Growing Political: Violence, Community Forestry, and Environmental Defender Subjectivity

Unrooted responses: Addressing violence against environmental and land defenders

“…Third, the study points to a devolvement of responsibility by NGOs upon local communities through rights awareness and demands for justice against forest violence. Yet, while such devolution constitutes a form of empowerment for communities, our study joins others seeing it as placing the burden of responsibility upon communities and putting them at risk of additional harm, especially given the uneven power relations at play and virtual impunity of (local) elites in many countries (Cronkleton et al, 2012;Daudelin et al, 1996;Grant and Le Billon, 2019;Peluso and Lund, 2011;Ystanes, 2016). We suggest that such processes risk pushing some communities, or community members, to buy into neopatrimonal arrangements.…”

“…Rather, responses are reactive, inconsistently implemented, and ad hoc; they are 'unrooted' from legal-rational systems, such as the FA, judiciary, or village leaders, while lacking the strategy, as well as political and financial support, to effectively reduce forest-related violence. At the community level, this appears to reflect a feeling of powerlessness to change the underlying socio-political structures that distort legal-rational systems and sustain direct violence, and secondly, a perception that they need to maintain the support of development organizations (see also Grant and Le Billon, 2019). Among supporting NGOs, this 'unrootedness' appears to reflect the pervasive influence of the authoritarian patrimonial political system and an unwillingness to push the boundaries of their activities into more overtly political issues of patronage and corruption as a means to tackle some of the 'root causes' of forest-related violence.…”

“…Here, we aim to better understand the recommendations and practices by NGOs involved with protecting rural communities from violence associated with logging, agribusinesses, and 'land squatting' in the context of community-based forest management (CBFM) activities in Cambodia (Milne and Mahanty, 2015;Persson and Prowse, 2017). Forest-related violence manifests in ways such as threats, beatings, kidnappings, arsons, and shootings directed at Community Forest (CF) patrollers, mostly committed by illegal loggers and land seekers -including state/local authorities like the military -but sometimes also members of their own communities involved in prohibited activities (Grant and Le Billon, 2019). Threats of violence are common, if not constant for many CF members.…”

“…First, given that Cambodia is known to experience a high degree of corruption and patrimonialism (Un, 2019;Vukovi c and Babovi c, 2018), how does this context relate to the recommendations and practices taking place? Second, given that NGOs arguably put communities 'in charge' of protecting their forests, often without effective backing from local authorities or foreign project sponsors (Grant and Le Billon, 2019;Hennings, 2019), 3 what responsibilities do organizations promoting community forest projects bear for forest violence? Third, given that the factors contributing to forest-related violence are so complex and deeply rooted in the Cambodian socio-political structure, how can and should CBFM participants and the NGOs that have assumed the responsibility of supporting them respond to forest-related violence (Global Witness, 2017)?…”

Beyond subject-making: Conflicting humanisms, class analysis, and the “dark side” of Gramscian political ecology

“…So, while the authors explicitly guard against notions of the “production of a singular subjectivity” (see also Grant and Le Billon, 2019), there is nevertheless a sense in which such “production” seems to follow a linear sequence. This is a process from the centers of power (firms, allies, dominant actors within extraction) to local populations, even if this includes not only overt strategies and actions by the extractive actors but also unintentional effects of their presence.…”