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Miles Kenney-Lazar, "Socializing Land: Plantations, Dispossession, and Resistance in Laos" (U Hawai’i Press, 2025)
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Dr. Miles Kenny Lazar
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Miles Kenny Lazar about his book titled Socializing Plantations, Dispossession and Resistance in Laos, published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2025. This book, as the title suggests, takes us to Laos, looking at what is happening around a renewed sort of spike of interest in the acquisition of land, the use of planned land for plantations for sort of big capital investment type projects and what that actually means on the ground. Right. Obviously the land has people who have their own understandings of what it should be used for and who gets to make decisions about it. So what happens when a government or a big company kind of turns up and tries to do something else? It's not a straightforward story in terms of kind of black and white. One side thinks this, the other side thinks that, you know, there's no room in the middle, or it always goes one way or it always goes the other. It's a much more nuanced and complicated picture and I don't want to give too much away at this point because I think we have a lot to discuss. So, Miles, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about it.
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Dr. Miles Kenny Lazar
Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm very pleased to have you as well. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us what why you decided to write this book? What sorts of questions are you investigating? How did this all Develop, Sure.
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Dr. Miles Kenny Lazar
So I'm a senior lecturer at the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Melbourne, and I just wanted to say that I'm living and working on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Wai Wurrung peoples, and would like to pay my respects to elders, past, present and emerging. And where I'm working and living always was and always will be aboriginal land. I'm originally from the United States, from the state of Maine, but I've lived all over the world, in Laos, but also in Japan and Singapore and now in Australia. And by training, I'm a human geographer and a political ecologist. So that means I'm interested in how relationships between humans and their environments change, especially as influenced by politics, power and political economy. And the motivation for this book really started from earlier work that I had done in Laos. I was working there for several years conducting research on the same topic, the social and environmental impacts of Chinese and Vietnamese rubber plantations, which were hugely problematic. But at that time I was focusing mostly just on the impacts such as land dispossession, deforestation, agrochemical pollution and labor abuses. And that was all pretty clear what was going on in terms of how people were being affected. But what was less clear to me was how and why these projects were developed, such as why farmers were made to sacrifice their lands to them, and in particular, why some villages and farmers were more impacted than others. And I was particularly struck by one village that had resisted the acquisition of a significant portion of their land, but it wasn't clear to me at that time why they had been able to do that while others hadn't. So I started to set out a study, which became my doctoral research, on how plantation companies are acquiring land, including how the boundaries of their land concessions become modified in practice, and how some villagers are able to push back against that acquisition of land. So I was becoming very interested in the politics and governance of these projects, and I was also very interested in the politics of land and how they are operating in Laos, which is a very repressive political environment. But there was clearly room for some groups of people to be able to stand up and to make claims for their land rights within that space.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
A whole bunch of things that are definitely interesting to investigate and for us, of course, to discuss in more detail. But before we get into any of those kind of pieces you've just raised there, I want to talk a little bit more about, obviously, the title of the book, right, Socialising Land. What do you mean by this? And what are some of the different ways that land can be socialised?
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Dr. Miles Kenny Lazar
Yeah, it's a really great question. The concept of socialising land is one that I developed as I was writing the book. So it's something that came through later. But I came up with this concept to capture how control over land is produced in Laos. But I hope that it's also relevant. I think it's relevant to other contexts. So my hope is that other people will take that up as well in their own work. But one of the things that I kept coming back to as I was writing the book and I was trying to think through all these different cases of dispossession and resistance to it and the politics of land was I kept coming back to how land was entangled in a web of social relationships, by which I mean that multiple people and institutions were making claims to the same plot, a plot of land that might have had a history of different uses and forms of land tenure. And so this idea of socializing land kept coming to me to help me describe this characteristic of land and the way that I was increasingly thinking about it, that was helping me understand how these changes occurred. And that's a way of thinking about land as something that is not just an entity or a thing or how it's often times treated in a capitalist economy as property to be owned, but it's something that people have fundamentally social relationships with. And I kept coming to the conclusion that those. Those are relationships that people have with land, regardless of how it changes over time. So, at a very basic level, socializing land is really just about the process by which these ties and connections that people have to land are developed over time. And so that might be something like a slow, incremental process, as a group of people are cultivating an area of land and passing that land down through the generations. Or it might be something that's much more sudden, a kind of a rupture in control over land that could be due to war or revolution or major land redistribution policies, whether that's redistributing land to the peasantry or to investors. And so I found the concept increasingly useful for tracing these social relationships that change over time, but also how land control is produced at moments of rupture, such