Table Of ContentUNWRITTEN RULE
A Volume in the Series
Cornell Series on Land: New Perspectives in Territory, Development,
and Environment
Edited by Wendy Wolford, Nancy Lee Peluso, and Michael Goldman
A list of titles in this series is available at cornellpress. cornell . edu.
UNWRITTEN
RULE
State- Making through Land Reform
in Cambodia
Alice Beban
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON
Copyright © 2021 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts
thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from
the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512
East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress. c ornell. edu.
First published 2021 by Cornell University Press
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Beban, Alice, 1981– author.
Title: Unwritten rule : state- making through land reform in Cambodia /
Alice Beban.
Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2021. | Series: Cornell
series on land: new perspectives in territory, development, and environment |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020021631 (print) | LCCN 2020021632 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781501753626 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501754043 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781501753633 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501753640 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Land reform— Cambodia. | Land tenure— Political
Aspects— Cambodia. | Power (Social sciences)— Cambodia. |
Nation- building— Cambodia.
Classification: LCC HD1333.C17 B4 2921 (print) | LCC HD1333.C17 (ebook) |
DDC 333.3/1596— dc23
LC rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2020021631
LC ebook rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2020021632
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowl edgments xii
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
1. Donor- State Partnerships in the Cambodian Land Sector 32
2. Encountering the Leopard Skin Land Reform 58
3. Reconfiguring Local Authority through Land Reform 80
4. Youth Volunteers to the Frontier 104
5. Life in the Leopard Skin 136
6. Communal Land Strugg les in the Wake of the Land Reform 166
7. An Ontology of Land Beyond State-C apital Formations 189
Conclusion 211
Notes 219
References 223
Index 237
Preface
When I set out to conduct research for this book in 2011, I did not think I would
end up writing a book about land reform. I planned to research the viol ence with
which state- facilitated economic land concessions (ELCs) for forestry and com-
modity crops were spreading across rural Cambodia and displacing smallholder
farmers at a seemingly intractable pace. But while I was preparing for fieldwork
in 2012, the Cambodian prime minister made a sudden announcement: a pre-
election land titling reform that promised to break up ELCs. The potential of this
shift intrigued me, and I switched my empirical focus to look specifically at the
rollout and implications of the land reform. I was able to observe the land survey
during preliminary fieldwork in 2012. When I returned to Cambodia for eigh-
teen months in 2013–2014, I undertook a multisited ethnography to understand
how the land reform was reshaping people’s relationships with land, with their
communities, and with the Cambodian state. In this preface, I describe my re-
search approach, rooted in a feminist ethics of research on viol ence that evolved
during my fieldwork.
I based my ethnographic research in two Cambodian provinces: my primary
field site in western Khang Cheung province and a comparative study in north-
east Khang Leit province (note, all names of places and research participants are
pseudonyms to protect people’s safety). I lived primarily in Khang Cheung in
2013–2015, with regular trips to Khang Leit and Phnom Penh city, and spent
much of my time hanging out talking with people at their homes and fields. I at-
tended monthly village meetings, festivals, community network meetings, and
community forest patrols, as well as land title displays and distribution ceremo-
nies. In both provinces, I also interviewed smallholders and land claimants, un-
official community leaders, NGO officers, government officials, volunteer land
surveyors, land brokers, plantation laborers, village elders, and youth. Although
I speak Khmer (Cambodian language) and undertook interviews myself, I worked
with local Khmer research assistants (one man and one w oman) during my re-
search in Khang Cheung and with an indigenous research assistant in Khang Leit
province in order to build rapport with research participants. I complemented
this ethnographic work with a h ouseh old survey of 270 land claimant h ouseh olds
in my study provinces with the help of two professors from Pannyasastra Uni-
versity in Phnom Penh and eight university students. In Khang Cheung, I ran-
domly selected around twenty-fi ve house holds to survey per village, across four
vii
viii PrefAce
randomly selected villages in each of my two study communes, for a total of 198
househ olds. In Khang Leit, I similarly randomly selected four villages within each
of my two study communes, although my team de cided not to continue the sur-
vey in two villages due to concerns for participant safety after local officials in-
timidated team members and survey participants. Due to both the change in
fieldwork schedule in Khang Leit and people’s preference for group interviews, I
completed only seventy- two surveys in Khang Leit.
