 Hi everyone. So I am presenting this on behalf of Nancy Lee Paluso and Kevin Woods as well. So please forgive me for not giving quite as dynamic a presentation as some of these other folks do as I'm going to read this so I make sure I get everybody's hard hard work represented appropriately. So and thank you very much for C4 for having us. All right. So land formalization, also known as legalization, certification, titling, or registration, is the creation of written state authorized property rights in land. Formalization essentially creates the legal instrument that carries property rights in land or land use. It makes land or land use a commodity governed by the state in various degrees of intensity. We all know that commodity exchange and production are the foundations of capitalist exchange and the goal of having commodities is to make a profit to accumulate wealth and capital. Formalizing, registering, and demarcating land and land use parcels as commodities precedes and enables the large-scale land deals, acquisitions, trades, and expropriations that have captured the attention of contemporary agrarian scholars and observers of land grabs that dominate the headlines of scholarly journals and global news sources these days. What we hope to add to this discussion is an expanded recognition of formalization inspired by these new debates. Land grabs do not take place only on many parcels of private land concentrated by investors after formalization, but on state lands that are effectively the property of or under the jurisdiction of various state agencies. Land formalization, in other words, enables states to turn the landed territories they are supposed to govern into commodities in and on global markets. We have three main arguments in this paper. First, we propose to treat formalization more broadly than has been the case, including the formalization of state territories within the broader purview of land formalization. This move allows us to see formalizations as a form of enclosure, as a part of primitive accumulation. The process first discussed by Marx as absolutely fundamental to the creation of capitalist markets of buying and selling things. Formalization turns land holding and uses into things that can be bought and sold because it is inherently, it is not inherently a commodity. It has historically other meanings and uses as Polani pointed out. Polani calls land along with labor and money fictitious commodities. Formalization is meant to take the fictitious aspect out of land as a fictitious commodity. In theorizing primitive accumulation, Marx identified two key processes, enclosure and the creation of a surplus army of labor. We see smallholder communal and state formalizations as creating enclosures and in many cases, displacing or dispossessing various peoples whose preferred uses of land do not fit with the new enclosers' intended uses. By using a framework of primitive accumulation, it becomes much clear why it is important to define land formalization more broadly and in accordance with other trends generally pushed under the rug when we just talked about neoliberal political economies. When state agencies, actors or authorities enclose territory, not only to govern, as is the intention of state territorialization, but also with the intention to profit from that territory and its contents, as in the production of national forests for extraction. It is done by first rendering and reconstructing property rights in this territory, rights to exclude others from use or benefit of the land and the resources contained within. This leads to our second argument, that state territorialization of land to be commoditized constitutes a form of enclosure and leads to primitive accumulation by the state and its agents. Accumulation of wealth and capital is enabled by these state enclosures, and state actors, institutions, agents and their business partners are the beneficiaries, either directly or indirectly, through the reallocation of the formal rights to hold that property, such as land leases, concessions and reserves. They exclude prior owners with other claims and forms of property rights. While neither property rights nor the capitalist relations in which they are embedded are by any means new social relations, formal rights have arguably become the hegemonic coin of global land transactions. Our third argument can be stated simply as history matters, and it matters in several ways. Any political ecological study of say agrarian transitions, transformations and other processes that are defined as change, requires an understanding of history and how it is told. Land formalization programs and practices are not original to the 21st century. Its histories derive from earlier eras of global capitalism when primitive accumulation was first emergent under a variety of colonial, imperialist and national political economies. Thus, to really understand or predict the effects, successes and challenges of formalizing land rights, it is critical to understand the initial and extent effects of land formalizations formulated first under colonial and earlier national regimes. Because they create exclusions, formalizations have differentially affected various social groups using the land, creating or exacerbating social differentiation, often hiding the origins of these exclusions under fuzzy rubrics of cultural difference. Contemporary cultures of land use and production, however, are constituted through specific historical, geographical and social contexts affected by earlier waves of primitive accumulation, which, though sometimes changing in form over time, persist as normalized histories. Unfortunately, our examples will not be able to extend into all of these details today. They require much more paper to explain, but we do want to be clear that how and by whom history is told matters too. Formalization has never leveled the playing field under capitalist relations. Despite the exhortations of program developers, ideologues and idealists, formalization differentiates and repeat performances aggravate differentiation. Today we will use just one brief example from Indonesia to demonstrate how formalizations of state territories as well as private lands can be seen as enclosures and therefore parts of primitive accumulation and why the histories of these enclosures are important to understanding how and why exclusions take place. Three weeks ago, incredible news was celebrated across Indonesia. Indonesia's constitutional court ruled that the Indonesian government's claim to customary forest areas was invalid. Since the Suharto period, this was imaginable only in the wildest dreams of NGOs and indigenous peoples' organizations. The Indonesian Ministry of Forestry claim to millions of hectares of Indonesian land has effectively been declared illegal. Indonesia's experience with state territorializations and enclosures illustrates our argument about how contemporary nation states gain control of land and how the histories of those institutional and legal