as what I studied in the book, which are these periods in which large amounts of land are suddenly granted out to private investors, and it creates a really big threat to people's access to land. So the other thing that I did with this concept is to think about the different ways that land can be socialized. The basic notion of land as social relations Is an important starting point. But I didn't find that it was sufficient to help explain how land and control over it changed for different purposes. And so, in the context of my research, that was really about whether control over land Was maintained by communities. Or if it was granted and controlled by plantation companies. So I started thinking about this as the way that land can be socialized for the peasantry, for rural communities that are using it, or for capital for these private plantation investors. And that's not. Those are not inherently the only ways that land might be socialized in Laos and also in other contexts. But there are two directions that are particularly important for this study. So, on the one hand, socializing land for the peasantry Is really about how people's social ties to land can help protect against its dispossession, right? So if people have a really close connection to the land, it was passed down through the generations. If they see themselves as having kind of spiritual connections to land as well, as is the case with many communities, Then those meaningful connections to their land Are worth fighting for to maintain access to and control over it. And that's really important. But on the other hand, we see lots of different cases. Where these social ties to land can be disrupted or broken, Whether it's by coercion or persuasion Or a combination of the two. And oftentimes, this is kind of focused on As a process of privatizing land. But what I wanted to do with this concept of socializing land. Is to talk about how privatizing land Is also a social social process. So in the case of Laos, the land does end up coming under the control of a company As a private lease. However, that land is leased to the company by the state. So the social relations of land had to be transformed by the government to support that land lease. The ties and connections that people had to that land had to be changed. And the land that people used as customary land. Had to be redefined as state land that can be leased out to the company. So, again, the social relations to land have been changed. Additionally, that land is no longer owned and worked by an individual household. For whether for subsistence or for commodity production, it's something that is now managed by a company, and it's worked on and labored on by an organized group of laborers. So there are social relations Inherent in the way that land is being used. And commodities are being produced from that land. While, of course, the plantation itself Is owned by the company. And the surplus accrues to the company. So these two forms of socializing land are these kind of different directions that social relations of land can go. And I see it as a kind of a field of struggle or an area of contestation. And, uh, this idea of socializing land then becomes a kind of guiding framework throughout the book to think through what forces are pushing control over land in one direction or another, and how that struggle over. Um. And so I use that to kind of think about those different forces, whether it's a company's political ties to the government that gives them greater capacity to gain control over land, or if it's the capacity of a village to organize itself against land expropriation.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So there's a lot of things there that are obviously really helpful to examine, as we will in Laos, But a lot of what you've described there could be applied to other places as well. So why do you focus on Laos to examine these processes?
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Dr. Miles Kenny Lazar
Yeah, that's a great question. So I have been thinking, of course, a lot about the applicability of these ideas to other contexts. And there are many places where the state plays a major role in distributing land, Even in contexts that have a very kind of liberalized or neoliberal land system of registration and marketization. But Laos is particularly interesting for a few different reasons. And one of those is that it has this history of governing land in different ways that conflict with one another. And therefore, it's a clear case of showing how land can become socialized toward different ends. These different models of land governance kind of conflict with one another in the contemporary era, especially as the government has been granting out so much land for concessions. And so, to me, that really speaks to concerns over these contrasting approaches to land control that are very relevant to a debate that's been going on about what is the global land rush, this sudden rush of interest in land that's been occurring across the world over the past 15 years, or sometimes called land grabbing. So those kind of contrasting approaches to land governance, they start from the socialist. The early socialist period after the revolution, and the socialist Lao People's Democratic Republic was formed in 1975. And actually, the concept of socializing land to a certain degree is also inspired by the socialist system of governance and economy in Laos, especially in those early years, to be thinking about how that has inspired and motivated the approach taken towards land in Laos since then. So after 1975, there were attempts to collectivize land, but that was largely unsuccessful. The collectives fell apart for various reasons. And so in the 1980s, the economy was liberalized, and private land ownership was allowed and encouraged. But one of the things that I think is quite interesting and important for this concept is that the legacies of socialism can still be seen in many ways. That land is governed in the country, including to this day. And one of those ways is the significant role that the state plays in managing land. And so because of that socialist history, for example, there is this idea that the government has some sort of duty or commitment to allocate land to the people. But that comes into stark relief with government policies that began in the 90s, but really kind of took off in the early 2000s of granting large areas of so called state land to private investors. So we have these kind of really conflicting approaches to land governance that have occurred throughout the Lao history, from a more strictly socialist approach to one that favors capital investment. But there is still that kind of legacy of socialist governance at play. And so it's a really interesting case study because of these conflicting visions of land control. Another reason is that