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The Journal of Peasant Studies

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Fragmented sovereignty: land reform

and dispossession in Laos
Christian Lund
Published online: 14 Sep 2011.

To cite this article: Christian Lund (2011) Fragmented sovereignty: land reform and dispossession in
Laos, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 38:4, 885-905, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2011.607709

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 The Journal of Peasant Studies
Vol. 38, No. 4, October 2011, 885–905

Fragmented sovereignty: land reform and dispossession in Laos

Christian Lund

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
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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. As a consequence, a government institution’s
control over land does not represent or reflect pre-existing sovereignty. It
produces it.
Keywords: Laos; land reform; property; political subjects; sovereignty

Introduction
How is agriculture integrated into the capitalist economy? The original Agrarian
Question and its meandering into a broad range of contemporary questions and
puzzles are traced by Akram-Lodhi and Kay (2010a, 2010b). Dispossession as an
outcome of capitalist transformations is one of the recurrent themes, and the authors
argue that complex forces are at play divorcing peasants from their land. The process
has no single trajectory; history and geography exhibit tremendous variation and
overlapping processes such as urbanization, market integration, commercialization
of land and production produce complex processes of intensification and
extensification. Commodification of land and labour are central elements in both
agrarian transition and the integration into capitalist economy.
Dispossession’s ubiquity seems to be tempered, however, by the evidence of a
range of land reforms, which have come to the fore over the last decades (e.g.
Ducourtieux et al. 2005). Many contemporary government-led land reforms have –
in all their variation – elements of market liberalisation and a formalization of
existing land rights. This is true for Laos, whose government has engaged in
resettlement of the population since the end of the Indochina War in 1975, and in
land reform since 1988. It reflects an overall trend across continents and cutting

I am particularly grateful to Ian Baird, Pierre Petit and Olivier Evrard for commenting on this
piece. Their research provides important primary material to its argument. I am also indebted
to David Lorenzo, Derek Hall, Henk Schulte Nordholt, Holly High, James Scott, Janet
Sturgeon, Jesse Ribot, Michael Eilenberg, Mike Dwyer, Naseem Badiey, Nancy Peluso,
Olivier Ducourtieux, Vatthana Pholsena, Veronica Gomez-Temesio, Woods, Yayoi Fujita,
and You-tien Hsing for inspiration and comments on the work along the way. Finally, the
Journal’s two anonymous referees provided invaluable help and guidance. All shortcomings
and mistakes are mine alone.

ISSN 0306-6150 print/ISSN 1743-9361 online

Ó 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2011.607709
http://www.tandfonline.com
 886 Christian Lund

across market-based and socialist societies (see also Borras and Franco 2009, Sikor
and Müller 2009, World Bank 2003). Proponents of land reforms, which redistribute
land or formalise customary forms of access to it, tend to focus on the elements
of granting land rights and securing people’s possessions, not on the elements of
dispossession embedded within them.
Yet, something more than redistribution and formalisation of rights is at stake.
What is at stake is a matter of sovereignty. When people accept land allocation (by
force or consent), they recognize the power of the institution allocating land to them;
they recognize the power of the complex of institutions involved in the exercise – that
is, their ability to define and enforce collectively binding rules. In other words, people
recognize the institutional actors’ authority to grant rights and hope it will also
protect them. This is a major change in which political subjectivities are created.
People thenceforth relate to a political centre beyond the community, through a new
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dimension of political subjectivity. This transforms agrarian relations. Examining

political subjectivities and property and their relational constitution enables us to
unearth ways in which agriculture – or the agrarian economy – is integrated into the
wider political economy.
To approach this, I suggest taking a step back, and ask generally how political
subjectivity, property and sovereignty come into being. They are not simply
established by fiat but are relationships of power between institutional actors1 and
people, and they connect state formation and resource control. This theoretical
discussion is followed by a brief contextualization of government-peasantry relations
in Laos. Resettlement and land reform in Laos are analysed through three case
studies2 showing government institutions’ efforts to become capable of defining
and enforcing property rights. This leads to a conclusion about how fragments of
sovereignty cohere.

The production of property, political subjects and sovereignty

Access to land concerns two fundamental elements of state formation, or of
government: political subjectivity and property. More precisely, it interpellates

1
Institution is a spacious semantic container. Some writers insist on a crucial distinction
between institutions and organizations as a distinction between patterns of rules and relations,
and (bodies of) players (see e.g. North 1990). However laudable such precision may seem, I
find it a linguistic straightjacket, and worse, it suggests that a particular phenomenon –
institution – has only, or primarily, a single meaning. This, in turn, may well obscure what is at
stake in institutional competition and rivalry. Politico-legal institutions are, in this paper,
configurations of actors acting to define and enforce collectively binding decisions and rules.
An institution is represented by leaders who act and speak in its name. But such an institution
is also an arena where competing social actors struggle to influence the way decisions are
made. As arenas, the politico-legal institutions are also manifestations of structures; of power
relations which, in the course of (some) time, establish a structure of entitlement and
exclusion. Using the word institution like this obviously requires that it is clear what particular
aspect of the institution (actor, arena or structure) is in focus in a particular analytical context.
2
The three case studies are based on the work of others. Baird, Petit and Evrard all conducted
extensive fieldwork on issues relating to policies of resource access, political control,
resettlement and land reform in Laos. Their work offers rich analyses. Mine is based on a
reading and gleaning of their work in order to understand the connections between property,
political subjectivity and sovereignty, questions the three authors do not address in this way.
It is worth noting the general paucity of historical data on land use and local politics in Laos
(cf. Rigg 2009).
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 887