mechanisms matter to the present enclosures. Such enclosures, as we have argued, start out as formalizations. The formalization of forests and other land resources and the categorization of subjects in relation to those lands first happened under colonialism. Forests and other colonial categories such as customary lands and customary use rights stuck around all these years after colonialism, but were not formalized in the same way. They constitute much weaker property rights in a legal, formal sense. However, their continued presence as working terms, as social facts, is indicative of constant struggle and resistance to state land enclosures. In 1848, a colonial constitution was established, consolidating the Dutch colonial holdings as the Netherland East Indies. All land within the colonial territory was declared the sovereign domain of the colonial state. One of the first differentiations of colonial state land comes with the recognition of certain lands as native customary lands. This created a legally plural system in which there were dual legal systems for land, native land, and other state-held land. All lands occupied or in clear use by local people were rendered customary territories under various sorts of legal governance, some more democratic, some still quite futile. Europeans and people defined as foreign orientals, Chinese, Indians, Arabs, and other folks who were non-native people could not own by or sell land, a native land, but they could rent or lease other kinds of state land to establish agricultural enterprises. By the liberal period, however, starting around 1860 or so, agricultural enterprises paid wages to workers on lands that had been leased to them by the state. A classic example of primitive accumulation comprised of enclosures and dispossessed laboring bodies. In 1865, the first Netherlands East Indies colonial forest code was put in place. NEI political forests as formal territorial enclosures began in Java with teak forests. Teak forest districts were carved out of state lands, those allegedly not recognizable as customary lands or already leased to agricultural enterprises. Both teak wood and trees and the teak forest were enclosed, as well as the land upon which these forests were located. They were commodities monopolized by the state. Land was mapped, legislated, and registered as state forest. In some areas, local people's settlements and fields were physically moved out of the forest to create contiguous blocks of forest and village or customary land. In areas outside of Java, the colonial state mapped some vegetation and claimed some land for small timber concessions. But in general, these forests were too vast and forestry technology was not developed enough to allow the Department of Forestry to benefit from strictly enclosing these areas. That said, the legal procedures for enclosing lands and creating what were essentially state property rights were set down, if only most extensively applied in Java. In 1950, after independence and the end of the Indonesian Revolution, the Republic of Indonesia was established and included all Dutch territories except for East Timor. The political ideology of the independent Indonesian government was meant to be anti-feudal and anti-colonial. The famous Article 33 of the Indonesian Constitution declares that all land and the resources within are held by the national state. Adat, or customary lands, were recognized as existing, but they were not given formal recognition or status and they were subsumed to the needs of the nation. This tenant did not mean much under the first President, but the second President, Suharto, used it to seize land for large-scale development projects and investment after he came to power in 1966. In the early 1950s, colonial forestry laws were translated into Indonesian and approved by the Indonesian legislature. Forestry, land holdings, and the colonial government were continued by the independent state through the basic agrarian law of 1960 and the basic forestry law of 1967. Seventy-two percent of the country was put under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Forestry. In Java, forests were still enclosed by, managed by, and benefited from by the State Forestry Corporation, an example of ongoing primitive accumulation. Outside Java, forest lands were mapped and reserved. Production forests were leased to private and state concessionaires for logging. Each lease constituted a new moment in primitive accumulation. Struggles over land were made iconic in 2000 when the National Indigenous Peoples Alliance, AMAN, declared, as the state does not recognize us, we do not recognize the state. The Indigenous Peoples Movement used a different aspect of land formalization history, the colonial division of land into native customary land and non-native state land, to reclaim and try to formalize their contemporary claims to customary land. In this example, we have seen that various layers of state formalizations led the way for primitive accumulation by the state and private actors. As a result of these formalizations, land and resources were enclosed and people were dispossessed of their land and resources, becoming surplus labor. Though these state formalizations and enclosures were violent and unfair, they also created possibilities for those struggling to reclaim their land that do not exist in other places. The ways in which formalization occurred in Indonesia, recognizing customary rights in land as existing, even if they were given minimal consideration or precedent, created the conditions under which customary lands could be reclaimed by Indigenous Peoples in the country today. In our long group paper where we outline formalization histories of Ethiopia, Thailand, Cameroon, Tanzania, and Vietnam, we show how each country's unique history of formalization has affected the ways primitive accumulation is ongoing in these places and what possibilities for resistance against continued dispossession and expropriation exist. In Ethiopia, for example, we see how lowland territories and their pastoralist residents were produced as peripheral in early imperial land policies. These lands have been produced as vacant or ownerless through two other national governments and have laid the foundations for the current large-scale land grabs going on in Ethiopia's lowlands today. The residents of these lands have been produced as peripheral as well and excluded from the nation-state in various ways which has made their struggle to maintain their ways of life more difficult. Stories of production forests under state jurisdiction being made into commodities and leased out for concessions or state-held mining lands and state-held plantations are not at all uncommon in Thailand, Vietnam, China, Burma, and elsewhere. These histories tell us how contemporary national states and state agencies became or assumed the roles of landowners and first established the property rights in state lands, all formalizations that have enabled land acquisitions today. Thank you.