the reality of land in many parts of the country is that there's a lack of clear land tenure. So there's many parts of the country where land is customarily used by rural communities based upon traditional systems, which vary by ethnic group. However, most of this land is not actually officially registered. So. So what's really interesting about these areas is that they could be socialized in either direction. They could be treated as community land that's been customarily managed, or on the other hand, they could be treated as this kind of empty and available land by the government that could be granted to companies. So it's another example of how those kind of contrasting approaches to socializing land come into play. And then just finally, the last reason that is particularly interesting to me has to do with the politics of Laos. Laos is really interesting because a lot of times people assume that because it's a one single party socialist system of government, that there's no room for politics of dissent over land. But what I wanted to show through this book is that there's actually a rich world of politics that lives beneath that surface. And it's of course, true that villagers need to be careful of what they say and what they do, as it can invite repression, but it doesn't mean that they're believing everything that they're told, or they're not trying to resist what is happening when it's threatening their land and life. So that means we can understand the control over land to be political in places where it seems at first to be apolitical There are always these kind of social ties and connections to land, even when they seem to be absent. And so that makes it a really interesting case study for showing how this kind of struggle over how land is socialized in different directions is even occurring in a place where it might not seem to be the case.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I mean, this absolutely sounds like a fascinating case for all of those reasons, but you have mentioned sort of the repressive political climate a few times already. So can we also talk about sort of practically how you go about investigating these questions in that sort of context?
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Dr. Miles Kenny Lazar
Absolutely. So maybe I'll just say a little bit about the empirical fieldwork and then get into those challenges that I faced during the research. So I was looking at two plantation companies. One is called Sun Paper, a private Chinese pulp and paper producer, and the other is, I call it just Kwaza for short, a state owned Vietnamese rubber enterprise. They're both operating in the same area of the country, which is the eastern portion of Savannakhet Province in the south, near the Vietnamese border, which means they're working in the same physical and governance landscape. So I chose these companies because I could examine how they're both operating in a similar kind of context. And they also had really different political relationships with the local government, which offered me room for comparison. And then for each company, I looked at five villages, each of which had different experiences of land dispossession and responses to it. And this provided a lot of opportunities for analyzing these kind of different factors that enabled their abilities to resist. So what this meant is that I ended up studying a topic that was very politically sensitive at the time and continues to be so and so. It created some pretty substantial challenges. And these are challenges that anyone would face in doing research in Laos, but were particularly heightened because of the topic. And one of those was gaining official permission to do the research, and the other was working in a way that would allow people to feel comfortable enough to share sensitive information while also ensuring their safety. So to Gain official permission. One of the things that was kind of odd in the process of setting up this project was that I ended up working with a government agency, which I didn't expect at first. I thought I might be working with an NGO or an international organization working in Laos. But many of the organizations that I initially approached were quite hesitant to work with me on this project because of that sensitivity. But it turned out that there was a research center within the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment that was actually keen to host me once they learned about my research, because they were actually tasked with monitoring and evaluating these land investments, and they felt that my research could strengthen their position within the government to achieve that task. There's a bit of power struggle between them as a relatively new institution and more established institutions in the government. And so I think that there was a way that they saw that my work could kind of help achieve some of those political goals. But nonetheless, I still had to go through many layers of bureaucracy and approval from the central level all the way down to the district and the village to be able to access my field sites, which created quite a few delays, as you might imagine. But eventually I got there, and one of the interesting things was that working with the government actually enabled me quite a bit of access to government officials, but also to the companies. And having official permission in Laos can also provide a degree of security for the people that you're speaking with as well, which was a surprise for me, because they understand that you are allowed to be there and you're allowed to be doing this work, rather than potentially being suspicious of who you are and what you're up to and whether them talking to you could get them in trouble. For the second aspect, in terms of ensuring that people felt comfortable to speak and that I could try to reduce any risks to them. This was particularly challenging because working through the government, I had government officials escorting me to the field, which would be the case for anyone going to the field in Laos. There's always a requirement that foreigners be accompanied by some sort of government official, and this can be really challenging. Many researchers have faced this challenge working in Laos. I dealt with this in a few different ways. So one is that I also worked with people from the same ethnic group, the Brew ethnic group in southern Laos, who had been working in these villages for a long time and had a lot of connections there to work with me to conduct interviews in the Brew language and to keep any kind of sensitive information from being translated to Lao. And that just provided a degree of kind of safety to be able to have that conversation in their own language. And it came through in interviews where they would say, please definitely don't translate this to Lao. The other strategy that worked quite well was that after spending quite a bit of time in any one place, district officials would tend to get bored or see that kind of the work that we're doing is not as kind of, you know, not particularly dangerous, and that they would allow us to. Could do our work on our own and kind of leave us alone. And so after spending more time in the place, we started to kind of create more space for us. The other thing that was quite interesting is that it became clear to me that many villagers were actually quite okay with sharing a lot of information that I assumed would be sensitive. And sometimes they'd have actually even made similar complaints to government officials. So I was starting to see that there are certain kind of areas that I had assumed would be very difficult to talk about, but that people were willing to speak about because they actually wanted some of these complaints to get out there into the open and also to be heard by the local government.