments questions, I'll just do all three of them and then you can sort it out because we have 15 minutes I don't know how much time we have to do each one. So the from Gary Alex, commonly there was an interesting presentation thank you. This covers some of the issues I've heard of and seen in northern loss, and then began to make a few comments but didn't. That's some technical problem or something. So we don't have those comments. Patrick slack has said prior to displacement from resettlement programs and secret war in Laos, what were historical livelihoods and Luang Nam thought and Bokeh province, how have French colonial countries operated or not these two needs for agriculture and or market based interventions, for example to the East and Pong Sully, and, and some newer province, the French archives had detailed substantial poppy production by mong and which might have influence open this crash crash crops up contract farming and or wage labor. How might these pre war interventions influence further market and political power in the modern day. Do you want to take that one before we do the next. Yeah, that's a great question. So, I talk a very little bit about this in the history chapter that I glossed over very quickly but when I was talking about that Rand report from the early 70s. One of the things that I talked more about in that is this chapter two of the book is the ways that the US took the different dimensions of French colonial administration in Laos and essentially tried to repurpose them toward their own territorial and especially in the uplands. And so as Patrick points out, there was a pretty well research pretty what's now pretty well understood effort by the French to harvest opium from the uplands of Laos, same as they did in the uplands of Vietnam. And the way that they did that was through a form of indirect rule that created upland hierarchies among the opium growing groups that were seen to be culturally superior to the groups that didn't grow opium, because this is pre 55. Before opium was outlawed it was it was acknowledged as a vice but it was really it was developed as a statement, hopefully. And because of some of the debates within France about whether French should be a colonial power at all French into China really had to make its own, make its own money. And so opium was essential to the budgets of not Laos, in particular but to French into China as a whole. And so it really was the use of, as Patrick points out, upland groups like the mong and the aka. And the the me and were in particular the, the, the me and and the mong were often the, the, the local officials who were charged with collecting taxes from some of the other upland groups that were seen that were seen as less developed and in turn were given less power. So the law who fall into that group the aka fall into that group. These were groups that sometimes grew opium but sometimes would also work on the opium plantations of other communities. So, the simple answer is that there was a pretty heavy degree of indirect rule that turned a huge amount on the opium monopoly. You see traces of this, both in the upland in the, in the, the settlement and resettlement patterns of upland communities, but also in the ways that provincial officials talk about rubber. I had a number of provincial officials tell me that rubber is kind of like opium in that they both involve skilled labor tapping of a resin. And so it should be natural for upland communities to figure out how to to learn how to grow rubber because they've been growing opium for a long time. So you see it in a couple of different ways. There is also a narrative that you hear among government government officials, as well as among a lot of development professionals that essentially rehearses this earlier colonial hierarchy of the mong as highly adaptable and finally, good, good at markets, good at cash crops, good at transitions, good at seizing new opportunities and they're often contrasted with with other other upland groups some of whom are seen to be longer more indigenous residents and some but some of whom are also seem to be sort of the the newer wave of arrivals like the law. I'm going to take in reverse order because the next question, the third question is shorter than the second. The third question is the original village non far was law who she in the early 70s were those villagers moved into the cat non far. The original. That's a great question. I don't actually know my, I talk about this in the book. The extent to which I could reconstruct the resettlement trajectories really varied by time period and really by decade. And so the best information that I have is the stuff that comes from the 90s. As I get back into the 80s and especially the 70s. I have no idea. So one of the things that I'm, I think I'm pretty transparent about this in the book, but I can take the history up until about 1972. And then I know that there was a lot of disappearance of things that were on the map before but I don't know where they went. So I would, I would love to talk to William in more detail. If you drop me a note, I'd love to stay in touch. But I don't know, and I would love to know more. We have the another lengthy question the presentation though perhaps not the book suggests the Cold War Civil War was responsible for the ethnic cultural split between law and tribal areas. Not only a factor but there was quite a bit of split historically the mom areas were resources slaves maybe in a way this continues and forcing them to move to rubber plantations. The disruptions of the Civil War emphasize some distinctions but greatly increased interactions. Some force movements were likely directed at the losers in the war. Interestingly, I believe the law who she we were not committed to either side of the war but trying to evade it as much as possible, to the extent that they suffered in land decisions. Maybe more their poverty than past political affiliation. Not really a question. They're they're saying they're saying, but I think that you know you can give a response comment. Yeah, yeah, it's a really it's a really good comment. One of the things that I talked about in the book. And that really that I had to figure out was precisely this point that the law of communities that are now really at the biggest losers of these land deals were as yeah as as the as the comment points out their position in the agency was not nearly as simple as was invoked by the, the government rationale and the government rhetoric that said that people were resettled into these areas because they were security threats. My informants who are working in the development industry said, that's not true. That's garbage. These people are poor they've never settled because they're vulnerable. They are not security threats. But I make that clear in the book I think for both historical reasons and all as well as for ethical reasons I think it's really important to point out the ways that the difference between an actual security threat and one that's invoked because it, it tells a nice economic story and helps helps rationalize a land grab. One of the things that did come through and this echoes my answer to Williams question is that from the accounts of the insurgency that took place, certainly in the late 70s through much of the 80s and even into the 90s. The different ethnic groups, different subgroups of the indigenous people who had been there for hundreds of years that were sort of categorically referred to as the Lao Tung, but that made up were made up of a couple of different groups, but that were not law who that were really the base on the heartland of the insurgency. And they actually were defeated earlier and resettled into a number of the other villages. The heart, the, it had to do with the timing by which the law who groups are resettled much more than their association with actual insurgency that led to them being moved into this area that was then the target for enclosure. So, both of these, these comments are our spot on in ways that I to some degree get to in the book but that also, especially in Williams case points to stuff that I didn't quite have access to. Well, I'm conscious of the time we're getting towards the end so I, we have one more comment and it's, I think it's an appropriate one on which to close I think from William Sage, thank you Michael informative presentation. Well, I want to thank you all for being here. Thanks again to Michael for the introduction. And I'd love to stay in touch. We were very happy with your talk thank you very much. And then to our attendees thank you for, thank you for coming.