Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia

摘要

The popular cliche 'it's complicated' does not begin to do justice to the intricacy and convolution (dare I say 'involution'?) of social relations around land in Southeast Asia. Zoom out to a panoramic overview of the region and we see big and often quite contradictory trends, patterns, and discourses overlapping, colliding, and blending together in novel and unpredictable ways. An ongoing process of 'deagrariani-sation' coexists with the rapid expansion of cropland and intensification of agriculture on existing smallholder plots across the region.