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting, because so much of what is clear you came out with from having all these conversations was a lot of kind of gray area in reality, that maybe isn't sort of as gray on paper. And that really shows the benefit of doing this kind of fieldwork. So one of the gray areas I'd love to explore is something that sounds really straightforward, right? The idea of state land, straightforward phrase seems like something we'd all kind of automatically understand. We know what it is, but as you discovered in Laos, it's really not that clear. So what exactly is state land?
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Dr. Miles Kenny Lazar
That's absolutely correct. It's a real gray area. It's also a very slippery concept. And this is one of the things that I spent a lot of time thinking about through the research and also through the writing process. It seems really straightforward, but it's is actually a. It can be a very confusing term in terms of what it is, but also how it operates on the ground. One of the starting points for me is to kind of. To start from what people assume to be actually the straightforward understanding of state land, which is that the understanding that the Lao government owns all land within the country and therefore can do whatever it wants with it, even if people are using and managing that land. So basically, state land would just be all the land of the country, and there's no kind of confusion there. But one thing that becomes very obvious once you just even just look at the Constitution and the different iterations of the land law is that it states that not that the state owns the land, but actually that the country's land is owned by the national community, which sounds kind of like the state, but it is distinct in that the national community is the whole country. It's the nation, and the state is the representative of that. And it also states that the state. The role of the state is to manage that land. So that's quite different in the sense that the land in another sense belongs to everyone, but it is managed by the state. And actually, I had this really interesting experience when I asked people who owns the land, just as a kind of opening discussion, that many villagers would say that the people own the land, but the state manages it. And even some district officials would repeat the same phrase to me. And that can be kind of understood in different ways. But clearly by. From the discussions I had with villagers, the way they understood it was that ultimately they do own the land, but they recognize that the state has certain rights to manage it. And that certainly doesn't clear up anything. In fact, it probably makes it even more confusing, but it does really establish that people have a kind of fundamental rights to land, even if those are shared with the state. So what makes things more complicated, of course, is that since the 1980s, as the government liberalized the country's markets, introduced a market economy, they also started to liberalize land ownership. And this especially started happening in the late 90s with land titling programs and with the reform of the land laws, Individual tenure and even ownership over land was allowed. So you start to get a kind of another category of land, which is individual land, individually owned, entitled land on one end of the spectrum and state land on the other. And then in between is kind of land that somehow belongs to the village, but they don't quite own. So it's clear that when land is legally owned by an individual and because they have title to it, that that has become their land. Even though sometimes that titled land can still be expropriated. For the most part, it's recognized that that's individual land. The question is what to do and how to understand and approach the rest of the land that is not titled, which is actually a significant amount of the country's land, because the land titling programs have rolled out pretty slowly, and there's many different areas where land is not titled and it's just customarily used by individuals. So an extreme interpretation would just be that any land that's not titled belongs to the state, and therefore if the state is to grant out land to a plantation company, then they could just use any of that land that's not titled and kind of allocate it as they wish. And that is a view that some government officials espouse. And they kind of treat that land as being empty and available for land concessions. But that's a very kind of extreme interpretation, because there's other parts of the law that also provide for customary land, which means that if their land is to be owned and titled and registered, then there has to be a process from taking the land that belonged to them customarily, that was passed down to them within their family, and to register that officially as titled land. And typically in the law, it's defined that if villagers have been using that land for 20 years, they have the right to title that land. And then on top of that, there's always been provisions for villages, which are the lowest administrative level of the state, to have rights to manage land, their own land. And so you get this, like, very. This gray area that you were mentioning, this kind of confusing relationship between individually private land, village land, and state land. And the question of what exactly is state land and where it exists is really a vexing one. And across many areas of the country, there aren't any maps showing where private land ends and state land begins. And so one of the kind of big arguments of the book is that it's actually that process of defining state land that is an area of contestation over whether that state land is land that would be allocated to villagers to become their privately used land, or to become village managed land, or if it's land that would get allocated to a company. And those are the two directions of socializing land for the peasantry versus for capital. And oftentimes it's actually through the process of developing these plantation projects or other types of land concessions that that question of state land gets resolved. Because once the concession is determined, the boundaries are determined and the land is developed, the nat has been transformed into state land. And sometimes that comes through the use of force or the pressure or threats or force, and often with some sort of negotiation under that pressure. So it's really those boundaries between the plantation as it's established and the village that come to define what is and what is not state land and which areas the village can continue to use, and some of which can also be treated as private land.