The Peasants in Turmoil: State Formation, Power and the Control of Land in the Northwest Cambodia

Land pioneering into peripheral uplands has been associated with voluntary migrations of a very large population from all across the country. This migrant population comes particularly from the rice plain provinces where the growing population density has outstripped the capacity of farmers to secure livelihoods solely from rice production. The forest land being cleared and cultivated is mainly by peasant households. It is not the result of agro-industrial economic land concessions granted to companies as is the case in other parts of Cambodia. This migration can be seen as an expression of peasant household’s agency in responding to rural poverty (Pilgrim, Ngin, and Diepart 2012). The mode of production in these new agricultural systems combine different types of commercial links between agro-industrial groups (provision of agricultural inputs and credit or via a guaranteed purchase of production) and the households who remain the owners of the land. These agrarian transformations reflect the integration of Cambodia’s State and rural economy into supra-national agricultural markets dominated by agro-industrial groups. In a wider economic context, the setting for this transformation is the inclusion of the region in the “Ho Chi Minh-Bangkok” Greater Mekong Sub-region development corridors (Royal Government of Cambodia 2011). As in other countries in Southeast Asia this agricultural expansion into marginal areas is built on the political will of the State to exercise his authority over its population and to position itself in regional and global markets vis-a-vis the neighbouring nations (Dery 1996; De Koninck 2006). This research paper is part of an overall endeavour to understand the role and place of peasantries in the dynamics of agrarian expansion. In a context where, globally, capital and markets have become the organizing principle of the agrarian political economy (McMichael 2008) we are particularly interested in examining the nature of relations between peasantry and the Cambodian State. These relations are scrutinized through the processes of land control we see as strategies and practices that aim to fix, consolidate and legitimize the access to land and its resources (Peluso and Lund 2011). We suggest that over the history of the Cambodian Northwest, control over the access to land was and continues to be an important element in the exercise of power by State institutions at different levels. Given the dialectical relations between access to land, power and authority (Sikor and Lund 2009), the examination of struggle and strategies of land control in which peasant and the State are engaged reveal a great deal about peasant mobilization processes and contemporary State formation. As the region was the cradle of the Khmer Rouge uprising in the sixties and the rear base of their resistance against governmental forces in the eighties and nineties (Vickery 1984; Gottesman 2003), this contribution also aims to contribute to better understanding how neo-liberalism plays and how it restructures Peasant –State relations in this post-conflict agrarian context.