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War, Insurgency, and Governing Landscapes in Southeast Asia
Organizer and Chair: Peter Vandergeest, York University
This panel is a comparative exploration in how insurgencies and state violence in Southeast Asia have reshaped landscapes, ecologies, livelihoods, and resource management practices. It is well known that the Southeast Asian insurgencies that began after World War II, and continued to the present in some sites, have often been based in landscapes less conducive to central state monitoring and control, and that they had or have a strong ethnic component. Despite these connections, most literature on insurgency and counter-insurgency has been distinct from that on the debates around resource management, resource rights, and the claims of indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities. A limited exception is the separate literature on the environmental impacts of war, and on the financial contributions of natural resources to political violence. We analyze these insurgencies as alternative state-building projects based on various territorial control mechanisms. Counter-insurgency practices by states were meant to assert or re-assert and strengthen territorial control. Insurgencies and wars in Southeast Asia have been associated with huge expenditures to control peoples’ activities in particular areas, generating territorial separations between forests or mines and farms. There was significant variation in effects on access to and control over resources, as well as the very definitions of what resources are. Using a variety of theoretical perspectives, these papers discuss connections between war and resource control, including the relative strength of resource management and military agencies, the politics of ethnic (and religious) classification, external military assistance, psychological bases of warfare, and diverse ecologies.
Insurgency and the Water Landscape in Vietnam
David A. Biggs, University of California, Riverside
Throughout the First and Second Indochina Wars, battle lines were commonly drawn between different environments--city and country, field and forest, above ground and below. Vietnam's networks of roads and airstrips facilitated the circulation of French, American and South Vietnamese government troops while its remote mountain forests and sinuous delta creeks supported an alternative nation-building project, the Vietnamese Revolution. Since the first days of colonial conquest in 1858, many key struggles to 'pacify' or 'liberate' the nation were waged on water. Controlling traffic on waterways and clearing swamps were constant features of colonial public works campaigns. After 1945, they were often subject to attacks, as a growing insurgency built a 'liberation' government from bases on the creeks and inside the mangroves. Since 1975, with many former revolutionaries now working as leaders in post-war provincial and national government, many government-funded projects are targeted in these sensitive environmental areas, often producing environmental or social conflicts as older government plans for reclamation now being implemented have often led to severe degradation of the former base areas. This paper considers how the water landscape figured into the Indochina Wars and how legacies of revolutionary struggles here have played into post-war development.
Flows of Enclosure: Actually Existing Governance along Burma’s Riverine Systems
Ken MacLean, Emory University
For decades, different armed groups fought one another to control the riverine systems in eastern Pegu Division of Burma and with them, the flow of people, information, food, and other commodities along its waterways. During the late 1990s, efforts to extract the region’s resources intensified and more regulated forms of violence have since largely replaced lethal ones. This transformation is all the more striking as counter-insurgency campaigns, which employ methods initially developed by the British in colonial Malaya and then used by the United States in Republic of Viet Nam, have failed to bring the eastern part of the division fully under the military regime’s control. The paper examines how the division’s topography shapes struggles by different state and non-state actors to control access to timber, non-timber forest products, gold, and hydropower. Special attention is focused on the different ways military battalions and private business interests alternately compete and collude with one another to exert their authority and to produce a compliant labor force in areas where the above resources are extracted. The data, drawn from research conducted in eastern Pegu Division between 2001 and 2005, demonstrates how ethnic forms of identity are erased at some moments and re-inscribed at others by this economic competition. The findings also highlight the contradictions that have accompanied military efforts to consolidate centralized state control of Burma’s more remote regions, even those spatially quite close to the capital such as eastern Pegu Division.
Citizenscapes: New Villages, Biosettlements and Enacting the Power of the Nation-State
Maureen Sioh, DePaul University
This paper traces Malaysia’s postcolonial landscape to its roots in the British counter-insurgency campaign against the forest-based Malayan Communist Party (MCP) after WWII. Colonial reterritorialization of Malaya required both physical reconfiguration and imaginative recuperation of the landscape. The ultimate success of the counter-insurgency rested on two ambitious policies: the New Villages and later, the FELDA agricultural scheme. I explore how the two policies constructed moral ‘citizenscapes’ based on ethnicity that reflected the state’s anxieties of control. The New Villages comprised a punitive landscape designed to contain 20% of the population suspected of supporting the MCP. Curfews and a geometric architecture combined in the New Villages to immobilize its population as well as render them visible to, and manageable by, the state. But I contend that an equally urgent task of the reterritorialization project for the Malaysian post-colonial government who sided with the British in the decolonization struggle, was the creation of a positive moral scopic politics of an essentialized national space inhabited by loyal subject-citizens in place of the anarchic rainforest and its insurgent population. Invoking contemporary scholarship on performativity, I analyze the state-sponsored agricultural FELDA schemes through the concept of biosettlements as theatrical stages for performing national identity embodied in the icon of the male bumiputera settler. The FELDA schemes accomplished two significant projects for producing state power: accumulating agricultural revenue and imaginatively recuperating the space of the nation through the thousandfold enactment of citizenship in the settlers’quotidian agricultural rituals.
“The Forests are Surrounding the Cities!” Emergencies, Insurgencies and Forestry in Southeast Asia
Peter Vandergeest, York University
In this paper we look at the ways that the construction of political forests and professional forestry in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia were shaped through political violence. From the 1950s through the 1970s, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand experienced “Emergencies” and insurgencies during which political violence was staged in or from many of these countries’ forests—called “jungles” in reference to their use for staging insurgencies. We show how these political movements are best framed not as “non-state” or “recalcitrant” national subjects, but as alternative civilizing and state-making projects that used the forests as a site from which to launch territorializing projects. Both the insurgencies, and counter-insurgency strategies were organized around perceptions of ethnic identification with national states; millions of people were thus moved, with suspect ethnic groups generally moved out of forests, and more trustworthy ethnic groups settled into forests to practice agriculture. Counter-insurgency practices also channeled huge resources into “development” in “pink” zones, meant to alleviate the poverty that was understood to make subjects susceptible to alternative civilizing projects, and into intensified surveillance of forests. Surveillance technologies and information could subsequently be used by forest departments to strengthen territorial control of political forests. The outcomes across the sites examined in this study thus varied according to the particular ethnic character of the different insurgencies and states; the relative influence of forestry departments who preferred strategies that cleared people out of forests, as well as diverse ecologies, military power, and broader state capacity to monitor and control peoples’ activities.