London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. xix, 231 pp. (Illustrations.) US$149.00, paper; US$109.00, ebook. ISBN 978-981-336-111-9.
Struggles against natural resource extraction and environmental degradation by corporations and authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia have long attracted the attention of scholars of the region. Benjamin Bagadion’s 1990 Cornell PhD dissertation on logging in northern Luzon in the Marcos era and George Aditjondro’s 1993 Cornell PhD dissertation on the Kedungombo Dam project in Central Java during the Suharto period were pioneering studies in this vein, and recent years have seen the publication of Jason Morris-Jung’s Unearthing Politics: Environment and Contestation in Post-socialist Vietnam (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) on the bauxite mining controversy in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, as well as a steady stream of articles and books about hydroelectric dam projects in Laos and Myanmar. These studies all provide rich and riveting accounts of David and Goliath-style battles between local communities, social movements, and NGO activists and powerful politically connected private companies and authoritarian states in conflicts over land and natural resources in remote rural areas of Southeast Asia.
Sokphea Young’s Strategies of Authoritarian Survival and Dissensus in Southeast Asia: Weak Men Versus Strongmen fits within this body of literature and also transcends it. Drawing on dozens of interviews and government documents, the book not only chronicles but also compares two land struggles in different provinces of Cambodia—pitting rural communities, social movements, and NGO activists against companies affiliated with long-time Prime Minister Hun Sen’s authoritarian one-party regime. The diverging trajectories and outcomes of these struggles, the book suggests, ultimately depend less on the strengths and weaknesses or tactics and strategies of the struggles themselves and more on the varying nature and extent of political connectedness and protection enjoyed by the private companies involved. On one hand, sugar plantation companies owned by a powerful Cambodian senator and Thai and Taiwanese investors succeeded in claiming and clearing nearly 20,000 hectares of land in Koh Song Province, evicting thousands of peasants and overcoming protracted resistance from local villagers and Cambodian and international NGO activists. This was due to the companies’ political influence over local and national-level government officials and their ability to overcome resistance through a combination of limited compensation to villagers and violent repression of protests. On the other hand, companies combining European capital and Cambodian political connections were substantially less successful in protecting land concessions of 7,500 hectares in Mondulkiri Province from the protests and resistance mounted by local Indigenous people and Cambodian and international NGO activists. This was due to the weaker hold of the Cambodian tycoon over local government officials and the greater sensitivity of European investors to issues of “corporate social responsibility.” The implications of this subnational comparative analysis are important for academic analysts and activists alike: the opportunities and prospects for resistance to land grabbing and environmental degradation are decisively shaped by the political access and influence enjoyed by the private businesses involved; and thus, close careful political economy analysis is an essential complement to social movements theory and other analytical tools for studying local land struggles across Southeast Asia and beyond.
But as the title Strategies of Authoritarian Survival and Dissensus in Southeast Asia makes clear, the book is not solely concerned with local land struggles in Cambodia and elsewhere. Indeed, after the two chapters covering the land struggles in Koh Song and Mondulkiri Provinces, the book scales up to look at national-level politics in Cambodia and examine the implications for understanding the endurance of Hun Sen’s one-party authoritarian regime, with successive chapters moving from Cambodia to Malaysia and Indonesia in an analysis of both land struggles at the local level and challenges to authoritarian rule across these three Southeast Asian countries and beyond. Here the book suggests that the success of authoritarian rulers in holding together “winning coalitions” depends in no small measure on their skill and success in the selective provision not only of patronage to the private business interests among their clienteles, but also of protection vis-à-vis social movements mobilized to contest their claims to land, labour, natural resources, and various kinds of economic rents.
This book provides an instructive reminder of the importance of understanding the complex constellations of private business interests that are intertwined with state power under authoritarian regimes (and in different ways under democracy) in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. As other scholars have suggested, the diverging political fortunes of Mahathir and Suharto in the face of the so-called Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–1998 reflected their varying success in addressing the interests and assuaging the anxieties of private businessmen embedded and entrenched within their regimes. Transitions from dictatorship to democracy in the region have unfolded and endured when, and only when, business classes have been able and inclined to divest themselves—economically and politically—from authoritarian rule and invest in opposition parties and regime change. Thus, Strategies of Authoritarian Survival and Dissensus in Southeast Asia reaffirms the value of comparative political economy, an approach to the study of the region which has declined in prominence since the turn of the twenty-first century and deserves renewed promotion today.
John Sidel
London School of Economics, London