Party, State and the Control of Information in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic: Secrecy, Falsification and Denial

Baird, Ian G.

doi:10.1080/00472336.2018.1451552

Cited by 28 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…In the southern province of Xekong, a group of villagers who cut down rubber trees on a plantation that had unjustly acquired their land were arrested (Radio Free Asia, 2017). More recently, the government has threatened those who make ‘inaccurate’ statements or criticize the government on Facebook, which has otherwise been a powerful venue for built-up political frustration among the populace (Baird, 2018; Palatino, 2014).…”

Section: Emerging Resource Capitalism In Laos and Myanmarmentioning

confidence: 99%

Variegated transitions: Emerging forms of land and resource capitalism in Laos and Myanmar

Kenney‐Lazar

Mark²

2020

Environ Plan A

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Since the mid- to late- 1980s, Laos and Myanmar (Burma) have gradually and unevenly opened their economies to capitalist relations of accumulation. Both countries have done so by granting state land concessions to private capital for resource extraction and land commodification projects, particularly since the early 2000s. Yet, resource capitalism has manifested in distinct ways in both places due to the ways in which capital has interacted with unique pre-capitalist political-economic and social relations as well as the diverse political reactions of Lao and Myanmar people to capitalist transformations. In this paper, we analyze such differences through a conceptualization of ‘variegated transitions’, an extension of the variegated capitalism framework, which investigates the political economic transitions towards capitalism in marginalized, resource extractive countries of the Global South. In Myanmar, the transition from military to democratic rule has been marked by protests and land occupations combined with center-periphery fragmentation and ongoing civil wars, all of which have led to a heavily contested process of land concession granting. In contrast, a stable, comparatively centralized political system in Laos that restrains popular protest has enabled an expanding regime of land concessions for resource extraction projects, albeit hemmed in at the edges by sporadic, localized forms of resistance and appeals to the state.

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Section: Emerging Resource Capitalism In Laos and Myanmarmentioning

confidence: 99%

Variegated transitions: Emerging forms of land and resource capitalism in Laos and Myanmar

Kenney‐Lazar

Mark²

2020

Environ Plan A

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“…Vietnamese companies were granted vast logging rights as a quid pro quo exchange for road construction and a form of reparation for Laos's debt to Vietnam during the war (Baird & Shoemaker, 2008). Internally, years after the Lao PDR regime was established in 1975, areas of the country were not under government control due to holdouts from insurgents (Baird, 2018). Despite the top-down discipline of the Party, provincial governments maintained a significant degree of autonomy into the 1990s and were…”

Section: Land and Sovereignty In Laosmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relations of sovereignty: The uneven production of transnational plantation territories in Laos

Kenney‐Lazar

2019

Trans Inst British Geog

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The contemporary emergence of land grabbing across the Global South has been framed by critics as a threat to the national territorial sovereignty of postcolonial societies. Such concerns hinge on conventional notions of sovereignty as an abstract form of power possessed by the state and lost to global forces. However, the transfer of domestic lands into the hands of foreign investors is complicated by the contested and relational nature of authority in resource frontier spaces. Critical scholarship has shown that sovereignty in practice-the production of control and authority within spatial fields-is dynamic, contested, and variegated. It has further staked out an ontology of sovereignty as relational, although not explicitly stated in such terms. This paper employs the insights of relational geography to advance theorization of sovereignty's relationality: the contested and consensual relations among heterogeneous actors that produce and transform authority in complex and variegated spaces. I demonstrate the value of this approach by examining Vietnamese and Chinese industrial tree plantation companies' differential access to land in Southern Laos, based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork. Each company differed in their access to land granted to them by the central Lao government due to the types of socio-political relations that they established at various administrative scales of the Lao state. Such relations shaped their coproduction of sovereignty driven by logics of centralized state territorialization and capital accumulation. When such state-capital relations broke down, opportunities emerged for

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“…People also blamed the flooding on deforestation, again linked to the developmentalist bent of the party-state. That such critical comments were even made on Facebook was striking, given the recent, widely publicized arrests of Lao citizens for criticizing the Lao government on social media (Baird 2018). One memorable post at that time was a photo of the provincial office of Attapeu stacked with goods, such as bottled water, packet noodles and household items intended for the flood victims.…”

Section: Charitable Donations and The Party-state Thriving On Crisismentioning

confidence: 99%

THE 2018 DAM COLLAPSE IN ATTAPEU, LAOS: Charitable donations and the party‐state thriving on crisis

High¹

2019

Anthropology Today

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Party, State and the Control of Information in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic: Secrecy, Falsification and Denial

Cited by 28 publications

References 20 publications

Variegated transitions: Emerging forms of land and resource capitalism in Laos and Myanmar

Variegated transitions: Emerging forms of land and resource capitalism in Laos and Myanmar

Relations of sovereignty: The uneven production of transnational plantation territories in Laos

THE 2018 DAM COLLAPSE IN ATTAPEU, LAOS: Charitable donations and the party‐state thriving on crisis

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