people’s political relations to public authority, and their rights to resources with
recognition from a political authority. However, since no single institutional actor
unilaterally determines these questions, no single institution is the state as such;
‘state’ is, rather, the quality of an institution being able to define and enforce
collectively binding decisions on members of society. This quality – stateness, if you
will – I suggest, is sovereignty.
Sovereignty is conventionally understood as unlimited and indivisible rule by a
state over a territory (Agnew 2005, 437), and governments generally claim legal
sovereignty over a territory and a population in the name of the state. This
perspective is conventionally used for international concerns where sovereignty is a
de jure claim reflecting an ideology of law and is a question of either/or. If we apply
the concept to internal issues of state formation, and focus on de facto power to
determine the issues of political subjectivity and property, sovereignty becomes a
question of degree (see e.g. Hansen and Stepputat 2006, 296).3 This allows us to
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dispense with a theory of a unitary sovereign power, which finds its expression in the
juridical apparatus and the architecture of government structures. Instead, it allows
us to see political relations of domination that permeate society and embody a vast
number of polymorphous institutional actors, which engage in domination and
subjugation – in short in governance (Abrams 1988, 82, Foucault 2003, 27–37).
In post-colonial political landscapes, governance is not the preserve of
governments. A wider variety of institutional actors are at play in this enterprise,
often using the language and idioms of state. The situation is sometimes described as
legal or institutional pluralism, where ‘law and legal institutions are not all
subsumable within the ‘‘system’’ but have their sources of self-regulatory activities of
all the multifarious social fields present, activities which might support, complement,
ignore or frustrate one another’ (Griffiths 1986, 39).4 When an institutional actor is
able to define and enforce collectively binding decisions on members of society, it has
state quality, or sovereignty. State formation can therefore be seen as an institutional
competition over the authority to create a structural framework of rules through
which collectively binding decisions are made and enforced.5 By referring to such
sovereignty as fragmented we should not think of a once coherent whole, which is
subsequently pluralized and fragmented. Rather, we are dealing with a range of
competing institutions, endowed with different resources, which engage in the
co-production of property and political subjects. This production is not the purview
of a single institutional actor; competing institutional actors engage in it and the
ability to define and enforce property rights and political subjectivities is fragmented
among them. These competing institutions may integrate and become mutually

3
Scholarship across disciplines has questioned the classical notion of formal sovereignty very
effectively from philosophy (Foucault 2003), political science and law (Hibou 2004, Werner
and de Wilde 2001), and sociology (Sassen 2000, 2006), over history (Benton 2002, 2010),
geography (Agnew 2005, Brenner 1999), anthropology (Appadurai 2003, Hansen and
Stepputat 2006, Ong 2000) and development studies (Lund 2006).
4
For a discussion of Griffith’s idea of legal pluralism, see Merry (1988), Moore (2001), and
Tamanaha (2008).
5
Different schools of thought differ widely in their conceptualization of the state, however, as
Grzymala-Busse and Luong (2002, 531–32) argue, while they see the state as either an
‘instrument of the bourgeoisie, a mediator between broad interest groups, a set of centralized,
cohesive, and autonomous decision makers, or a revenue-maximizing ruler, they all share the
assumption that there exists an identifiable set of actors and institutions that exert legitimate
authority over a given territory’ [my italics].
 888 Christian Lund

reinforcing as they form alliances, or they may dominate one another. When we look
at fragmented sovereignty among institutional actors, we are therefore not
necessarily investigating a collapse of something erstwhile coherent, but rather
contingent efforts unfolding to make disparate fragments cohere.
The production of property and political subjects is obviously a complex process,
and I will focus on one particular aspect. A core element of both processes is
recognition. The processes of recognition of claims as rights simultaneously work
to imbue the institution that provides such recognition with the recognition of its
power to do so. Such rights may be simple legal recognition as a ‘bearer of rights of
some kind’ (Honneth 1995, 109). They may be rights of belonging and political
subjectivity, and they may be rights of property. This simple form of recognition
does not suggest equality among subjects, and their claims are not infused with
‘universalistic principles’; it simply signifies a mutual recognition between subject
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and authority. Likewise, recognition of an institutional actor’s authority does not

necessarily involve a normative approval of it; it simply means that it must be
reckoned with. These are the ‘contracts’, so to say, that link property and political
subjects to political authority in society. Struggles over property relations and
political subjectivity are as much about the scope and constitution of authority as
about access to membership and resources.
Property is essentially distinguished from mere momentary possession or longer-
term access by virtue of being recognized by others, through enforcement by society
or government, and by custom, convention, or law (MacPherson 1978, Rose 1994,
Sikor and Lund 2009). Hence, property is a claim sanctioned by some form of
political authority. There are, therefore, two central dimensions of control over land:
first, the control over the resource through rights such as ownership and the like, and
second, the institutional control, i.e. control over who obtains such rights and how
they are transacted. In societies with multiple competing institutions, they vie to
define and enforce property rules, and secure effective recognition. Consequently, it
is important to investigate not only what land rights people acquire, but also what
(group of) institution(s) that guarantees them. Land rights may be limited or
extensive, but what is important in terms of sovereignty is the institutional control:
How and by whom are rights guaranteed.
Political subjectivity is collective and relational. It designates a mutual,
reciprocal recognition of categories of persons and institutions of authority (for
example, an ethnic group is a collective, and members are recognized as such by
their institutions of authority and other groups; citizens of one country are a
collective recognized as such by their national governments and other citizens, etc.)
(Honneth 1995, 107–10).6 The relative strength between the political institution and
the political subjects obviously varies tremendously. It ranges from the subjugation
of subjects by despotic institutions to citizens holding governing bodies accountable
(Fox 1994). As with the case of property above, rights entailed through recognition
as a political subject may be limited or extensive, but what is important in terms of
sovereignty is how and by whom they are guaranteed. In societies with multiple

6
Honneth’s work on the grammar of recognition focuses on so-called post-traditional
societies. He operates with three dimensions of inter-subjective recognition: as an ‘intimate
other’, a ‘legal subject’, and as an individual with ‘universal rights’ (Honneth 1995, 92–139).
For our purpose, ‘simple legal recognition’ is the central feature in the production of state
quality in recognizing institutions.
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 889

