The emotional life of rupture at Cambodia's Lower Sesan 2 hydropower dam

Abstract

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.

Clarifying rupture: An authors’ reply

“…As Cretney and Nissen recognize, rupture episodes can expose injustices and create a broader state of flux, where ‘life turns to molten metal’. We show in the paper that these spaces of negotiation play out in highly contingent and ambiguous ways within politically and economically unequal settings – for instance, sparking acts of resistance, as much as reassertions of state authority (see also Mahanty et al, 2023). Exploring these ideas in the cases of post-disaster politics and COVID-19 in New Zealand, Cretney and Nissen find that these political spaces are not only spaces of radical resistance but also can equally create political space for groups that seek to generate oppression and violence.…”

“…The four commentaries in this forum have engaged helpfully with different aspects of our article on ‘Rupture’ (Mahanty et al, 2023), which argues for contextually rich and critical understandings of dramatic nature-society transformations and their catalytic effects. Cretney and Nissen (2023) illustrate how rupture spoke to the often-unpredictable outcomes of disasters in New Zealand, especially the politically ambiguous character of the ‘open moment’ that followed Christchurch's 2011 earthquake.…”

Hybrid governance, environmental justice, and hydropower development in the Mekong transboundary commons

“…Studies on the Mekong must also navigate the scalar tensions in understanding these dynamics at transboundary and transnational levels, while not losing sight of injustices also produced at the local, grounded level. Going forward, there is scope to examine these issues through an intersectional lens more work could be done in applying an intersectional lens towards understanding environmental justice in the Mekong transboundary commons may be compounded, particularly through the lens of feminist political ecology which has been used to investigate issues of gender and indigeneity (Mahanty et al, 2023; Middleton, 2022). Such perspectives will undoubtedly play an important role in furthering diverse yet contextual understandings of how environmental justice can be sought in the Mekong transboundary commons.…”

“…The benefits and harms of state‐led and large‐scale infrastructural development are inequitably distributed among Mekong countries and local communities (Sok et al, 2019), for example in exacerbating Cambodia's seasonal and variable vulnerability to water insecurity (Sithirith, 2021). Displaced local communities often bear the brunt of these projects when their fishing and farming livelihoods are damaged by the loss of ecosystem services (Soukhaphon et al, 2021), and communities may become fractured in the aftermath of nature‐society ruptures associated with large scale development, as seen in the case of the Lower Sesan 2 dam in Cambodia (Baird, 2016; Mahanty et al, 2023). In examining these place‐based struggles, the notion of “rescaling”’ occupies a prominent position in the literature, not just in explaining how power accrues to state actors and the private sector when governance arrangements and financial networks are scaled to their advantage, but in understanding community and civil society resistance to hydropower development.…”

Disorientations: The Political Ecology of “Displacing” Floating Communities from Cambodia's Tonle Sap Lake

“…A thorough analysis of the state's relocation of floating villages warrants a complex understanding of linked ruptures across the vast Mekong ecosystems that flow into and out of the Tonle Sap Lake (Mahanty 2023a(Mahanty , 2023b. Because water, wetlands, and rivers comprise up to 42% of the land-waterscape of the Lower Mekong River Basin, the foundation for our understanding is water.…”