The security exception: Development and militarization in Laos’s protected areas

Dwyer, Michael B.; Ingalls, Micah; Baird, Ian G.

doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.11.002

Cited by 39 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 28 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In doing so we take Lefebvre's (2003, 87) felicitous question as an analytical departure: "Is not the secret of the state, hidden because it is so obvious, to be found in space?" In Laos, connecting state theory to an analysis of space, territory, and the politics of resource use and control, opens up productive lines of inquiry that can also ground everyday processes of state making, and the practical establishment of internal sovereignty (see Dwyer, Ingalls, and Baird, 2016;Lund 2011;Mahanty 2017).…”

Section: Territory and Environmental Statecraftmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptualising Party-State Governance and Rule in Laos

Creak

Barney

2018

Journal of Contemporary Asia

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article develops a framework for conceptualising authoritarian governance and rule in the Lao People's Democratic Republic. After introducing the national and academic context, which go a significant way towards understanding the paucity of comparative political work on Laos, we propose an approach to studying postsocialist authoritarian and single-party rule that highlights the key political-institutional, cultural-historical and spatial-environmental sources of party-state power and authority. In adopting this approach, we seek to redirect attention to the centralising structures of rule under the Lao People's Revolutionary Party, illustrating how authoritarian institutions of the "party-state" operate in and through multiple scales, from the central to the local level. At a time when the country is garnering greater attention than at any time since the Vietnam War, we argue that this examination of critical transitions in Laos under conditions of resource-intensive development, intensifying regional and global integration, and durable one-party authoritarian rule, establishes a framework for future research on the party-state system in Laos, and for understanding and contextualising the Lao People's Revolutionary Party regime in regional comparative perspective.

show abstract

Section: Territory and Environmental Statecraftmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptualising Party-State Governance and Rule in Laos

Creak

Barney

2018

Journal of Contemporary Asia

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…First, various geopolitical interests are sometimes aligned with conservation goals in the creation of protected‐area borders (and in some cases, conservation activities are co‐opted to further state geopolitical interests), and such acts of territorialization (see above) have diverse consequences (Bocarejo & Ojeda ; Dwyer et al. ; Kelly & Ybarra ). Second, involves the growing militarization of conservation, particularly the practice of using armed guards to secure the borders of protected areas, and the impacts this may have on both wildlife and local people (Duffy , ).…”

Section: Geopolitical Practices and Wildlife Conservationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conservation geopolitics

Hodgetts

Burnham

Dickman

et al. 2018

Conservation Biology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We reviewed recent work concerning the impact of geopolitics on wildlife conservation (and vice versa) and identified future priorities in conservation geopolitics research. Geopolitics is understood as both an analytical focus on geopolitical practices (especially concerning the behavior) of countries with respect to territory and national security and a set of theories developed to explain and predict those behaviors. We developed a typology of core geopolitical practices of relevance to conservation: territorial practices of colonization and the management of migrations and borders, and security practices relating to military, economic, and environmental security. We identified research that considers how these practices affect conservation situations and outcomes, noting the recent emergence of conceptual developments such as "environmental geopolitics" and "geopolitical ecology" that draw on multiple fields within the social sciences to theorize the links between geopolitics and environmental management. We defined a "geopolitical perspective" as a focus on geopolitical practices combined with an explicit engagement with geopolitical theory and identified conservation situations where this perspective could contribute to analytical clarity. We suggest the most pressing questions in conservation research to which the geopolitical perspective might contribute are how political and economic differences between countries affect biodiversity outcomes, how geopolitical practices to address those differences facilitate or frustrate conservation efforts, how national borders and human and wildlife movements can be better managed for the benefit of both, and how the most effective conservation strategies can be best selected to suit existing (and future) geopolitical realities.

show abstract

“…Moreover, "only three NPAs in the country have reasonable levels of site management" (GEF 2012, 15), such as zoning, demarcating and enforcing totally protected zones, and even in these NPAs (such as Nakai-Nam Theun and Nam Et-Phou Loei) conservation seems to fight a losing battle (see below). Furthermore, actual NPA management is tightly linked with the military: as Dwyer et al (2016) explain, conservation overlaps with the army's dual task of securitization and development, so much so that conservation efforts are at times seriously hampered by the military's claim to Lao forests. In fact, some of the first NPAs -especially along the borders with Thailand, China and Cambodia, as well as those close to Vientiane Capital -were (and partly remain) sites of insurgency, and became included into the system precisely for security reasons (ibid, 210).…”

Section: Extractive Frontiersmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Recreational Frontier

Kleinod¹

2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The security exception: Development and militarization in Laos’s protected areas

Cited by 39 publications

References 28 publications

Conceptualising Party-State Governance and Rule in Laos

Conceptualising Party-State Governance and Rule in Laos

Conservation geopolitics

The Recreational Frontier

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About