competing institutions, multiple relationships are established, reproduced and

undermined between people and a range of institutions. Formal national citizenship
is therefore just one of several configurations of group membership. Access to voice
a claim is often conditioned on political identity and thereby a relationship to a
political institution. It is not that political identity automatically entails rights, but
it can make it legitimate to claim them. Conversely, not belonging, not being a
recognized subject, may outright deny a person a legitimate opportunity to stake
a claim. The categories of those entitled to seek entitlements are not carved in
stone. Groups can slide out of this category while others enter it and entrench
themselves. People’s political subjectivity denotes the political institution through
which a person derives rights of membership to that community. It denotes
their political ‘visibility’ and to whom they are beholden for their rights, in other
words. Hence, political subjectivity does not only concern relations to formal
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governments, but to any institutional actor that grants and guarantees rights to
political subjects.
Political subjectivity and property are often mutually enabling. Political identity
and belonging can be avenues to secure property, and property may bolster claims of
belonging and citizenship. The repertoire whereby institutional actors operate to
enforce or deny particular claims to citizenship or property is wide, and the
establishment, reproduction, erosion and transformation of these categories are the
results of struggle. This often involves violence. Violence, force and deception are at
the origin of most land property regimes. They are often integral or underlying
features in dispossession and exclusion.
Status as a national subject is often contrasted by a sense of belonging, which is
more local in its connotations. Consequently, a complex creative ‘dissonance’ is at
play. Concretely, people may believe that landownership is a relation primarily
between the individual and his/her near community (family, village, ethnic group),
and not a distant government (Agrawal 2005, Jacob and Le Meur 2010, Li 2007).
Formal national citizenship is often conjugated with government’s actual practice of
objectifying and instrumentalizing identities to differentiate between groups of
people and their land rights. Hence, certain communities are seen, en bloc, as
belonging to one or the other groups, and entire communities – often defined in
terms of ethnicity – are therefore seen as either worthy of recognition of rights, or as
requiring control and exclusion (see e.g. Li 2005).
To sum up, institutional control over land and political subjects does not
represent or reflect pre-existing sovereignty. It produces it. This is neither a linear
process, nor one with an absolute endpoint, however. Attempts to make processes of
recognition cohere and integrate, and efforts by institutional actors to become
mutually reinforcing may be successful and consolidate just as they may be
challenged and undone. For this, we must turn to the empirical parts.
Questions of property and political subjectivity have all been engaged in recent
decades of land governance in Laos. Land reform and resettlement policies have
had crucial impacts on people’s livelihoods, but they are about more than that.
Recent history in Laos demonstrates how different institutional actors with varying
state quality have attempted to categorize people into different groups and grant
and expunge different property rights. The ambition in the following is to
investigate the efforts by institutional actors to make their fragments of sovereignty
cohere, thereby reconfiguring political subjectivity and property rights in significant
ways.
 890 Christian Lund

Resettlement and land reform in Laos

Policies are never implemented in a vacuum. Socio-political history and context
matter. In the case of Laos, the upland-lowland distinctions as well as political
loyalty, vis-à-vis property, are especially relevant for our purpose.

Uplands versus lowlands and ally versus foe

Forest policies have been used to create jurisdictional divisions between forests and
agriculture and thereby define certain areas as ‘nature’, and exclusive government
property. By the same token, people living in such ‘political forests’ (Peluso and
Vandergeest 2001) have been defined as ‘poachers’, ‘thieves’ and ‘squatters’. In
contrast, people farming the areas designated by government for this Activity were
considered proper peasants and could effectively enjoy rights to land (see Evans
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1998, Gunn 2003, Ivarsson 2008, Jerndal and Rigg 1998, Lestrelin 2010, Rigg 2009,
Petit 2008b, Pholsena 2002. For Southeast Asia, see Keyes 1977, de Koninck 2006,
Li 1999, Scott 2009, Vandergeest 2003).
The classification of political subjects has a long history in Laos. Topography is
reflected in the dominant discourses on ethnic contrasts observers, planners, and
officials make between ‘modern lowlands’ and ‘backward uplands’. Laos is home to
a large number of diverse ethnic groups with the ethnic Lao as the largest.
Combined, minorities make up the majority of the population, however. In the
1950s, government coined the terms of Lao Loum (lowland Lao), Lao Theung
(upland Lao) and Lao Soung (highland Lao) to refer to residential patterns. This was
an attempt to forge national unity ‘by suppressing the pejorative nature of the racial
connotations attached to the previous [colonial] naming system, and by denying the
reality of the cultural differences among people’ (Pholsena 2002, 180). Despite all
differences, the ‘political truth’ about the population is a union of three distinct
groups of political subjects. This was produced, legitimated, and naturalised during
the Royal Lao period, but it has been reproduced ever since in different ways by
official communist government policies, development agencies, independent aca-
demics, and by popular self-representation (see also Vandergeest 2003). Even though
the classification of political subjects was officially discontinued in the 1980s, people
readily classify themselves according to these categories, which are also still
reproduced in official documents (Jerndal and Rigg 1998). In terms of poverty and
livelihood, Rigg identifies a clear pattern unfavourable to up- and highland Lao. The
government and development organisations generally attribute poverty to people’s
adherence to ‘traditional forms of living’ (e.g. non-commoditized subsistence
farming) and the continuation of shifting cultivation (Rigg 2009, 711–12).
While persistent, the upland-lowland distinction is not the only significant
population category of difference in Laos. The war spilt many communities into
‘royalist’ and ‘communist’ camps. Sometimes entire ethnic groups were on one or the
other side, but more often splits ran through communities. After the war, groups
loyal to the victorious communist guerrilla movement were entitled to a dividend
for patriotism, while supporters of the royalist side were faced with suspicion and
retribution. Some leaders were sent to ‘re-education camps’ for years.
In addition to these categories of political subjectivity (ethnicity and ‘patri-
otism’), wealth and the physical ability to move also differentiated the population’s
possibilities of engaging with political institutions, to position themselves vis-à-vis
policies, and to establish themselves with rights of settlement and rights to land.
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 891

Sometimes these categorizations would align, and sometimes they would cut against
each other.

