Email: yrosa@u.nus.edu

Affiliation: National University of Singapore

Nationality: Cambodian

A political history of land struggles and agrarian differentiation in northwestern Cambodia

Abstract

This paper examines land struggles and social differentiation in Cambodia's northwestern region of Samlout district, Battambang province, one of the Khmer Rouge's (KR) last strongholds. To inform my analysis, I build on the work in political ecology of war and transition and place it in conversation with scholarship in critical agrarian studies and geography to account for the spatial and temporal relations of power that shape access to and control over land and the wider agrarian economy in a post-war setting. The paper draws on the empirical materials from a village ethnography conducted as part of the larger PhD dissertation research between February and December 2023 in Battambang. I conducted 40 life-history interviews with smallholder farmers, including both the ex-KR militants and in-migrant settlers brought together into the village's landscape through the post-war opening of land frontiers. These interviews were complemented by semi-structured interviews with local authorities, merchants, agronomists, extensionists, and NGO workers, as well as formal and informal group discussions and participant observation. I argue that land struggles among smallholder farmers in the region today are shaped, though not determined, by its political history of the 1980s and 1990s, punctuated by Cold War geopolitics, resource extractivism, and post-war reintegration. Specifically, the production of new agrarian landscapes through turning forests into agricultural land to accommodate demobilized KR militants and facilitate their transition from military to agrarian life was socio-politically fragmented and shaped by the legacy of war and wartime resource extraction and control by the KR political elites. Politically accommodated by the government's reintegration policy following the ceasefire deal between the two warring parties, ex-KR commanders were able to maintain their political and economic interests in their controlled territories. When these territories were transformed into land frontiers, These ex-commanders were best positioned to extend unchallenged control over access to land as an emerging resource. Demobilized militants were, on the other hand, left to compete among themselves and gradually with in-migrants for limited land. This resulted in uneven initial access to land among militants-turned-farmers and, more remarkably, between them and their ex-commanders. I then show how initial land differentiation intersects with the broader agrarian transformation marked by intensifying export-based commodity production that Cambodia has undertaken over the past two decades through its neoliberal economic pathways, setting in motion patterns of social differentiation. I conclude the paper by underlining the theoretical contribution it makes to the question of land and agrarian class formation and differentiation in critical agrarian studies and geography.

Bio

Rosa YI hails from Cambodia and is a PhD candidate in human geography at the National University of Singapore and a visiting fellow (2024-2025) at Harvard-Yenching Institute. He holds a BA in education from the Royal University of Phnom Penh (RUPP) in Cambodia and an MA in International Development and Policy Studies from Waseda University in Japan. Prior to undertaking his PhD studies, he lectured at RUPP, where he taught development studies and qualitative research methods. His research interests include critical development, environmental change, agrarian transition, and labor migration. His PhD dissertation research titled "Political ecologies of agrarian commodification and labor migration in Cambodia" examines how capitalist development of agriculture transforms agrarian socio-natural landscapes, shapes rural livelihood trajectories, and produces different geographies of labor migration. Using a multi-sited ethnographic approach, the research explores, through the experiences of smallholder farmers, how commodity production and labor migration under contemporary capitalism intersect and transform socio-natural relations.