Research in Violent Spaces
Research by privileged foreign researchers in the global south and in poorer com-
munities is beset with ethical quandaries. Postconflict settings demand added
questions about the researcher’s responsibility and potential viol ence to t hose she
or he works with. Fieldwork can be intrusive, demanding of p eople’s time, and
may expose people to unnecessary risk. In Cambodia, universities and research
institutions complain that most international researchers leave the country with-
out even leaving a copy of their t heses or making a pres en ta tion (Sovachana Pou
et al. 2016).
In this context, I came to my fieldwork committed to a postcolonial feminist
scholarship that privileges awareness of positionality, self-r eflexivity, and reciproc-
ity and places importance on emancipatory epistemologies and methodologies
in order to facilitate social transformation (see Smith 1999). In contrast to my
previous experience working for an agricultural NGO in Cambodia as a single
woman in 2006–2007, I arrived in 2012 with a husband and two c hildren in tow
(a six-m onth-o ld and a three-y ear-o ld when I began fieldwork). Motherhood can
be a key marker of mutual identification between women researchers and par-
ticipants, and I found that having children helped people to size me up as some-
one more familiar and therefore trustworthy (Warren 2001). This familiarity
opened up new spaces for social interaction while it closed down o thers. Previ-
ously, my anomalous status as a childless single white woman made me strange
enough to pass in situations where p eople gendered as w omen would not fit, such
as at the village coffee shop in the eve ning when men gathered to drink local li-
quor or in the remote forest that was considered too dangerous for w omen. As a
woman with c hildren, though, I felt disapproval when I entered t hese male spaces
and often stayed away from them (even if my children weren’t with me), which
meant being excluded from the spheres where much informal village politics took
place. At the same time, my children helped ease me into new spaces and new
relationships (Scheyvens, Scheyvens, and Nowak 2014). As my children played
with kids at the playground, as I waited to pick them up from school, or as we sat
PrefAce ix
in the shade while the pediatric nurse conducted wellness checks, I found myself
in gendered sites of sociopol itic al power that I had not appreciated before becom-
ing a mother. These were feminine spaces of good- humored laughter, news
about what was happening in the village, gossip about land sales, complaints about
corrupt government officials, and ideas for how to solve village issues.
My desire for reciprocity in research practice was complicated. As a white
middle-c lass w oman from New Zealand, I was often assumed to be working with
an NGO, but I did not have the po liti cal clout required to make a large interven-
tion in land conflict, nor was I an NGO worker who could deliver resources to
communities. Moreover, my first concern was for the safety of my research par-
ticipants. At times, I felt tension between a desire p eople articulated for me to
witness and help with their land strugg les and a sense that I should abandon field-
work in case I was putting p eople at risk (something I explore more deeply in my
collaborative work with Laura Schoenberger [2018]). With an ethics of “do no
harm” to guide the researcher, withdrawing from the field may seem the most
ethical response to a violent field site, but if we are committed to an ethics of reci-
procity and social justice, the meas ure of risk is much murkier. When does a re-
sponsibility to do no harm become a paternalistic position that denies any agency
on behalf of research interlocutors to engage on their own terms?
I do not have a definitive solution to this quandary. But I settled on an ethical
position guided by three princi ples: first, to place myself in a position where I
could move in and out of my diff ere nt fieldwork sites and methodologies if I sensed
I was putting research participants in danger; second, to be honest with rural
people that while I had provincial permission to conduct research, I was likely
being watched by the local authorities and elite (I found, however, that p eople of-
ten considered me the vulnerable one in the interaction, as they were used to
threat and intimidation); and third, to aim for an ethics of reciprocity and social
justice. I stressed my academic affiliation and stayed away from pol iti cal events
when I felt that my presence might endanger me or my participants. Instead, I
tried to find other ways to help. For example, I wrote grant applications for a lo-
cal community activist group, and I worked with land rights NGOs to design a
series of land rights workshops for w omen in my Khang Cheung and Khang Leit
field sites, each of which brought together twenty w omen from diff er ent com-
munities to share stories, learn, and network with each other.
Research Ghosts
This book is s haped by the p eople I was able to encounter in the field and by the
ghosts of others. Because I based myself in rural villages, I interacted most with