Government policies of resettlement and land reform

Land tenure, or property, had not historically been a direct concern of central
government. This was to change from the late 1970s. The categorization and
movement of people through resettlement, and the affirmation of authority to
allocate land, were attempts by government institutions to assert control over land
in a way that previously did not exist in Laos.
The communist party – Pathet Lao – took power in Vientiane in 1975.7 Land was
now officially owned and institutionally controlled by the state in the name of the
people, no individual had rights to private property. One of the first concerns after
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the war was to ensure the country’s territorial borders and eliminate remaining
pockets of resistance. This included forced resettlement of groups considered
oppositional, generally from hilly areas difficult to control, a policy pursued by both
sides during the war as well. While some upland groups, notably the Hmong, were
predominantly on the Royal Lao/US side and seen as enemies, the communist army
had also largely been made up of largely upland minorities. Upon victory, however,
ethnic Lao were soon to dominate government, and the tenor of debate once more
singled out certain upland groups – now, not only backward but also dangerous and
counter-revolutionary political subjects (Petit 2008b).
When Laos gradually opened up for foreign (Western) development assistance in
the late-1980s, the development problems that were identified were expressed in
terms of the upland/lowland dichotomy. As Rigg summarizes, ‘government policies
construct and characterize shifting cultivation, and by extension shifting cultivators,
as problematic. The reason for this is a combination of concern over the perceived
environmentally destructive nature of shifting cultivation, a wish to capture the value
of the forests in the interests of the state, a desire to exercise firmer control over
people both for taxation and security reasons, and a commitment towards improving
the livelihoods and raising the living standards of swidden cultivators’ (Rigg 2005,
97, see also Ducourtieux 2004, 2006). The policy, especially targeting the uplands,
was developed during the 1990s by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and
endorsed by the Politbureau of the Central Committee of the Lao People’s
Revolutionary Party, with active support of the donor community, and Focal Sites –
destinations for relocation – were selected by the provincial and sometimes district
authorities (Baird 2010, 263, Evrard and Goudineau 2004, 937, Fujita and
Phengsopha 2008, 115, Rigg 2005, 97–8). Most of the focal sites were in already
established villages populated by communities of ethnic Lao. This meant that
incoming migrants were settled in somebody else’s village, on somebody else’s land,
and directed to observe somebody else’s way of life. By 1998 the official policy was to
settle 450,000 uplanders in the lowlands (Evrard and Goudineau 2004), but the
actual numbers are unknown. UNDP and six other UN agencies, as well as the
Asian Development Bank and the World Bank adopted and funded the policy and
have provided at least 80% of the costs of the nationwide programme (Baird and

7
While the bureaucracy and the party were technically distinct, in practice this distinction was
blurred and the bureaucracy often functioned as a ‘highly politicized arm of the Party’ (Stuart-
Fox 2004, 6).
 892 Christian Lund

Shoemaker 2007, 875). A debate on the success of the policies of resettlement and
land reform in Laos has recently emerged.8 Observers agree that livelihoods were
dramatically affected by these policies, for many to more precarious situations. Most
of the debate tends to focus on policies’ effects on people’s livelihoods, rather than
on the institutional implications, however.
The main vehicle of government’s mandatory land reform – the Land and Forest
Allocation Programme – had two key components: comprehensive forest zoning –
i.e. creation of a political forest - and village land re-allocation. Whereas the former
was designed to restrict people’s access to and use of political forest areas, and to
reduce or eliminate the practice of swidden agriculture, the latter aimed at providing
rural households removed from the now political forests with a certain area of land
(officially six hectars for cultivation per person, a target unlikely to have been met
[Lestrelin 2010]) and in so doing sought to intensify agricultural production (Evrard
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2004, 16).
The categorization of forest was a point of contention. The authority to define
space as one or the other was removed from the village and put into the hands of
donor supported government agencies. This was an important effort by government
agencies to acquire state quality.
The categorization in village land allocation followed a similar logic. The Land
and Forest Allocation Policy was initially a simple agreement between the village
authorities and the District Agricultural and Forestry Office and other district
planning and financial officers. However, the policy, formalised through the Land
Use Planning and Land Allocation (LUPLA) programme, standardized a protocol
for intervention. First, fallow periods were mandatorily reduced to a maximum of
3 years. Secondly, the programme involved delineation of village boundaries and
zoning of different resources within the village. It identified land for agriculture
(paddy and upland rice), orchards, etc., with the ‘remaining land defined, by default,
as forest’ (Lestrelin 2010, 431). Thirdly, land and resource management responsi-
bilities were officially transferred to the village leader and to the newly formed village
committees and representatives of the mass organizations (Fujita and Phanvilay
2008, 121). Finally, the District Agricultural and Forestry Office issued Temporary
Land Use Certificates to the villagers recognizing landholders’ rights to land.
This operation was supported by donor organisations. In fact it is doubtful
whether any such certificate has been issued anywhere without their active
involvement.9 Donor activities in this field are concentrated in certain areas, and
the number of projects in these areas doubled between 2001 and 2006.10
The process of assigning land to each household was delegated to the village
authorities. They had to form committees for the occasion to form a structure with
which government could communicate. While supposedly participatory, instructions

8
See e.g. Baird (2008, 2009), Baird and Shoemaker (2005, 2007, 2008), Baird et al. (2009),
Barney (2009), Chamberlain et al. (1995, 1996), Chamberlain (2007), Ducourtieux (2004),
Ducourtieux et al. (2004, 2005), Eggertz (1996), Evans (1995), Evrard (2004, 2006), Evrard and
Goudineau (2004), Fujita (2004), Fujita and Phanvilay (2008), Fujita and Phengsopha (2008),
Goudineau (1997), High (2008, 2009), Kirk (1996), Lestrelin (2010), Lestrelin and Giordano
(2007), Mahaphonh et al. (2007), Petit (2006, 2008a, 2008b), Rigg (2005, 2006), Thomas
(2004), Vandergeest (2003).
9
Interview, August 2009, Anonymous.
10
Personal communication with Peter Messerli, Centre for Development and Environment,
University of Bern.
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 893

were given that no household should have more than three plots. With the imposed
limits on the length of fallow, it meant a transition to sedentary, permanent
cultivation and completely new conditions for many farming families.11 Land reform
with land use zoning, and resettlement of the population in focal sites, embodied
government’s ambitions of territorialisation and development in Laos from the
mid-1980s.
The Land and Forest Allocation Programme was not merely an instrument
enabling people and their land claims to become visible to government and donors, it
was equally an instrument enabling government and donors to cohere in the
production of property and governable subjects (see also Watts 2004). The rhetoric
of the degraded uplands – whether or not they are actually degrading, and whether
or not small-scale farmers or logging companies are then the culprits – enabled an
alignment of interests between government and donors and the contingent formation
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of an effective coalition with state quality. It constituted a significant effort by the

government-donor complex to muster authority to make decisions on property. By
defining and policing certain types of land use as appropriate for certain spaces and
by allocating land to certain political subjects the government-donor complex tried
to establish sovereignty. At ground level, the Land and Forest Allocation Policy
often proved a fiction, like other property policies (see Hall et al. 2011). The actual
land use pattern was ‘quite different from the multi coloured maps and statistics
posted at the village entrance’ (Ducourtieux et al. 2005, 511, Mike Dwyer pers.
comm.). Thus, the government-donor control was far from total – especially in the
detailed land allocation. Nonetheless, they managed to dispossess and disenfranchise
large groups, forced them to move and made them dependent on a government-
donor reading of their claims. These were granted according to a pattern of
differentiated political subjectivity where certain statuses were harder currencies than
others, as will be detailed in the cases below.

