Land and Geopolitics

Abstract

Abstract Enclosure is an enduring feature of capitalist development, yet its unevenness—some areas and populations endure far more than others—is inevitably a function of the historical versus emergent processes. But at what point does enclosure cross over into the geopolitical? This chapter outlines a conjunctural approach to land and geopolitics, using the global land rush as an entry point into land politics over multiple spatial and temporal scales. Beginning with the geopoliticization of the global land rush of the middle and late 2000s, and drawing on long-term fieldwork in Laos, the chapter locates the governing of enclosure at the nexus of domestic and international affairs. It draws heavily on the concept of micro-geopolitics, a term that gestures to the ways that contemporary processes of enclosure have become grounded in and shaped by earlier geopolitical conflicts, often in ways that reflect highly localized processes of state territorialization, colonial and postwar legacies, and legal pluralism. It also examines the explicitly (if often unrecognized) geopolitical dimensions of property itself, highlighting the global and historical trajectories of debates about land commodification and alienation that create today’s patchwork of legal formalization and, with it, the endurance of imperial and colonial legacies.