Micro-Geopolitics: Capitalising Security in Laos’s Golden Quadrangle

Small-scale land acquisitions, large-scale implications: Exploring the case of Chinese banana investments in Northern Laos

“…Consequently, more recent studies have examined the complexity of land grabbing in various contexts by focusing on the distribution of power and agency between local and foreign investors, smallholders, middlemen and state authorities (Beban and Gorman, 2015;Borras and Franco, 2013;Smalley and Corbera, 2012;Sud, 2014), as well as between foreign investors, state authorities and domestic elites (Baird, 2014b;Bräutigam and Zhang, 2013;Wolford et al, 2013). It has been shown that such relations not only depend on the scale but also on the social, political and historical contexts in which any specific deal takes place (Dwyer, 2014;Edelman and León, 2013). Adding to this complexity, the purpose of the investment and for farmland acquisitions the 'nature of the crop' have been shown to influence actors' ability to engage in or contest land grabbing.…”

Nontraditional security and China's transnational narcotics control in northern Laos and Myanmar

“…By emphasizing illicit drugs as an NTS challenge, this paper has analyzed the new approaches deployed by the Chinese state to cope with the challenge. By showing the complexity of transnational narcotics control as a significant arena of national security, capital accumulation, and social development, I neither condemn nor romanticize China's approach in northern Laos and Myanmar (for more details, see Dwyer, 2014). Rather, I seek to underscore the longstanding but underdeveloped theoretical recognition of illicit drugs as a global commodity and an NTS challenge.…”

“…Recent studies provide detailed analysis of how rubber plantations have contributed to increasing poverty amongst ethnic minorities living in upland areas (Baird, 2010;Lyttleton, 2004). In small villages in Khet Nam Fa, northern Laos, for instance, rubber plantation has eroded the land base for rice production and forced local farmers to depend on the market for subsistence (Dwyer, 2014). Woods (2011: 766) argues that the agricultural investments by Chinese companies in northern Myanmar facilitate the coercive integration of upland subsistence farmers into "the lowland market economy as exercises of military securitization and nation-state building."…”

“…9 I hesitate to use "land grabbing" here as the term which, loosely defined, underestimates the complicated land co-management systems launched by Chinese enterprises, local enterprises and governments, and rural farmers. Through a nuanced analysis of China's agribusiness investment in Laos,Dwyer (2014) argues that a generalized term of land grab cannot fully account for what happens on the ground.…”

Land-use change in a telecoupled world: the relevance and applicability of the telecoupling framework in the case of banana plantation expansion in Laos

“…Such insights can facilitate a deeper understanding of how and why certain regulatory responses might be failing (see also Friis and Nielsen 2016). Lastly, the spillover processes associated with the political telecoupling attest to the geopolitical aspects of the current banana boom in Laos, and a historical geopolitical analysis of the position of China with respect to the politicaleconomic position of Laos, the Philippines, and other banana producers in the global banana market could potentially have fostered a deeper understanding of the insights we have presented here (see Dwyer 2014). This is undoubtedly by no means an exhaustive list of potential analytical perspectives that could deepen our understanding of the causal processes involved in the expansion of banana cultivation in northern Laos, or for telecoupling research in general.…”