Implementing resettlement and land reform – three cases

The resettlement and land reform policies can be seen as efforts to control people and
space: to produce and regulate political subjects, property and territory (Peluso and
Vandergeest 2001, Vandergeest and Peluso 1995). However, to understand the
institutional ramifications we need to zoom in closer to the actual processes. The
ambition is to provide insight into the quality of the organization of state formation
at a general level through a couple of case studies of the conjunction of these
processes at the local level (see Moore, 2005, 9). The following cases of local level
dynamics show some details of profound change in how property relations come
about and to what institutions landholders have become beholden for their rights.

‘Colonizing the Brao’

Ian Baird (2008) analyzes the encounter of the Brao people and centralized colonial
government in Laos and Cambodia. ‘Historically, village territories included spaces

11
Around 90% of all land was classified as forest through this process between 1995 and 2004,
and was thus largely out of bounds for agriculture. Studies agree that the entire process
seriously reduced the agricultural area per capita thus forcing people to abandon fallow-based
swidden farming (Evrard 2004, 24, Lestrelin 2010, 432).
 894 Christian Lund

where people would conduct swidden agriculture, hunt, fish and collect various kinds
of forest resources. . . . [V]illages were considered to be self-contained political
entities . . . with high-levels of autonomy. Formal hierarchical political structures
above the village level did not exist’ (Baird 2008, 107). The internal organisation of
society, including access to resources and land, was not a question that preoccupied
outsiders before the colonial period. Questions of property were not important in the
relationship between the uplanders and the polities of the lowlands. This would
change with the French colonial project and designs for civilization and
development.
The French found it difficult to control the ‘hinterland’ and relied heavily on Lao
as intermediaries to execute taxation. Corvée labour to make footpaths, roads, and
other public works was a pillar of French rule. Rebellions erupted, and French rule
was a mix of tax collection and counterinsurgency activities. French administrators
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in Indochina, like their counterparts in British and Dutch colonies, were critical of
swidden farming, seeing it as destructive and backward. They first formally banned
swidden agriculture in 1875. The ban was obviously not effective as decrees and
regulations had to reiterate its criminalization in 1895, in 1899, in 1902 and in 1905
(Baird 2008, 181). Nevertheless, the French were largely unable to stop the practice,
and coercive measures had little real impact. The colonial administration had little
or no ability to rule in the hills.
From the 1930s, the colonial administration began to experiment with
resettlement of upland villagers with the idea that it would remove them from
communist influences that were developing during this decade. The departure of the
French in 1954 did not eliminate lowland political powers’ ambitions to control
space, property and political subjugation of the Brao. And yet, neither the Royal
Lao Government, nor the US army ruling the south, or the Pathet Lao ruling the
northern provinces of Phongsaly and Sam Neua were in permanent control of the
uplands in their respective areas. With the Pathet Lao takeover of the country
in 1975, formal national territorial integrity was established. In the Brao area,
many entire villages were moved to the lowlands in 1975 and 1976. Up to 20
villages were consolidated in single agricultural cooperatives. The provincial
authorities, with assistance from the army and coordinated by the Lao
People’s Revolutionary Party, applied the resettlement policy ‘with determination’
(Goudineau 1997, 21). Severe penalties would be imposed for non-compliance with
the command to move. Threats formed the backdrop against which resettlements
were pushed.
While the resettlements in the immediate aftermath of the war, in the late 1970s
and early 1980s, were sometimes driven by military strategic interests, from the late
1980s and onward, ‘development’ was the driver and international development
organisations became institutional partners of the government agencies. Interna-
tional organisations, national donor agencies and NGOs played vital roles in
bringing about resettlement and land allocation. Donors would foot the bill of the
per diems of local administrators, and they funded most of the infrastructure
intended to attract people to new settlements. Thus, school buildings, wells and
roads, funded through development aid, became important components of the
resettlement and land allocation policy. The mapping and the zoning of villages
in particular were done with technical assistance from donors. The institutional
alliance between government and development donors made it possible to actually
implement the resettlement policy.
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 895

Resistance to resettlement was not violent, but certain forms of foot-dragging

and non-compliance were encountered among the re-settling populations. Within
a few years, many had returned to the hills from where they came. Baird gives
examples of whole villages being resettled not once or twice, but three and four times
over a decade. Moving back constituted defiance of government policy (Baird 2008,
282) and it countered government and donors’ efforts to act with state quality and
establish sovereignty.
In view of the unwillingness of the many uplanders to resettle and abandon their
place of belonging and swidden farming, and in view of the costs and difficulties of
resettlement, more pragmatic forms of implementation have seen the light of day in
recent years. First, the District Agricultural and Forestry Office would occasionally
tolerate swidden provided it was permanent dry field cultivation and that it was
subsequently planted with fast growing exotic trees. The consequences for farmers of
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accepting this were uncertain, though. Tree plantation might re-categorize the land to
a forest category, which would be out of bounds, and thereby eventually end the field
crop cultivation. More subtle forms of consolidation also began to take place. As
Baird describes (2008, 276), from 2005 multiple villages began to be administratively
consolidated under one village leader, usually the village leader from the larger
lowland village. It meant that the many upland settlements were increasingly
administratively integrated into other administrative polities, and in order to get any
of the everyday paperwork done, uplanders had to go through the lowland village
leader. For example, selling of livestock and transactions in land required
authorisation, and thereby recognition from the seller of the authority of the village
leader of the lowland village, and by that token to the national government.
Government and donors gradually relaxed their attempts to control land use in a
detailed way. These institutional actors did not necessarily attempt or succeed with
direct detailed land use control, but they strengthened their institutional control, i.e.
authorizing different uses. Land that the Brao had used remained accessible to them
but now as property under the auspices of the government. The Brao were henceforth
connected to government through their land rights, and these were no longer merely
a village relationship. Even if old practices were sometimes tolerated, it was exactly
‘freedoms’ and validation of transactions granted by government institutions to
which people were henceforth beholden. The ability to exercise institutional control
over landed property relied on government institutions’ alliances with well-heeled
donors.

