Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia

by Derek Hall, Philip Hirsch, Tania Murray Li

Questions of who can access land and who is excluded from it underlie many recent social and political conflicts in Southeast Asia. Powers of Exclusion examines the key processes through which shifts in land relations are taking place, notably state land allocation and provision of property rights, the dramatic expansion of areas zoned for conservation, booms in the production of export-oriented crops, the conversion of farmland to post-agrarian uses, "intimate" exclusions involving kin and co-villagers, and mobilizations around land farmed in terms of identity and belonging. In case studies drawn from seven countries, the authors find that four "powers of exclusion" - regulation, market, force and legitimation - have combined to shape land relations in new and often surprising ways.

Land debates are often presented as a conflict between market-oriented land use with full private property rights on one side, and equitable access, production for subsistence, and respect for custom on the other. The authors step back from these debates to point out that any productive use of land requires the exclusion of some potential users, and that most projects for transforming land relations are thus accompanied by painful dilemmas. Rather than counterposing "exclusion" to "inclusion", the book argues taht attention must be paid to who is excluded, how, why, and with what consequences.

Powers of Exclusion is a path-breaking book that draws on insights from multiple disciplines to map out the new contours of struggles for land in Southeast Asia. The volume provides a framework for analyzing the dilemmas of land relations across the Global South and beyond.

Genres: Anthropology

266 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

<>There is more than one author in the Goodreads catalog with this name. This entry is for Derek ^2 Hall. Dr. Derek Hall is Associate Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University.

BA (Trent),
MA (York),
PhD (Cornell)

His main research interests are in international political economy, Japanese politics, the political economy of East and Southeast Asia, environmental politics, the history of capitalism, and the political economy of food, land and agriculture.

Reviews

[unperspicacious · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, just published three months ago, has already been receiving some very warm informal reviews on the academic grapevine. Based on what little I know of agrarian change in Southeast Asia, it has been a really informative introductory read.

(Coming immediately after having read Davis’ ‘Planet of Slums’ (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...) it is also interesting how well the two books complement each other; like siblings raised by the same parents, now living different yet interconnected lives. Seems pretty obvious that ideally the way forward is not to focus solely on either rural or urban change, but to try and see how the two co-exist at different scales.)

The book's main argument surrounding land conflicts is straightforward and can be gleaned from the synopsis. It is the elegant framework used to map out these different land conflicts, and to a lesser extent, the wealth of case studies drawn from Southeast Asia to support this framework, which are truly eye-opening. The book basically adopts a matrix format. For those who thrive on tight, structured lists this is a godsend; land conflicts can be an absolute nightmare to narrate coherently because so many different, fluctuating variables are usually in play.

On one axis are four 'powers' of exclusion from access to land; markets, legitimacy, regulation and force. The other axis consists of six identified processes of agrarian transition in Southeast Asia - land licensing and zoning, conservation agendas, crop booms, post-agrarian 'urbanisation', contests for land between social intimate neighbours and kin, and social movements against land exclusions. A chapter is devoted to each process, and the four exclusionary powers are discussed repeatedly within.

The range of case studies is fascinating and frankly quite overwhelming. Actors at all scales are covered: villagers, state officials, NGOs, donor agencies, IFIs, social movements and agribusinesses (both local and foreign). The analytical emphasis between state and class seems quite balanced, agency is recognised in both and extensively recounted in one case study after another. I don't know enough of agrarian history in general to know much about what other important studies were left out.

While the book is excellent at identifying the more proximate, overarching factors for land conflicts, this sort of macro 'mapping' exercise inevitably means that in-depth contextual knowledge of each Southeast Asian state's socio-economic history has to be sought elsewhere. This is fine as long as one knows what to expect in advance. In addition, the case studies, while extremely wide-ranging, have been chosen to illustrate the relevance of the four 'powers' at work. From the viewpoint of comparative social research the book's contribution to comparative politics, political economy etc is thus more limited; one could substitute many cases from outside the region to flesh out the same matrix. This is both a positive and negative I guess. The conceptual framework can certainly travel and be used by others, but it doesn't really systematically explore anything specific about Southeast Asia's political economy or the differences within the region. The latter is of course a very difficult thing to do and shouldn't detract from the high heuristic value of the mapping exercise itself.

The other issue which raised some flags is that the four 'powers' of exclusion from land do not really seem like powers to me; they look more like dimensions, or mechanisms via which deeper social processes unfold. This is even more evident when the concluding chapter alludes to four other powers of exclusion in passing: environmental change, technological development, political relationships/alliances , and inertia (pp. 197). Interesting but certainly raises some eyebrows. There is a clear attempt to limit the way in which power is conceptualised and defined in this book (and the authors admit as much on pp. 15). My current knowledge of debates around the philosophy of power is very rudimentary. Is power an apolitical thing, with a more political original source, or part of the very essence of being itself? Is it an instrument to be wielded, or an adjective to describe a more general state of affairs? I don't even know if I'm asking the right questions. The book's concept of legitimacy as a dimension of land conflict is also, I suspect, up for questioning. I don't know whether this is all petty semantic nitpicking or an opening for more serious criticism. I'll have to revisit these issues later.

[La Ring]

Good book