Abstract
Introduction
“‘Country’ and ‘city’ are very powerful words” writes Raymond Williams in the introduction to his analysis of the cultural meaning of these two concepts in English literature (1975: 1). He continues “the contrast of the country and city is one of the major forms in which we become conscious of a central part of our experience and of the crises of our society” (Williams 1975: 289). While Williams restricted his perspective to the historical experience of Great Britain, it nevertheless seems reasonable to argue that the polarity between countryside and city – whether socially imagined or manifested in the real world – has constituted an almost universal facet of the human condition. This polarity can be understood as embedded in what has been framed as “agrarian transition”, “agrarian change” or “agrarian transformation”: a broad range of intersecting processes that have profoundly altered rural and urban societies around the globe, often causing severe disruptions and evoking various reactions among affected populations. From a global perspective, the nature of these transformations, their outcomes and their impacts differ greatly across countries and regions. While for the Global North questions of agrarian change and rural–urban relations have become less relevant, for most countries of the Global South the opposite is true – and thus for them rural studies remain a highly dynamic field of scholarly inquiry.
This paper is concerned with Southeast Asia's unique experience within this global trajectory. It considers the implications of agrarian transformations – specifically in social, political and economic terms – for the rural population and examines their ways of embracing and resisting these changes. Southeast Asia, in this regard, is particularly interesting for at least two reasons: First, the region offers numerous cases of countries ranging in type from still predominantly agrarian societies (such as Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam) to those that are relatively advanced in terms of urbanisation and industrialisation (such as Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand). Second, the study of rural change in Southeast Asia has a long history and has produced a prolific body of literature that is often based on empirically rich case studies, which thus provides numerous possibilities for comparative analysis.
Three newer publications take agrarian change in Southeast Asia (and India) as their vantage point, while each employing different theoretical approaches. In terms of academic disciplines, these studies span from Comparative Politics, Sociology and Cultural Anthropology to Human Geography and Environmental Studies.
Based on a review of these three recent publications, this paper seeks to identify new perspectives and fresh approaches to the analytical challenges that arise from the multi-faceted and intertwined nature of agrarian change in Southeast Asia. I shall begin with a brief discussion of the evolution of academic engagement with agrarian change, and then address how far-reaching changes in rural societies have created new contexts and empirics that have called for a shift in approach in theoretical and methodological terms. Against this backdrop, I next look at the three publications’ conceptual and analytical approaches to rural change and point out divergences and concurrences. Then I consider the ideological construction of “the countryside” and “the peasantry”, as evident in several of these publications’ case studies. Hence I address at this point the implications of agrarian change for the issues of resistance and peasant politics. In light of the recent revival of agrarian studies in the scholarship of the region, I want to emphasise the explanatory potential that linking approaches, theories and methodologies of different research traditions and disciplines in an integrative fashion has, in particular as a way to scrutinise the multi-dimensionality of agrarian change. As will be demonstrated by reviewing selected contributions to the publications at hand, in order to enhance our understanding of people's responses to rural change it is essential to recognise their agency and perceptions as interconnected across multiple scales within broader structural conditions.
Rural Change and the Classic “Agrarian Question”
Over the past six decades, the countryside in Southeast Asia has been subjected to dramatic transformations that have swept over or, at times, trickled into – every domain of rural life, and left agrarian societies profoundly altered in their political, social, economic and ecological configurations. What has been labelled as the “Green Revolution” – that is, agricultural intensification – has had, on the one hand, multiple impacts on the agricultural sector – such as the increase in productivity of both land and labour, as well as the furthering of the ongoing transition from subsistence to commercial agriculture. On the other hand, it has caused immense turbulence in the socio-cultural and demographic currents of rural societies, exemplified in changing gender relations, livelihoods, mobility and migration patterns as well as consumption practices.
On top of this, conflicts over access to and the distribution of natural resources, issues of land use and ecological concerns have arisen almost everywhere in Southeast Asia. Intimately interwoven with these changes – and the arrival of modern communication technologies, mass media exposure and generally improved infrastructure in the countryside – is the change in the character of rural residents – the Southeast Asian countryside is now allegedly inhabited by “cosmopolitan and urbanised villagers”, “farm entrepreneurs”, “toproots”, “post-peasants” and “polybians”, to name only a few of the academic designations that have been used to describe the new type of peasantry that has arisen. Needless to say, not all these transformations occurred everywhere at the same time and same rate – but rather point towards general trajectories of rural change in the region. In the same vein, it is obvious that these developments did not take place in a vacuum but were rather embedded in local economic and political contexts, incidences of regime change and political transitions. Of course these dramatic changes in the countryside stand in complex relation to the changes that have occurred in the cities. The powerful notion of the rural–urban divide still looms large, both culturally and ideologically, but the boundaries of these supposedly separate spaces have become increasingly blurred – causing many to question the analytical values of these two concepts.
The overarching theme of all three publications at hand is one that scholars of various disciplines and from around the globe have been concerned with for more than a century – “the agrarian question” (Byres 1995). Its classic formulation, originally grounded in Marxist theory and articulated in Karl Kautsky's work
The opposite is the case for most countries of the developing world, where the agrarian transition is a continuous and prevalent process, one characterised by varying stages of capitalist transition and the enduring importance of the agricultural sector (Rigg 2001: 13). In contemporary thought, the agrarian question (in reality, questions) and the notion of agrarian transition refer to larger societal transformations. These describe – in light of globalisation – the broad range of specific, often intersecting, processes that transform a rural agrarian society economically based on agriculture into an increasingly urbanised one that relies on industrial production and services.
With regard to the scholarship of agrarian change in Southeast Asia, Philip Hirsch notes that, apart from colonial-era studies, most research originates from the Cold War period and has thus “reflected debates between left and right, modernisationist and neo-Marxian, structuralist and nascent poststructuralist, essentialist and constructivist scholarship […]” (Hirsch 2012: 394, 396). Despite their differences in ideological and analytical terms, Hirsch identifies a number of commonly held assumptions in this period of study: peasant livelihoods a relatively enclosed and self-sufficient system, the village as the main unit of analysis, a fairly sedentary peasantry and agricultural production as the key parameter for social differentiation (Hirsch 2012: 396). While the 1990s saw a notable decline of academic interest in agrarian change in Southeast Asia, there has been something of a revival of this scrutiny during the last decade – accompanied by the required shift in theoretical and methodological approaches, so as to adapt to the new empirical contexts of agrarian transition in the twenty-first century (Hirsch 2012: 396). A number of these new empirics of rural societies in Southeast Asia, as well as the various challenges to the study of agrarian transition that were created by them, will be discussed in the following pages.
Changing Empirics and New Theoretical Approaches
The impacts and outcomes of agrarian change in Southeast Asia might differ from country to country, but it is possible to identify certain general trajectories of change that have become more pronounced during the last two decades. First, with the increasing integration of rural production into the national – and more importantly global – economy there has been a rise of agribusiness and contract farming in the region since the 1990s (Kelly 2011: 480; Neilson 2008). Despite a general decline in the importance of agricultural labour as a source of income, farming nevertheless remains a persistent part of rural economies. Overall, household livelihoods have however become more diversified, with some family members often only seasonally engaging in agriculture labour or permanently working off-farm, often in urban centres (Rigg 1998: 502; Hirsch 2012: 399). The phenomenon of “phantom famers” – unrecorded rural people seeking employment in urban areas in order to respond to their native village's livelihood challenges (Rawski and Mead 1998: 773) – is not only an indication of this economic diversification, but also raises doubts about the representation of Southeast Asia as being dominated by agriculture (Rigg 2001: 63–67).
Migration has become a crucial dynamic that is affecting population distribution and rural residents’ livelihoods in fundamental ways. Households are becoming stretched across space, and the spatiality of the village is thus being transformed through long-distance linkages (De Koninck, Rigg, and Vandergeest 2012: 30). The new empirical dimensions that the issue of migration adds to the study of agrarian transition are, among many new forms of livelihoods, the implications of remittances flows, new sources of agricultural labour and potential conflicts between ethnic groups in places of in-migration (Kelly 2011: 481). At the same time, this phenomenon also poses several methodological challenges to the study of individual lives. Further, the new mobility and multi-locality of people's lives are having a strong impact on divisions of labour, gender norms and identities, as well as on consumption patterns and lifestyles in the countryside (Rigg 2001: 42, 153).
The arrival of new technologies – ranging from new irrigation systems to cell phones and the internet – is having noteworthy impacts on how agrarian transition is currently playing out in different locales, regions and countries. Information and communication technologies have led to the increasing connectivity of rural communities that were previously rather isolated from broader global networks of communication and interaction (Borras 2009: 8; Rigg 1998: 516). Closely related is the question of the “rural–urban divide”, which has proven to be a strong and enduring concept not only in Social Science but also as an ideology of development and in the minds of people in general. The borders between the urban and rural spaces are becoming increasingly blurred, which has prompted a new critical examination of the analytical use of these two concepts (Agergaard, Fold, and Gough 2009; Rigg 1998: 499).
The focus on rural–urban linkages and disparities has brought attention to problems of social justice and inequality, not only in economic terms but also in political ones. The context of the democratisation and decentralisation of administration in a number of countries of the region has renewed academic interest in the rural electorate and rural political beliefs and attitudes (Hirsch 2012: 399). Moreover, ongoing processes of industrialisation and urbanisation of the countryside have directed scholars’ attention towards the intensifying impacts on local environments and ecosystems (Rigg 2001: 117–118). A final context for academic engagement with the changing conditions of the Southeast Asian countryside has emerged out of the state's central role in influencing the agrarian transition, as a result of the various laws and regulations enacted that would reshape people's livelihoods and their access to resources. State strategies that lead to uneven development have facilitated new threats of exclusion and inequality, which in turn has created new arenas of conflict (Caouette and Turner 2009: 7).
As described above, the new contexts and changed empirics of the countryside – alongside its transformed relationship to urban areas – have altered the ways in which scholars read the dynamics of the agrarian transition. As previously mentioned, earlier scholarship viewed rural change in Southeast Asia through the analytical lens of peasant studies, based on variations of the classic agrarian question. According to Kelly (2011: 483), the empirical and theoretical concerns that had gradually emerged during the 1980s found their expression in the publication of Gillian Hart, Andrew Turton and Ben White's
Moreover, in the context of the changing empirics of rural societies, a disciplinary shift occurred that has gradually led away from Anthropology's focus on the village as the main unit of analysis and Political Science's concern with broad structural questions. While both disciplines remain, like others also do, important due to their theoretical and methodological strengths, “inherently geographical questions of space, scale, regional specificity and human environment relations” (Hirsch 2012: 402) have emerged and somewhat revitalised the study of agrarian change in the region. What other theoretical framings and approaches have also appeared in response to the changing configurations of the Southeast Asian countryside? Commonly discussed is the concept of the “de-agrarianisation” of the countryside, which refers to the decline of agrarian-based activities and the diminishing importance of self-sufficiency, on the basis of the process of income differentiation and labour migration (Ellis 2006: 387). Bryceson emphasises four aspects of de-agrarianisation: occupational readjustment, income-earning reorientation, social re-identification and spatial relocation (Bryceson 1997: 4). Closely linked is “de-peasantisation”, namely the multidimensional process of the erosion of an agrarian way of life that “combines subsistence and commodity agricultural production with an internal social organisation based on family labour and village community settlement” (Bryceson 1997: 175).
Bryceson understands de-peasantisation as a particular form of de-agrarianisation in which the peasantry demographically shrinks, while also losing its economic capacity and social cohesion (2002: 727). Hirsch notes the concept's derivation from the moral economy perspective that views “subsistence-oriented smallholders as subject to a different logic, world view, set of priorities and structural position vis-à-vis state and market from farmers in a modern capitalist society” (2012: 399). Furthermore, peasants are seen as either accessary to their subaltern status or as employing hidden forms of resistance so as to challenge it. Additionally, they are assumed to display a strong bond to the land both as an economic base and a place of living. For Hirsch, this description stands in contrast to the lived realities of many peasants in modern Southeast Asia, who often continue to work the land while they simultaneously pursue diverse lifestyles that are characterised by mobility, multi-locality and market orientation (2012: 399).
Jonathan Rigg adds another characteristic feature to our understanding of de-agrarianisation: spatial – or rural–urban – interpenetration (2001: 6, 1998: 517). He refers to the increasing blurring of the distinction between “rural” and “urban”, as a result of the emergence of various interconnections based on mobility and migration patterns, as well as on the multidirectional flow of money and ideas. Against the backdrop of the integration of rural production into national and global economies, it becomes increasingly necessary to employ multi-scalar approaches that cut across the local, regional, national and global dimensions. Another relatively new approach is that of Political Ecology in the field of Agrarian Studies, which in a way connects the materialist question of distribution with post-structuralist, discursive approaches. To be specific, Political Ecology and its discourse on the environment is in many ways a surrogate form of terminology for “claims on resources”. Interestingly, and most likely based on the fact that environmental concerns cut across boundaries of social class and geography, there has been a nascent movement against the neglect of natural resources in the name of “development”. There has thus been somewhat of a revival of activist scholarship in the region (Hirsch 2012: 400).
Saturnino M. Borras Jr. points out that the state–society relations framework is a valuable way “to locate one's analysis of the dynamics of agrarian change in the interaction of the various institutional arenas of agrarian power or politics” (2009: 21). In the study of rural politics this framework is able to cover more analytical and empirical ground, due to its incorporation of state-centred perspectives that have a focus on state institutions and actors – viewpoints that treat societal actors like social classes and social movements as independent variables. By employing an interactive analytical approach to state–society relations, and one that also recognises the significance of everyday forms of politics, scholars can increase the explanatory power of their analysis (Borras 2009: 21). Finally, the importance of an actor-oriented approach – or one that recognises agency – has not only been at the core of these subaltern studies, but has also become more important both to the study of agrarian transition and of the rural populace's reaction to it. In this way, it is crucial to recognise the importance of questions of power relations in both rural development processes and discourses about rights and empowerment.
Three Perspectives on Agrarian Transition
Taking the notion of agrarian transition as a vantage point, all three publications at hand direct their conceptual and analytical focus to different but often overlapping fields.
In
In
the linkages and interactions have become an ever more intensive and important component of livelihoods and production systems in many areas – forming not so much a bridge over a divide as a complex web of connections in a landscape where much is neither “urban” nor “rural”, but has features of both, especially in the areas around urban centres or along the roads out of such centres’ (Tacoli 2003: 3).
They disagree with the two contrasting current trends in scholarship: one is the shift towards analytically marginalising the notion of a “rural space” in favour of concepts of “global cities” and “mega-urban regions”, the other is the maintenance of a mono-dimensional focus on either “the urban” or “the rural”, therefore strengthening the concept of the “rural–urban divide” (p. 6). In this sense the editors’ approach is in accordance with Jonathan Rigg's (1998) aforementioned concept of rural–urban interpenetration.
Both the editors of
Walker's
First, based on Thailand's impressive record of poverty reduction and rural development, he argues that improved rural standards of living have for the most part lifted peasants out of poverty. While they have not reached the level of affluence of their urban middle-class counterparts, they no longer face “classic low-income challenges of food security and subsistence survival” (p. 8), and can therefore be described as middle-income peasants. Second, agriculture remains an important component of peasant livelihoods, but rural economies have diversified to a degree that only about 20 per cent of peasant households rely only on income from it. Third, despite Thailand's success in fighting extreme poverty, its record on relative poverty reduction has been less impressive – so that peasants are currently still confronted and burdened with widespread inequalities. These economic disparities are a result of uneven development and a relatively low agricultural productivity, as well as the bad performance of the rural economy. This has led to a wide income gap opening up between rural and urban areas. Fourth, Walker argues that through subsidy programmes the state has come to play a crucial role in supporting the rural economy. While the conventional understanding of the state–peasant relationship is occupied with state surplus extraction and in many cases consequential rural resistance. The case of Thailand sits differently though; there, the relationship of the rural economy to the state has come to be characterised by subsidy rather than taxation. As a result, the position of the peasantry vis-à-vis the state is not one of avoidance and resistance but rather based on the desire to draw maximum benefit from the state's various support programmes. Walker argues that this relationship between rural people and the state now forms a central component of Thai rural political identity.
The Agrarian Myth and the Construction of the Rural
On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre: of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times (Williams 1975: 1).
These observations mirror the imaginative power of “the rural and the urban”, as an ideology and a notion, culturally inscribed in peoples’ minds, that runs like a golden thread through the publications at hand. In
Thompson's notion seems to be linked to the older concept of the “agrarian myth”: the general belief that subsistence-oriented, small-scale farming is the most desirable form of community, particularly in agrarian village life (Brown 2003: 27–29). Following Brass, the agrarian myth puts forward a notion of peasant society that is romantic and essentialising, and that depicts the rural as fundamentally different from the urban – specifically, the former is presented as more authentic and in harmony with cultural traditions and nature (2000). Conceivably, it might function as a set of values that urban cosmopolitan chauvinism can derive from/be based on, as Robert Dayley (2011) demonstrates for the case of Thailand. He convincingly argues that Thailand's urban-based intellectual and cultural elites promote a unique version of the agrarian myth, one closely tied to a nostalgic “sufficiency ethic” that promotes small-scale subsistence farming as the rural means of defence against globalisation's market forces and materialistic values.
Historically, this bears resemblance to the notion of the peasantry as “the backbone of the nation” that was popular in the Thai elite discourse during the Cold War era in response to the perceived “communist threat”, as described by Tyrell Haberkorn's book
Dayley's perspective on the character of the modern Thai peasant bears a strong resemblance to Andrew Walker's notion of the middle-income peasant, which depicts this societal group not as naive, uneducated and backward but rather as made up of citizens who are increasingly modern and future-oriented. As Thompson correctly notes, in the case of Thailand the politics of rural identity and urban cosmopolitan chauvinism have proven to be particularly explosive. Chairat Charoensin-o-larn's account of the Red Shirt movement (in Chapter 12 of
In
In Dressler's case of upland communities on Palawan island, the Philippines, a comparable demographic shift occurred with the arrival of lowland migrant settlers. As a consequence, indigenous people entered into competition over land and forest resources with these new arrivals. This took place in the context of community-based conservation measures in national parks that “‘granted’ indigenous peoples the responsibility to access, use and manage resources for poverty reduction and biodiversity conservation” (82). National park management thinking based this practice on the binary stereotypes of “ethnic traditions” and “sustainability”, and on a specific understanding of indigenous upland livelihoods as subsistence-based. In contrast, lowland migrants were classified as “modern” and “productive”, thus receiving state support and public lands for commercial agriculture – while indigenous populations were only allocated low-level support intended to revitalise subsistence practices. Dressler regards this approach as, on the one hand, an ignorance of the diverse livelihoods of highlanders, one that further reinforces poverty. On the other hand, it also exacerbates the disparities between indigenous and migrant communities, thereby creating new terrains for conflict.