‘Settlement in Thongnamy’
Pierre Petit (2006, 2008a, 2008b) analyses the livelihoods of individual families
resettling from their upland villages of origin to the village of Thongnamy in
Bolikhamxay province. His ambition is less to make a longue durée historical
account of migration than to demonstrate the kaleidoscopic social variation in
individual families’ trajectories. Petit shows how economic and in particular social
endowments of families are crucial for their relative success in new villages.
Government efforts to ban swidden cultivation forced many families to move and
resettle – often without government help. Severe sanctions were dispensed to people
who continued to undertake swidden farming in the hills. Petit’s informants tell that
people were jailed if they persisted. Such intimidation propelled people to move;
having to abandon conventional swidden farming and with no real alternatives,
 896 Christian Lund

people set out for villages – focal sites – in the valleys, one of which was Thongnamy.
Over a decade, the population of the village grew from a mere 40 families to more
than 6,000 inhabitants (Petit 2008a, 119–21). The massive population increase was
made possible by a Lao-Luxemburg project, which was very openly supportive of the
official resettlement policy (Baird and Shoemaker 2005, Petit 2008a, 112, 126). Some
families were able to obtain land in their new village through the village chief, as had
previously been the custom. Others received land through the district authorities
and the Land and Forest Allocation Programme. Yet others managed to buy small
areas of land, while some were left landless. The resettlement policy thus had a direct
impact on people’s property rights, and, as Petit shows, this differentiation was
largely a function of political subjectivities.
District authorities, no doubt eager to promote national policies of land
allocation, and occasionally carried away by the temptation to take advantage of
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their power, sometimes allocated land to needy settlers which was already ‘owned’
and farmed by others. The influx of migrants let to competing claims between them
and the first settlers who had settled during the 1960s. The first settlers claimed
communal village forestland as their property. Apparently, government officials
accepted this and the claimants ‘acquired’ the forest as their property. None of this
involved formal legal title, but relied on non-written recognition by government
officials. In fact this was not so much to extend their own cultivation, as it was a
means of securing land, which they could, and sometimes would, then sell to the
more recent settlers. It moved non-commodified common resources into an emerging
land market. Landownership as well as institutional control thus changed. Land
went from being effectively common property, controlled by the village community,
over being effectively publicly owned under the institutional control of government
agents, to being effectively privately owned but now institutionally guaranteed as
property by government. Land was brought within the ambit of central government
recognition, and a relationship with owners, beholden to such government
institutions for recognition and enforcement of claims as rights, strengthened
government’s state quality.
Competing claims to access to land and property produced conflicts between
recent migrants and previous settlers. Whether the aim was to be allocated village
land by their District Agricultural and Forestry Office, or to buy land from fellow
villagers, it necessitated the involvement of the district authorities, which issued
Temporary Land Use Certificates. And even if land held under these conditions
formally was not supposed to be alienable, and sales could be seen as acts of defiance
of authority, the fact that the document issued by this institution was revered as
proof of ownership of property testifies to a profound recognition of government’s
authority. The district administration may not have been able to control behaviour
through policy in any detailed way, but it had become a public authority to be
reckoned with in land matters. Petit also records instances of corruption in the
process of land allocation. Again, one could argue that it demonstrates the weakness
of government, an unaccountable unwillingness of officials to adhere to rules.
However, it also demonstrates the power and significance of the government
institutions, and the important ways in which these new land arrangements produced
and reproduced narratives of their sovereign control over the territory as a part
of government. While Petit’s research documents that allocated land could be
‘un-allocated’ again, the significant point is that the district administration was seen
as the institution capable of defining property.
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 897

Petit’s fine-grained analysis allows us to discuss the resettlement process in terms

of the social differentiation and the production of different political subjectivities
(Petit 2008a). Four distinct ethnic groups inhabited the village Petit studied, but on
very different terms. While their access to land depended on their access to the
district administration, their conditions of access varied significantly. The Nyo
settled and formed the village in the 1960s. Land was plentiful and apparently no
public authority was involved in allocating specific land rights of any sort. Forty
families merely settled at the knowledge of the then Royal Lao Government officials.
Pushed by the ban on swidden farming, three other groups also came to Thongnamy
to settle: the Hmong, the Tai Dam and the Khmou.
As first settlers, the Nyo managed to have large tracts of land registered in their
names. A large group of resettled Hmong had a different relationship to the local –
Lao – authorities when they began to settle in Thongnamy in the 1990s. The
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lowlanders’ stereotype of the uplanders as ‘rustic, crude, and unsophisticated’ was

aimed at the Hmong. During the Indochina War many Hmong were on the side of
the Royal Lao Government and the Americans, and many fled the country after
Pathet Lao’s takeover in 1975. However, family ties with those who remained in
Laos – and in many cases fought on the side of Pathet Lao – served as conduits for
remittances from relatives who had made a life for themselves in exile. Some Hmong
thus had the means to buy land. This generally gave the Hmong an ambiguous
position vis-à-vis government.
Hmong settlers gained access through public land allocation and purchase, but
they also circumvented government control through technically illegal squatting of
forestland. However, even if the Hmong had an ambiguous status that allowed them
to be somewhat cavalier about concrete policies, they would sometimes gravitate
around the district administration in land matters.
The Tai Dam had difficulties with the district administration, having experienced
the penalty of imprisonment for upland swidden farming, and had been coercively
moved. Arriving at Thongnamy they were told that no new lands would be allocated
to them. Consequently, they were forced to engage in a type of share-cropping
arrangement with some of the first settlers, the Nyo. As the Nyo had managed to
secure land during the initial stage of land allocation, they would now let the Tai
Dam do swidden farming on their land in return for half of the cleared land.
However, in many cases, the Nyo proceeded to sell the cleared land leaving the Tai
Dam still landless. The Tai Dam were used as labour and as fall guys for the illegal
swidden if the district administration were to cause problems. The Nyo did not
formally own land, but their land transactions were tacitly condoned by government
officials.
The last group, the Khmou, had initially been settled in another village through
the resettlement programme. But it had proved too inhospitable with no school, no
health centre and no land, or even the prospects of acquiring any in the future. The
Khmou therefore abandoned their first settlement to go to Thongnamy. However,
the district authorities forbade the Khmou to settle anywhere other than the place
they had planned for them. They even went as far as to deny Khmou children access
to the village school and threaten them with eviction. Only by appealing to two
well-known generals of Khmou extraction and mobilising their political capital as
revolutionary patriots did the Khmou obtain permission to remain in Thongnamy.
However, they were obliged to enter into tenancy arrangements with the Nyo and
could expect no favours from a district administration that they had defied.
 898 Christian Lund