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is definitely a gray area then. And I want to talk a little bit more about what you mentioned in terms of sort of negotiation and going back to what you were saying earlier around kind of why different villages are more or less able to resist political pressure. What are the sorts of factors that explain that? I mean, for one thing, you talk about in the book kind of political ties, we. What sorts of things help explain that difference?
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Dr. Miles Kenny Lazar
Yeah, that's a great question. What's interesting is that most of the villages where I worked actually did not have significant ties that could help them to make those kinds of claims. So the area where I worked is mostly comprised of ethnically Brew villages, which is a Mon Khmer ethnic group. They could be considered to be indigenous to that area, but they have very little representation within the government. So they're somewhat kind of politically marginalized. They live in more kind of remote areas outside of the main. Away from the main roads, away from the district capitals, historically lived in more upland areas of the district. And the government offices are mostly dominated by officials either from the majority Lao group or the Putai ethnic groups, which are closely related to the Lao ethnic group. So for a lot of these villages, actually, it was very challenging because of this kind of lack of ties. And I could actually see this very distinctly when I compared the most of the villages where I worked that really. That were Brew and that really struggled to resist the acquisition of their lands. With the one Phutai village where I worked, which had very close links with the district government. The head of the village was formerly a police officer within the district. They had a lot of development projects come and work in the village. They were able to kind of attract a lot of development funding through those links. And it was quite straightforward for them to reject the project. Basically, they said they didn't have enough land for their other livelihood activities. And the government kind of went on to the next village. And there was only one Phutai village that I actually looked at because more generally, those villages were not targeted for land acquisitions. So it was actually the Brew villages that were targeted because they were seen by the government as in need of development, that they were seen as being impoverished, in need of the jobs that might were supposedly coming with plantations. And also because they practice shifting cultivation, which is an upland agricultural practice that the government has sought to replace for a very long time. Many people might know it by its more negative name of slash and burn agriculture. So in general, the Brew villages were facing an uphill battle. But there were some important exceptions that were really telling in terms of how political connections, when they're available, which is quite rare, could help communities to be able to lodge their claims with the government or to get their claims heard. There were two particularly interesting cases. So one was very remarkable because despite brew villages not having political connections in general, it did happen to be that, you know, the Lao state, the Lao government is a multi ethnic government. There are attempts to kind of represent different ethnic groups within the government. And they were connected to the former president of Laos, who was a brew man. And so they were actually able to connect with him through that family connection and to get him to intervene in a somewhat indirect way, to return a substantial portion of the land that was acquired in their village. So that was really exceptional. Another, which had a case which perhaps would be a bit more common, which was that this village had wartime linkages with the government. So several of the village leaders had fought in the Second Indochina War against the Royalists and against the Americans. And after the war, some of their veteran buddies were placed within the provincial government. And so they actually had that personal connection as veterans. And when they were making complaints to the district government about what Sun Paper was doing, they were actually able to get those complaints heard within the provincial government. And it ended up that they could get that case even brought up to the national assembly in the capital in Vientiane. So they were able to get national assembly members to come down and to come inspect the case and kind of raise the profile of their complaint. And this gave them a little bit of an edge to be able to protect certain parts of their lands. And they were able to get Sun Paper to only acquire half or to develop only half of the land that was allocated to the company. So, you know, without these political ties, villagers still have ways of making complaints. Like, they can make regular complaints to the district government. But it becomes difficult to get these heard, to get them to have any kind of movement and prominence. And especially it can create a lot of fear or concern that there might be reprisals or repression if they don't have the kind of COVID of some of those political connections to help protect them.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is a really interesting aspect that very much makes that sort of variation kind of come into clearer focus in terms of political ties, then what role, for example, do those ties have, in the state's sort of view of how much they care about this? Right. Because a lot of what you've described is sort of the villages caring a lot about kind of getting what they want from this. The state also has different ideas about kind of, this land is more or less useful than other kinds of land, which would kind of obviously incentivise them to sort of fight more or Not. So what are those sort of different levels of usefulness, and how does that play out in these negotiations?
