Book Talk - Upland Geopolitics: Grounding the Global Land Rush in Postwar Laos

Speaker: Michael Dwyer (Indiana University Bloomington)

Abstract

In the twenty-first century, transnational land deals in economically poor but “land-rich” countries of the global South have become increasingly prevalent and controversial. Drawing from the author’s new book Upland Geopolitics: Postwar Laos and the Global Land Rush (University of Washington Press, 2022), this talk uses the boom in Chinese rubber plantations in the borderlands of northwestern Laos to theorize the uneven geography of the new global land rush. By examining the human terrain that underlies foreign land allocations that are both economically “necessary” and politically difficult, the talk shows how legacies of Cold War conflict continue to pave the way for transnational enclosure in a socially uneven landscape.

Event recording

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Speaker biography

Michael Dwyer is a political ecologist who studies agrarian change, environmental governance and infrastructure development in Southeast Asia. He has conducted fieldwork in Laos and Cambodia on the social and legal geographies, as well as the policy tradeoffs, of large-scale land deals, land titling, new road and energy infrastructure, and carbon forestry/REDD+. He teaches in the Geography department at Indiana University Bloomington, and holds a research affiliation with the University of Bern’s Center for Development and Environment.

Chair: Prof Michael Charney (SOAS)

Organisers: SOAS Centre of South East Asian Studies

Contact email: centres@soas.ac.uk