The Global Dimensions of Land Grabbing in South East Asia

For the last two decades, large-scale land acquisitions aimed at expanding commercial agricultural production and natural resource extraction have boomed in many parts of South East Asia. According to the Land Matrix database, countries such as Indonesia, Cambodia and Laos are among those with the highest volumes of large scale land deals in Asia. Scholars examining these transactions have emphasised their global, transnational dimensions, branding them exemplars of “global land grabbing”— a term that also denotes their distinctly political character. In this public lecture, I seek to unpack the global dimensions of land acquisition and concomitant dispossession in South East Asia. I do this via explorations of the range of actors (states, corporations), transnational networks, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society, and institutions (norms, rules and procedures) implicated in these processes. In doing so, my aim is to elucidate the various power relations— spanning multiple scales— that characterise these contemporary phenomena, and depict this using case studies from varied contexts. I will draw on my primary research in Cambodia, as well as draw on examples from Indonesia and Laos in my lecture.

Bio: Saba Joshi is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Gender and Development in the Department of Politics and is also a member of the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre (IGDC) at the University of York. Her research focuses on gender in international relations, social movements, land politics and agrarian change, with a geographical focus on South and Southeast Asia. Her research has been published in the Journal of Peasant Studies, Third World Quarterly, Globalizations and the International Journal of Feminist Politics. Prior to taking up her position in York in 2021, Saba was a Swiss National Science Foundation Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of International Development. She has also held visiting scholar positions at the Department of Food and Resource Economics and Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen, and the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, at Lund University.

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