- [38:14]
Dr. Miles Kenny Lazar
Absolutely. So another really important differentiation of whether villages are able to protect access to land or if it gets acquired for the project, has to do with these different forms of agricultural production and whether they are valued by the state. So I mentioned earlier shifting cultivation, that is a type of land use that the government very much does not value. And actually, they have had a long standing policy since the 1980s to eradicate that form of cultivation across the country. And if not eradicating it, at least they want to stabilize it, which means keep it in controlled areas and limit the amount of land that can be used for that practice as a kind of initial step towards eventual eradication or erasure of it. Now, that is, you know, the Lao government is not alone in thinking that there are many development agencies that see shifting cultivation as environmentally problematic because areas of secondary forest are cleared and burned before cultivation. But I would like to note that it can be a very sustainable form of cultivation because it's a rotational system in many cases, where the land is actually left fallow after cultivation, ideally for periods of up to 15 to 20 years in traditional systems. And then that fallow land or that secondary forest is then cleared again. And so it's a rotational system where it's secondary forest being cleared rather than new forest. But the government has not seen it that way. They've seen it as environmentally destructive, and they also see it as a kind of backwards, economically backwards practice because it's subsistence based. It's not seen as being very productive and not capable of really generating a cash income. So it's not helping the country to kind of modernize and move forward with its development. And so for these reasons, it has been a kind of target land use for replacement. Not only the shifting cultivation, the lands that are cultivated each year, but also the lands that are left fallow. So the whole landscape is a kind of target for replacement by what the government sees as more permanent crops like rubber trees or other types of crop commodities. So it becomes very difficult for villages to protect that land, because that's the kind of land that the government wants to treat as state land or the land that is available for plantations. Well, on the other hand, the other major form of agricultural production in the area and across Laos is lowland wetlands, paddy rice cultivation. So this is the kind of rice cultivation that most people would be familiar with that stays in one place and is seen by the government to be more productive and a kind of staple of subsistence agricultural production. So one of the things that became very interesting for me is that, I mean, it was very clear that the main areas of lowland paddy rice production, Especially near the roads, in the flat, low lying areas, near the district capitals, near the small towns, would not be acquired by these plantations. It was not zoned, it was not allocated for these projects. They were mostly set up to be in the areas where there are shifting cultivation landscapes. But there's also, just like with state land, there are these gray areas that kind of sit between a shifting cultivation landscape and a paddy rice landscape. And there are quite a few villages that are villages where people are going through the process of trying to convert their shifting cultivation land, Especially if it's relatively flat land, it's not too sloped to paddy rice cultivation. And so that was oftentimes a claim the villagers would make that they are going through the process of expanding their paddy rice cultivation. And the land that they're currently using for shifting cultivation is productive. It's not empty, it's not available. It's something that they have been using, and they are planning to convert it into a kind of a permanent agricultural land use, Especially often as paddy rice. So that became a very kind of convincing claim that could be made, Although it was oftentimes contested whether they were really going through that transition towards paddy rice, or whether they were just kind of making that claim to try to protect their lands. But it was this really important kind of gray area of value and of productivity, according to this kind of government ideology and understanding of what types of land uses should be socialized for communities, or which should be socialized for plantation investors.
- [43:39]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's really interesting to see these very much overlapping and sorts of competing claims and kind of how they get figured out. Is there anything further we want to add to this to sort of help explore what makes villagers able to resist these kinds of external land grabs, Any sorts of other kinds of organizing that tend to be effective, or other aspects of how this impacts community relations. We want to discuss. Discuss.
