This event takes place on zoom, register to receive a link.
Speaker: Michael B. Dwyer, Indiana University Bloomington
Moderator: Jessica DiCarlo, University of British Columbia
Discussant: Juliet Lu, University of British Columbia
In the twenty-first century, transnational land deals in economically poor but “land-rich” countries of the global South have become increasingly prevalent and controversial. Drawing from Michael B. Dwyer’s new book Upland Geopolitics: Postwar Laos and the Global Land Rush (University of Washington Press, 2022), this talk uses the boom in Chinese rubber plantations in Laos’s so-called Northern Economic Corridor to examine and theorize the uneven geography of the new global land rush. By examining the human terrain that underlies foreign land allocations that are both economically “necessary” and politically difficult, the talk shows how legacies of Cold War conflict continue to pave the way for transnational enclosure in a socially uneven landscape.
Michael B. Dwyer (Assistant Professor of Geography at Indiana University Bloomington) is a political ecologist who studies agrarian change, environmental governance and infrastructure development in Southeast Asia. He has conducted fieldwork in Laos and Cambodia on the social and legal geographies, as well as the policy tradeoffs, of large-scale land deals, land titling, new road and energy infrastructure, and carbon forestry/REDD+.
Hosted By: Institute of Asian Research (IAR), School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia
