The emotional life of rupture at Cambodia's Lower Sesan 2 hydropower dam

Abstract

This article aims to extend and deepen our understanding of how emotions figure in experiences of major nature-society disruptions or “rupture.” Cambodia's Lower Sesan 2 hydropower dam is an example of rupture, which refers to dramatic, adverse, and disruptive episodes that ripple across scale. Against a historical backdrop of land enclosures and dispossession, the dam sparked significant community and civil society resistance. This emotionally charged campaign emphasized that the dam and associated resettlement would erase the impacted communities’ deep customary relationships to the area. Although some community members ultimately refused the resettlement package and moved to customary lands near their flooded village, the majority accepted resettlement. We explore the emotional dimensions of these communities’ experiences, finding that rupture is an inherently emotional process, within layered historical processes of change and violence. The intense emotions that such processes evoke can spark action within the “open moment” (Lund, 2016) that episodes of rupture create; yet the outcomes are highly unpredictable within the asymmetrical political and economic settings that underpin nature-society rupture.