This article aims to extend and deepen our understanding of how emotions figure in experiences of major nature-society disruptions or “rupture.” Cambodia's Lower Sesan 2 hydropower dam is an example of rupture, which refers to dramatic, adverse, and disruptive episodes that ripple across scale. Against a historical backdrop of land enclosures and dispossession, the dam sparked significant community and civil society resistance. This emotionally charged campaign emphasized that the dam and associated resettlement would erase the impacted communities’ deep customary relationships to the area. Although some community members ultimately refused the resettlement package and moved to customary lands near their flooded village, the majority accepted resettlement. We explore the emotional dimensions of these communities’ experiences, finding that rupture is an inherently emotional process, within layered historical processes of change and violence. The intense emotions that such processes evoke can spark action within the “open moment” (Lund, 2016) that episodes of rupture create; yet the outcomes are highly unpredictable within the asymmetrical political and economic settings that underpin nature-society rupture.
This article explores place‐making in post‐conflict resource landscapes by elaborating on the concept of frontier construction. Much of resource frontier literature examines conflicts over access to land and resources, but very few studies look at how places emerge through the process of frontier‐making. This article provides an in‐depth analysis of place‐making in Northwest Cardamom region, a former battlefield and ex‐Khmer Rouge stronghold, where the current socio‐spatial relationships are formed by the competing access to land and resources. I argue that the formation of place in post‐war resource landscapes is the creation of frontiers where the relationship between local people and landscapes are formed through the reinforcing imagination of resource landscapes as wastelands. Everyday socio‐spatial relationships in resource frontiers are established through three tensions: (1) socio‐ecological intensity, (2) social confrontation, and (3) local vs state territorial contestation.
This paper describes how village-level officials, relatively new to the Internet, use popular digital platforms on smartphones to supplement and extend long-standing patterns of information control and authoritarian power in rural Cambodia. They use these tools to monitor local affairs, report to the central government, and promote local government activities, practices which intimidate villagers and encourage their political withdrawal and self-censorship. This paper makes three contributions to the literature on networked authoritarianism and rural governance. First, technological changes currently underway in the Cambodian rural bureaucracy reflect a generational transition, as long-standing officials struggle to use new media easily or effectively, leading to new anxieties and breakdowns for these traditional holders of power. Second, bureaucratic information practices in these villages rely on material practices ranging from paper, face to face meetings, and loudspeakers, to new tools such as Facebook and smartphones - underlining significant continuities in mechanisms of bureaucratic power and control. Third, networked authoritarian practices conjure for villagers the historical links between information control and violence, and the effectiveness of these tactics on chilling speech is often rooted in villagers' memories of fear.
While there has been increasing scholarship exploring the social, cultural, and political dimensions of climate change migration, there is to date limited research situating climate migration studies within geopolitical history and land struggles, particularly in post-conflict states like Cambodia. Four decades after the Khmer Rouge genocide (1975)(1976)(1977)(1978)(1979) ended, rural migration and land struggles remain a central aspect of Cambodia's political and economic life. Since the beginning of the Cambodian civil war (1970), rural populations have repeatedly been forced to move from their land. However, the geopolitical dimension of land has not been widely considered in current climate change migration literature. To explore these dynamic relationships between land, migration, and geopolitical history, this paper investigates both historical narratives and everyday relationships with land of land (less) migrants in Veal Veaeng District, Western Cambodia, a former war zone and a Khmer Rouge stronghold during the 1980s and 1990s. This paper argues that political history plays a vital role in defining migration trajectories in Cambodia, especially how historical factors define land struggles. Through exploring migrants and land frontier dynamics, this paper discovers that poor peasants have been forced between labour markets and land frontiers.
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