Rural Resistance and Peasant Politics
Turning to the implications – whether directly or indirectly felt in the countryside – of agrarian change in Southeast Asia, closely linked as they are to emerging sites of conflict, the following will examine both peasants’ and other rural people's consequential political responses and resistance behaviours. As pointed out by Caouette and Turner in drawing on Foucault (1976), “conceptualizations of resistance are situated within understandings of power; power being comprised of the relational interplay of dominance and subordination” (p. 9). In this context, the question of state–society or alternatively state–peasant relations is highly significant for the understanding of rural resistance, in both its overt and covert forms. As demonstrated by Andrew Walker, the relations between peasants and the state are not coercively or inherently characterised by a “resistance imperative”, but can be based on other culturally informed attitudes and beliefs regarding power. Further, as in the current climate the locus of power partially shifts away from the nation-state and is instead becoming interrelated with other states, regions and global organisations in complex ways, transnational resistance movements are emerging – and they are increasingly seeking to link local grievances with developments taking place at the global level. While E. C. Thompson et al. do not explicitly adopt a resistance perspective, several chapters in
In their conceptual understanding of politics, all three publications adopt a similar perspective that transcends the currently rather minimalist understanding of politics that exists in disciplines like Political Science and Sociology (Kurtz 2001: 2). Walker notes that while for political scientists elections are a central component to the formal definition of politics, anthropologists in contrast, “tend to see party-dominated elections as a procedural exercise that has little meaningful relationship to local power dynamics” (p. 190). He argues that the distinction between formal and informal politics becomes blurred and does not prove to be that useful, at least is in the case of his north Thai village. He further stresses the interwovenness of party politics on the national level and everyday politics in the village. In the same vein, an inclusive and broad understanding of political phenomena is inherent to Caouette and Turner's combination of multi-scalar approaches with actor-oriented methodologies. E. C. Thompson et al. note that the political dimensions of rural–urban cleavages and connections are not to be limited to elections, but need to include, among other things, structural conditions like gender and class – through which power is regulated and legitimated. At the same time, the micro-level of everyday politics functions as an important arena in which disputes over resources and identity politics occur (p. 8–9).
Caouette and Turner address the unfortunate divide between studies that emphasise concepts like hegemony, domination, the moral economy and more hidden forms of resistance on the one side and, on the other, the literature on various forms of open collective action, ranging from localised protests and riots to transnational social movements. They frame their argument with three core assertions. First, the editors argue for a multi-scalar approach that addresses the complex and intertwined nature of resistance in the context of agrarian change and that encompasses various resistance practices – from the micro-level of the village to the macro-level of the global arena. Multi-scalar analysis seeks to dissolve the conventional boundaries drawn between local, regional, national and transnational acts of resistance. The concept of “scale” can initially be defined as “the level of geographic resolution at which a given phenomenon is thought of, acted on, or studied” (Agnew 1997: 100).
Aware of the problems of traditional understandings of scale as a static concept, the authors opt for a more fluid approach – one that focuses on the connections and contradictions that exist between spatial categories. They view scale as directly connected to social processes, and conceptualise it as “the focal setting at which spatial boundaries are defined for a specific social claim, activity, or behavior” (Agnew 1997: 100, 1993). From the introduction, one might get the impression that the authors define the concept of scale as being prior to a spatial category, even if connected to the realm of social processes (p. 3). A number of contributions also, however, employ the concept of scale in a temporal sense, for example Vu Tuong's discussion of the genesis of the agrarian movement and its anti-capitalist origins (Chapter 9) or Tran Thi Thu Trang's analysis of the development of rural resistance in Vietnam over the course of the past 50 years (Chapter 8). It is regrettable that processes of scale (re)construction and rescaling – especially in the context of social movements – remain largely absent from the anthology. As Dominique Masson notes, “the scales of collective action do not pre-exist collective action itself. Scales – regional and others – first have to be recognized as usable and, second, constructed as actionable by social movement actors” (2006: 463). Given the analytical significance of the concept of scale, one would have wished for a more thorough and systematic discussion of its relevance for the study of rural resistance movements.