- [44:05]
Dr. Miles Kenny Lazar
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the other really important things that I looked at in the research is the internal relationships between members of a village and how that shaped their capacity and their motivation as well to resist. Right. Because there was a lot of pressure placed upon them. Oftentimes villages would go through multiple rounds of negotiation, so they might express some hesitance at first. There would be greater pressure put upon them. There could even be threats of reprisals or oppression. There were instances of people being kind of called up to the District offices, to be educated, to be told that what they were doing was incorrect. There were one or two cases of people being jailed. When they had done things like sabotage the plantations or cut down trees. So there was a lot of pressure, and it took a lot to organize together. And to continue to resist the acquisition of their lands. Or to try to come to some sort of negotiation that would be to their benefit. For some villages, that meant giving away a small portion of land. But retaining the majority of their lands. In exchange for the company building a road or an electric line or a village office. So one thing I saw was that there were some quite big differences. Between different types of villages. Some that really were organized and put up a strong front of resistance. And were successful in some cases or less successful in others. And those that didn't resist at all. Or initially tried to prevent the acquisition of their lens. But then they kind of gave up on that, or that stance broke down in negotiations. And one of the things that became quite obvious Is that there were divides between villages. In terms of the relationship between the village leaders and the rest of the households within the village. So for villages that were kind of acting in solidarity to resist, they have this close connection between the village leadership and the rest of the community. It was quite incredible that they were very proud to share about how they had made all their decisions collectively. They had consulted with the rest of the village before any decisions were made. They didn't just kind of come to those decisions on the spot. When meeting with company officials or government officials. And then in comparison, villages where that kind of resistance fell apart or it never really happened. There was some pretty big gaps between the village leadership and the rest of the community. So those village leaders would make decisions on their own. There were also a lot of accusations of corruption. When they were acting on their own and not consulting with the rest of the village. It could be easier to buy them off, not necessarily for large sums of money. Sometimes it could be for per diems that they're paid for working with the company. Or in other cases, an easy and permanent job with the plantation, like working as a guard. And when this happened, you know, it led to quite a lot of discord within communities. There was a lot of anger at what was perceived as village out the rest of the village. And sometimes those village leaders retired. And new village leaders were elected. Who had to deal with all the problems that were left to them. So there can be really substantial differences. Based upon the kinds of solidarity that people have with themselves within the village. To be able to put up what is a very challenging act of resistance in a repressive political environment.
- [48:21]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely a whole extra layer to keep in mind. So thank you for adding that into our discussion. If we sort of zoom back out again a little bit, the way we did at the beginning, talking about kind of socialising land within and beyond Laos, what are some of the implications for all of this?
- [48:39]
Dr. Miles Kenny Lazar
One of the things that I think is really important coming out of this work and conceptualizing the idea of socializing land that I hope will be useful and applicable to other contexts is thinking about land as being really dynamic. So moving beyond that conceptualization of land as something static or a kind of thing to be owned, really thinking about the social connections that people have to it, even when it's privately owned. And I've used that, of course, in the book to think about how that shapes who controls and owns land and how it moves in different directions. But one of the things that I think is really useful about that is politically is to be thinking about how those social relations to land can continue to change for better or worse. Right. So in the case of the plantations that I was looking at in Laos, the land, even though it's controlled by the company, they have these long term leases, and those leases will probably be renewed at the end of the 35 to 40 year leases. There is always a possibility that because the land is still owned by the state, it could be reallocated for different purposes at some point. And that's a bit of a pipe dream. You know, it's a kind of a very impractical political outcome. But I think it's important to recognize that just because land has been turned into an investment or into private property, doesn't mean that there are social connections to it cease to exist, and that the social relations and uses of that land could change in the future under the right conditions. Another really related point is that people's connections to land last for a really long time, even after dispossession. So in one of the villages where I worked, they kind of gave me a tour of the plantation and instead of talking about the different parts of the plantation itself, they were talking about their different lands that they had within it. So even though you couldn't see their rice field or you couldn't see kind of fallow land, they still remembered where those plots were and still kind of maintained those connections to it. Another implication of this research is that land is always political and there are oftentimes always people seeking to maintain control over their land, even in situations that seem apolitical. And that's something that really comes out of the work in Laos, where it appears at first glance that the state has full control over the land and people have no choice but to kind of go along with that. But one of the things that I learned is that it's really important to watch out for politics and the politics of land in places and contexts where it can be difficult to observe at first. And this means that in other contexts, there may be opportunities to contest extractive land projects, even when it seems that there are not. And sometimes that could occur in quite surprising and creative ways.
