ABSTRACTED FROM WEBSITE INTRODUCTION: This briefing looks at the particular situation of people displaced by armed conflict. It will do so from the perspective that displacement is complicated in its own right, but any proposed solutions to displacement must also be understood in a wider context of rapid land polarization. Failure to take this perspective risks more harm than good. For people affected by displacement, land is much more than just an economic asset.

After 50 years of military rule, in 2011 the Thein Sein government’s reforms in Myanmar (Burma) entailed a reengagement with the international community, including major international financial organizations, donors, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and civil society organizations (CSOs). The government’s social and economic development policies, which were strongly influenced by this engagement, encouraged private domestic and foreign investment in agriculture to create wealth and reduce poverty.

In 2012, the Government of Myanmar passed the Farmland Law and the Vacant, Fallow, Virgin Land Law, with an aim to increase investment in land through the formalization of a land market. Land titling is often considered “the natural end point of land rights formalization.” A major obstacle to achieving this in Myanmar is its legacy of multiple regimes which has created “stacked laws.” This term refers to a situation in which a country has multiple layers of laws that exist simultaneously, leading to conflicts and contradictions in the legal system.

INTRODUCTION: Myanmar stands at a historic crossroads: one where the optimism of a "critical juncture" that is "more promising than at any time in recent memory" meets apprehension over what could happen if a "host of social crises that have long blighted our country" go unaddressed. After more than sixty years of civil war and ‘social crises’, land grabbing figures are high. New legislation is designed to move land out of the hands of rural working people and into the hands of ‘modern farmers’ and foreign and domestic big business actors.

The recent political and economic liberalization in Burma/Myanmar, while indicative of some positive steps toward democratization after decades of authoritarian rule, has simultaneously increased foreign and domestic investments and geared the economy toward industrialization and large-scale agriculture.

Despite the increasing acknowledgment of scholars and practitioners that many large-scale agricultural land acquisitions in developing countries fail or never materialize, empirical evidence about how and why they fail to date is still scarce. Too often, land deals are portrayed as straightforward investments and their success is taken for granted. Looking at the coffee sector in Laos, the authors of this article explore dimensions of the land grab debate that have not yet been sufficiently examined.

This essay explores the changing landscape of food sovereignty politics in the shadow of the so-called ‘land grab’. While the food sovereignty movement emerged within a global agrarian crisis conjuncture triggered by northern dumping of foodstuffs, institutionalized in WTO trade rules, the twenty-first-century food, energy and financial crises intensify this crisis for the world’s rural poor (inflating prices of staple foods and agri-inputs) deepening the process of dispossession.

Over the past 10 years, transnational land grabs for rubber tree plantations have proliferated across Laos. Plantation concessions are being established on village lands that are represented as ‘degraded’ and legally classified as ‘state forests’, expropriated by government officials in the name of poverty alleviation with promises that plantations will provide new wage labour opportunities for those dispossessed.

As a global phenomenon, land grabbing has significant economic, environmental, and social impacts, often resulting in serious conflict between the local community and outsiders. The aim of the study is to get a deeper understanding of the extent to which land grabbing and resulting land-use conflicts affect the move towards sustainable forest management (SFM) in Cambodia. Two case studies were conducted involving community forests (CFs), with data collected through literature review, key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and field observations.

Land reform, land politics and resettlement in Laos have changed people’s land access and livelihoods. But these reforms have also transformed political subjectivity and landed property into matters for government to a degree hitherto unknown in Laos. The control over people, land and space has consolidated sovereignty in ways that make government an ineluctable part of people’s relation to land. This transforms agrarian relations. Three cases demonstrate how rural small holders’ access to land depends on the ways in which property and political subjects have been produced.

An exclusive focus on external forces risks the production of an overgeneralized account of a ubiquitous neoliberalism, which insufficiently accounts for the profusion of local variations that currently comprise the neoliberal project as a series of articulations with existing political economic circumstances. Although the international financial institutions initially promoted neoliberal economics in the global South, powerful elites were happy to oblige.

This paper seeks to reconsider the contemporary relevance of the resource frontier, drawing on examples of nature's commodification and enclosure under way in the peripheral Southeast Asian country of Laos. Frontiers are conceived as relational zones of economy, nature and society; spaces of capitalist transition, where new forms of social property relations and systems of legality are rapidly established in response to market imperatives.