The editors’ second core argument states that “forms of resistance in Southeast Asia are numerous, rapidly diversifying and never static” (p. 4). Asserting that resistance might not always be easily identifiable and may at times blur into forms of compliance, they stress the context-dependency of resistance as “a force that is changing relative to dominance and within a dynamic network of power which can gather strength, diminish and shift positions” (p. 9). Based on a discussion of the seminal work of three scholars who have distinctly shaped our contemporary understanding of resistance – namely those of Antonio Gramsci (1971), Karl Polanyi (1944, 1957) and James Scott (1976, 1985, 1990) – the authors move beyond the classical Marxist understanding of peasant class struggle. Instead, they stress the importance of a broader interpretation of resistance – one that pays attention to such factors as ethnicity, culture, gender, environmental issues, social justice and the role of globalisation. Accordingly, they seek to integrate their perspective into a more nuanced framework for understanding “the variety and the multiple scalar dimensions of rural dynamics in Southeast Asia” (p. 10). This they do by linking these separate works on resistance, so as to incorporate small-scale, everyday forms of resistance (James Scott) with large-scale, more organised forms of resistance and counter-hegemonic discourses (Antonio Gramsci, Karl Polanyi).
Following Louise Amoore (2005: 8), the editors argue that these supposedly dichotomous perspectives actually overlap and inform each another in many different ways. Caouette and Turner herein make a strong case for the intertwined nature of open, outright resistance and that of the hidden, everyday kind. In this way, hidden forms of resistance function as a “seedbed for overt movement” (p. 11) and contribute to develop a “counterhegemonic consciousness” that serves as the key foundation for manifesting large-scale, overt resistance. Advancing their core hypothesis, the editors argue for rural collective action's interdependence on micro-level processes involving agency, as well as on shifts in macro-level political opportunities on a multi-scalar level.
In other words, the editors emphasise the significance of considering intertwined endogenous factors – such as culturally inscribed values, beliefs and ideology – and exogenous factors – such as the political system, power structures and the international context –, so that a comprehensive analysis of rural collective action and resistance can be achieved. Hence, the editors contend, in their third core argument, that scholarship on resistance in the context of agrarian change must acknowledge agency: “how ordinary people are involved in, and make choices about, resistance actions from everyday struggles to high-profile protests is vital. These decision-making processes might be individual or shared; they might be contradictory, ambiguous or paradoxical. Alternatively they might be highly disciplined and well-organised” (p. 4). They point out that while approaches that are merely structuralist are useful as a way to account for broader social processes, they have nevertheless largely failed to explain specific processes and actions unfolding at the micro-level. In order to address the exogeneous factors, Caouette and Turner suggest employing the concept of “political opportunity structures”. Following Tarrow (1994: 18), they understand these as signals that either encourage or discourage actors regarding engagement in collective action.
Specifically, these signals materialise in the form of “increasing access to power, changes in ruling alignments, the possibility of establishing linkages with influential allies and the existence of divisions within and between the elites” (p. 32). Since it was first proposed by Peter Eisenger (1973), and later incorporated into social movement studies, the concept of political opportunity structures has received much attention among social scientists and animated a great deal of research (Meyer 2004). However, it has also drawn a fair amount of criticism for being operationalised in an overly broad way. Gamson and Meyer remark that its use in many studies has turned the concept into “an all-encompassing fudge factor for all conditions and circumstances that form the context for collective action. Used to explain so much, it may ultimately explain nothing at all” (1996: 275). Other scholars have criticised the concept for being overly structural, and for neglecting the significance of actor agency (Goodwin and Jasper 2003).