This case demonstrates how government categorized people with differentiated

rights to land, to place of residence, and to services based on ethnicity and ‘patriotic
pedigree’. Government institutions’ partial success in their efforts to govern use and
control over land as a way to differentiate population groups in new settlements was
contingent on collaboration with donors, and fragments of sovereignty were made to
cohere only through this alignment.

‘Patterns of mobility in Luang Namtha’

Olivier Evrard (1997, 2004, 2006, Evrard and Goudineau 2004) analyzes resettlement
and its consequences for livelihoods and land tenure in the province of Luang
Namtha. Contemporary policies of resettlement were motivated by successive
considerations over the past quarter century. During the first decade after Pathet
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Lao’s victory in 1975, resettlement was an instrument to re-populate parts of the

lowland from which many people had fled and also establish and consolidate
military control of the up- and highlands. As territorial control was established in
the mid-eighties, resettlement policies continued, only now with an ostensibly
different purpose: development. However, resettlement was not only engineered and
organized by the government. Substantive so-called spontaneous resettlements
followed in the wake of the, sometimes heavy-handed, government operations.
Evrard’s research shows how this spontaneous movement was prompted by the
ongoing de-population of some areas. As some villages emptied, especially as the ban
on swidden farming was beginning to be enforced, their neighbours became more
isolated. Paradoxically, while central government authorities and the politbureau
pushed for upland communities to resettle in the lowlands, positive responses often
produced more movement than they were able to handle. The district and provincial
authorities were often incapable of honouring their promises of land and
infrastructure in the designated focal sites, and were even less capable or inclined
to provide for people who moved ‘outside’ of the plan.
In Luang Namtha, many people living in the valleys – the Tai Dam – had fled
the country after the war, abandoning their land. And as the district authorities
wanted the upland Khmou to settle in the valleys, they gave the land to them. This
was a reward for their patriotism – i.e. support of Pathet Lao – during the war.
However, soon after the fighting ended, many Tai Dam refugees returned from
Thailand to find their fields cultivated by someone else. The returning refugees had
been urged to come back by the Lao government, and conflict began to brew
between people rewarded for patriotism and people claiming to be original owners.
Neither party had any documents proving ownership. Both groups adhered to
customary principles whereby occupation and actual land use were the source of
rights. Letting land lie fallow did not immediately make it revert into a common
pool of land from which it could be claimed afresh; this depended on the duration of
the fallow. In short, ‘the immigrants [Khmou] considered the land to have been
‘‘given’’ to them whereas the first occupants [Tai Dam] believed that they had never
abandoned their rights, either because they had not been absent long enough or
because the land had been entrusted to their relatives’ (Evrard 2006, 343, my
translation). As land was now officially both owned and institutionally controlled
by the state in the name of the people, no individual had rights to private property.
Nonetheless, tensions ran high and in 1992 government issued a decree specifying
that land users forfeited the rights to their land only if it was abandoned for more
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 899

than 10 years.12 In most cases the returning Tai Dam recovered their land, whereas
the newly re-settled Khmou were left landless and un-settled. The ‘currency’ of
loyalty and patriotism, which had initially given the Khmou rights to the land, was
overridden by the ‘currency’ of autochthony fielded by the Tai Dam.
In other localities where the Khmou had been fighting Pathet Lao, the district
administration confiscated their land and transferred it outright to the Tai Dam.
For almost a decade, a local arrangement prevailed, possibly unbeknownst to, or
tolerated by, the district administration: while the land was now in the possession
of the Tai Dam, they let the Khmou use it as before as long as the Khmou
reimbursed the Tai Dam for tax payment. According to Evrard, this arrangement
fell out of kilter only when the border with Thailand was opened in the late
1980s and the Khmou, who used to buy their cloth from the Tai Dam, would now
buy it in Thailand. Thus slighted, the Tai Dam claimed possession of the land
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they had been given a decade earlier. With the help of the local administration,
they actually acquired the land and forced the Khmou to move and settle
somewhere else.
In some cases in Luang Namtha, government resettled Khmou from the hills in
the valleys. But increasing land scarcity – and in many cases the complete absence of
available land for irrigated rice cultivation – forced people to keep two homes. They
would have one home in the new village where they were registered to live, and
another in their old village, which was officially abandoned and inexistent, where
they would go to farm. Ironically, the policy to ‘sedentarize’ these itinerant farmers
produced seasonal commuters instead. One of the observations made by Evrard and
others is that the resettlement programme and the efforts to curb swidden farming
did not result in a decrease of this form of agriculture: on the contrary, it seemed to
increase, at least for the first decades following the implementation of the
resettlement programme (Evrard 2006, 334–35, Goudineau 1997, 15). In terms of
sovereignty, the Khmou moved in and out of a relationship with governments and
donors. While residing in the new villages, access to property depended on relations
to government agencies, whereas they were beholden to no one for access to land in
the formally inexistent old villages. The local authorities would sometimes discover
such swidden farms and fine people. However, for many such a fine – an official piece
of paper just like the Temporary Land Use Certificates – would be considered a form
of ‘legalisation’ of the land use (Evrard 2004, 31). To what degree this reflected the
farmer’s ignorance of the significance of the fine, or a play on such ignorance,
one can only speculate. At best, government sovereignty in the ‘old areas’ was
tentative and uneven.
Evrard points to several significant consequences of the policies of resettlement.
First, while government indeed pursued the resettlement process, it was hardly in
control of it. Not only did those designated to move do so, others did so
spontaneously as well. Resettled people did not always move in the direction
indicated by government. Indeed, most resettlements were not a single movement but
rather a series of settlements, some to designated places and other not; some by a
small group of villagers trying out the new place, and others with the whole group.