- [51:59]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, speaking of surprising, is there anything that you came across in putting all of this together that especially surprised you? Maybe a detail we haven't mentioned so far?
- [52:07]
Dr. Miles Kenny Lazar
Yeah, there were a few things that surprised me through the research process. One of them I did mention briefly before, but it's worth saying a bit more about, which is that I was quite surprised by how open people were to talk about the problems that they were facing, and especially when we were dealing with quite sensitive issues, even sometimes when government officials were present. And it was also quite interesting to me how having government permission to do this research was not necessarily something that hampered the research process, but actually allowed people to feel more comfortable to speak with me. Another surprise that came to me was how the politics of this issue could change in unexpected ways, and sometimes quite suddenly. So while at first glance, when I started doing my research in Laos, I understood Laos to be a strictly top down authoritarian political environment. And in many ways that's true. There's a lot of repression, there are a lot of limitations on political action and speech, but it doesn't mean that there isn't any room for bottom up politics at all. And I was quite surprised at how complaints over land, which didn't just come from the villages where I was working, but actually were coming from all over the country, were actually filtering up to higher levels of government, even though it didn't seem that way. So not only were people kind of making local complaints, those were actually getting transmitted up through the government. There were also situations where people were making direct complaints to the National Assembly. There were media reports that were coming out. And so, you know, Laos, despite being very authoritarian, it does have a system of democratic centralism, meaning that there is a system for allowing ideas and complaints and concerns to kind of filter up from the bottom through the state or through the party system, and for decisions to then be made at the top that are implemented across the country. And this actually happened when it came to land, that a moratorium was placed in 2012 on new land concessions, and it was specifically targeting mining and also rubber and eucalyptus plantations. And that moratorium was only supposed to last for a little while until better regulations could be put in place to manage these projects. But it's actually still in place, except for some limited areas of state forests, like what are called production forests. So that was quite surprising to me that this kind of bottom up form of politics could actually occur in the Lao context and lead to change that is not perfect, but it is a step forward to putting a stop on the granting of these large concessions all across the country that were wreaking havoc. And it kind of showed to me that we place a lot of emphasis in our politics on outward, loud and direct democratic forms of such politics, but they can also operate in other ways that are much more indirect, quiet, behind the scenes, but can also be as equally powerful and that are important to pay attention to and see what opportunities exist within them.
- [55:44]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
There's definitely lots of takeaways there, and clearly you had quite an interesting time figuring all of this out. So can I ask what you might be working on now that it's done, whether or not it's a book, whether or not it's related to what we've been discussing? Anything you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [55:59]
Dr. Miles Kenny Lazar
Certainly, yeah. So I guess after spending all this time looking at the problems of plantations and land concessions and land dispossession, it is really important to continue studying that. But I start to have a desire to study attempts to address these problems as well as not necessarily as the best solution or the ideal way forward, but to study them as a kind of an object of investigation, to see what potential they had for taking on the problems that existed and what are the limitations to them. So there are two areas I've been working on that. So one is around forest carbon sequestration projects in Laos. So those are attempts to address some of the deforestation related to agricultural expansion by providing payments to people to conserve forests rather than to clear them. Unfortunately, I'm finding that a lot of those efforts are actually targeting small scale farmers rather than these large plantations. But it is an interesting attempt to address one aspect of this larger issue. And then the other project that I'm looking at is efforts to make plantations more sustainable. And I'm especially looking at that within the rubber sector. So I'm looking at a few different initiatives that are led by different institutions. One is by multinational tire companies that have created a sustainable rubber initiative. Another is a new regulation coming out of the European Union to limit or restrict the importation of commodities, including rubber, that have been produced through deforestation. So I'm interested in understanding whether they are addressing the fundamental problems that have been faced in this sector and also how they are impacting small holder farmers as they have to kind of comply with more and more regulations to be quote, unquote, sustainable.
- [58:12]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly sounds interesting. Best of luck with the project.
- [58:16]
Dr. Miles Kenny Lazar
Thank you very much.
- [58:18]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
While you are off investigating, listeners can read the book we have been discussing of your previous investigation titled Socializing Land, Plantations, Dispossession and Resistance in Laos, published by the University of Hawaii in 2025. Miles, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [58:36]
Dr. Miles Kenny Lazar
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure to be here and talk with you about my book.