Agrarian Angst and Rural Resistance in Contemporary Southeast Asia

by Caouette, Dominique; Turner, Sarah

• ISBN13: 9780203874943
• ISBN10: 0203874943
• Copyright: 2009-07-08
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Summary

Agrarian transformations, market integration and globalization processes are impacting upon rural Southeast Asia with increasingly complex and diverse consequences. In response, local inhabitants are devising a broad range of resistance measures that they feel will best protect or improve their livelihoods, ensure greater social justice and equity, or allow them to just be left alone. This book develops a multi-scalar approach to examine such resistance occurring in relation to agrarian transformations in the Southeast Asian region. The contributors take a fresh look at the diversity of sites of struggle and the combinations of resistance measures being utilized in contemporary Southeast Asia. They reveal that open public conflicts and debates are taking place between dominators and the oppressed, at the same time as covert critiques of power and everyday forms of resistance. The book shows how resistance measures are context contingent, shaped by different world views, and shift according to local circumstances, the opening and closing of political opportunity structures, and the historical peculiarities of resistance dynamics. By providing new conceptual approaches and illustrative case studies that cut across scales and forms, this book will be of interest to academics and students in comparative politics, sociology, human geography, environmental studies, cultural anthropology and Southeast Asian studies. It will also help to further debate and action among academics, activists and policymakers.

Table of Contents

Shifting fields of rural resistance in Southeast Asia

Rural resistance and the art of domination

"Weapons of the Week": Selective resistance and agency among the Hmong in northern Vietnam

'Now the companies have come': Local values and contract farming in northern Thailand

Resisting local inequities: Community-based conservation on Palawan island, the Philippines

Oil palm and resistance in West Kalimantan, Indonesia

Development and its discontents: The case of the Pak Mun dam in northeastern Thailand

State-society relations and the diversity of peasant resistance in Vietnam

Indonesia's agrarian movement: Anti-capitalism at a crossroads

Paradigm shift: The 'September Thesis' and rebirth of the 'Open' peasant mass movement in the era of neoliberal globalization in the Philippines

Is rice non-negotiable? Malaysian resistance to free trade with the United States

Scaling-up rural resistance globally

The persistence of resistance: Analyzing responses to agrarian change in Southeast Asia

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.