12
Decree no. 99 of December 12th 1992, here from Evrard (2006, 343). The decree also
specified that if, for reasons of patriotic combat for national liberation, landowners had
been exiled for more than 10 years, exceptions could be made, and their claims would not be
extinct.
 900 Christian Lund

It would appear that resettlement amplified social differentiation. Not only were
wealthier people more able to buy land in receiving villages, groups and villagers
with political connections proved more able to be provided for in terms of land and
infrastructure in the receiving villages. People who were politically marginal, or seen
as potential or outright enemies of the regime, were dealt a poor hand, and received
little assistance and scant backing of their claims. They often ended up virtually
landless. An exception seems to be those who escaped government sovereignty by
returning to their old villages, although this would hardly qualify as an easy life.
Government ability to actually direct the process was limited, and the reach of
the government-donor alliance equally patchy. However, Evrard’s work shows how
the district and provincial administration increasingly became the pivot of political
authority in some areas. Land allocation, dispute management, confiscation and
re-allocation became the purview of the district and provincial administration. In all
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their technical ineptitude they did become the institutions around which these
processes were made to revolve.

How fragments cohere

The Indochina War made resettlement a question of personal safety as well as a
question of the strategic relocation of people. After the war, however, resettlement
continued in virtually military fashion, bringing communities within the ambit of
the government. While government policies set people in motion, government
institutions were – at least initially – incapable of controlling either resettlement’s
direction or its size. Only when the coalition between government institutions and
donors materialized were they able to settle people more systematically in certain
areas, and connect them to government programmes. New truth regimes, new rights
regimes and new governance regimes emerged through this process (Goldman 2001,
500). Land allocation and issuance of Temporary Land Use Certificates required
people to be visible to government and donors, and ‘committees’ seemed the
organisational vernacular. Only when people organized in committees did they
acquire the compatible political subjectivity, even if effective compliance with land
use policy has been variable. The combined expertise and resources of government
and development organisations established an increasingly incontrovertible political
structure. The contingent collaboration between the Ministry of Agriculture and
Forestry and donors established the institutional nodal point for questions of
property as they carried out the land and resettlement policy and delivered the
temporary Land Use Certificates.
Over the past two decades, property and political subjectivity have become
matters for government to a degree hitherto unknown in Laos. Through alignment
with donors, government institutions have become able to acquire institutional
control over land. Land rights had hitherto been a relationship between the right
holder and a variety of local institutions, and institutional control over land had
been fragmented among them. Henceforth, allocation of property rights – often
according to people’s political subjectivity – invested government institutions with
state quality. The cases illustrate how state formation is the contingent outcome of
struggles over property and political identity. It has been neither a linear process, nor
one that can claim to have reached an absolute endpoint, however. This shows
through the variation between the cases. Baird’s case, for example, represents quite
comprehensive institutional control of property relations, whereas Petit’s and
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 901

especially Evrard’s cases show how institutional controls varied in time and space,
producing different subjects. Despite obvious failures, patchy implementation and
many instances of non-compliance with government policy, the contingent
government-donor collaboration made resources, such as rhetoric (development
goals, decrees, legislation, etc.), technical expertise, money and violence lodged with
different institutional actors, come together and cohere. Therefore, while the land
reform purported to grant land rights to people with the sanction of government, it
also represented government’s claim to institutional control over land. This started
to change people’s political subjectivities: the authority to grant rights to land
inserted government into the lives of people. This is, in Laos as elsewhere, a central
aspect of state formation. Land reform and resettlement affirmed the authority of
government institutions – in the case of Laos, especially at the district level – and in
the process brought together ‘fragments’ of sovereignty in the wider process of state
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formation.
If people were indeed made ‘visible’ through resettlement (Scott 1998), what did
government and donors see? Despite the rhetoric about ‘one nation’, they did not
see a uniform mass of citizens with equal entitlements. People entering the purview
of government were segmented in several ways. The relative distribution of
entitlements depended on ethnicity – i.e. the objectified collective identity of
uplanders – and on people’s war histories. Certain groups in the reception areas
were privileged. They were rarely asked to give up land to accommodate new
settlers, and it was even possible for them to develop effective tenancy systems
subletting to those who arrived. Hence, privileged groups managed to negotiate
what was legal and illegal – or at least tolerated – practice in terms of property. The
crucial point is that this land use had become an issue for government, and that
people apparently realized that in their negotiations. In addition to ethnicity,
revolutionary pedigree mattered for how rights to resources were distributed. Thus,
while some groups became disenfranchised through a closer connection to
government and donors, others experienced a consolidation of their claims to land
through this process.
The Land and Forest Allocation Programme embodied a peculiar paradox.
The declared intent was for the government to allocate land rights to farmers. This
land had already been declared as state-owned and state-controlled land by the
revolutionary government. A landholder was given a Temporary Land Use
Certificate to prove that he held his land with certain rights guaranteed by the
state via the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. If this looks as if government
institutions relinquished a certain amount of control over the land to a landholder,
the process is deceptive. Prior to the Land and Forest Allocation Programme, state
ownership of the land as well as government institutional control was, at best, a
political ambition, enshrined in political documents, but with no tangible effect on
land distribution or land use. Ironically, while the land reform purported to be a
government allocation of land to people, government, in fact, seized institutional
control over it by claiming sovereignty to give it away. By granting land rights to
people – even for land already in their possession – land became, in effect, property
institutionally controlled by government agencies. We are thus not talking about
dispossession of the land but a dispossession of autonomous control; what we may
call the institutional dimension of the Agrarian Question. Landowners became
beholden to government for rights to land, and through its institutional control over
property, government became state.
 902 Christian Lund

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Christian Lund is Professor at Roskilde University and the Director of the Graduate School of
International Development Studies. His works include Local Politics and the Dynamics of
Property in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2008); Politics of Possession (co-editor,
Blackwell, 2009); Twilight Institutions (editor, Blackwell, 2006); and Law Power and Politics in
Niger: Land Struggles and the Rural Code (Lit Verlag, 1998). Website: www.christian-lund.dk;
email: clund@ruc.dk