In
Second, Tran Thi Thu Trang's contribution (Chapter 8) stands out as an excellent example of merging an actor-centred approach with a focus on political opportunities in the analysis of peasant resistance. Based on field research conducted in northwest Vietnam and on the relevant academic literature, he traces the genesis of rural resistance against the state. Building on the work of Mittelman and Chin (2000), the author develops a conceptual framework that analyses four dimensions of resistance (forms, agents, causes and targets) and how these relate to one another. He emphasises the interaction between structure and agency over time, as well as the fluid nature of peasant resistance, and shows how farmers’ perceptions of their grievances influence the emergence or not of resistance behaviour. An interesting concurrence with Walker here is that Tran Thi Thu Trang sees the lack of more open protest against the state as due to peasants’ trust in the state's benevolent nature and its good intentions. While both cases’ historical background and regime context are fundamentally different, Walker's middle-income peasant also regards the state as a rather positive entity and seeks its involvement in rural community affairs, instead of avoiding it or resisting its influence. Nevertheless, Tran Thi Thu Trang notes that Vietnamese peasants’ current trust in the state might evaporate if the latter's policies begin to further threaten rural livelihoods in the country.
Mindful of the structuralist underpinnings of the concept of political opportunity structures, as well as its analytical limitations, the editors posit that it is ultimately activists’ and movements’ perceptions of the shifting political opportunities that trigger specific forms of political response. In a recent study this has been conceptualised as “cognitive political opportunities”, as opposed to the previously described concept of structural political opportunities (Choe and Kim 2012). In line with their multi-scalar approach, Caouette and Turner seek to link structure (the macro-level) – in the form of political opportunities – with agency (the micro level), as for instance manifested in the actors’ beliefs and perceptions that inform their decisions and actions. In light of this chosen framework, it strikes me as slightly puzzling that the authors acknowledge the “illuminative” strength of their framing perspective in passing but nevertheless do not attempt to integrate this set of concepts and theories into their actual approach. Framing processes and collective action frames are commonly understood as connecting all three analytical levels, the macro, meso and micro (Staggenborg 2002: 128). In its function as a mediating concept between different levels of analysis, the framing approach would be a valuable addition to the editors’ proposed framework – particularly against the backdrop of their multi-scalar focus. Notable in this regard is Dominique Caouette's contribution on transnational resistance (Chapter 12), in which he examines, by adopting a framing perspective, the strategies of four transnational advocacy networks designed to connect micro-level rural grievances with macro-level global processes.
Transnational Resistance
As noted by Borras Jr., Edelman, and Kay (2008: 30), transnational agrarian movements (TAM) have existed since the early twentieth century; nonetheless, in the late 1980s and early 1990s an upsurge of TAMs occurred in opposition to the forces of neo-liberal globalisation. Reflecting the emergence of a transnational civil society, networks of peasants and small farmers in various regions of the world are now at the forefront of a global resistance movement embodied in the well-known Vía Campesina, as well as in various regional organisations (Borras Jr., Edelman, and Kay 2008: 30). As opposed to other regions – namely Europe, Latin America and North America – Southeast Asia still remains a somewhat understudied region in the transnational social movement literature (Piper and Uhlin 2004: 1). To rectify this, Dominique Caouette's chapter traces the genealogy of four transnational activist organisations – and examines how they link local rural concerns with the global level, therein producing what are termed “glocal” (global–local) connections. In her analysis of each organisation's approach to the development of advocacy platforms based on grassroot grievances that are also beneficial for local mobilisation, Caouette shows how activists within these organisations – despite their transnational orientation – remain embedded in their local and national networks. Most transnational activists demonstrate an ability to form alliances with a broad range of actors on different levels, as a way to respond to the different political contexts. Rural concerns are stitched together by such overarching themes as resistance to neo-liberal globalisation, the struggle for food sovereignty and the drive for global social justice. These themes function as broader “master frames” at the global level, and often challenge dominant discourses and call for collective action on the part of various civil society actors.
Of particular interest is Caouette's analysis of these four organisations’ different methodologies for linking local claims to global advocacy. These range from, among other practices, organising regional schools to bringing together local activists with scholars, students and fellow organisers, employing investigators on the ground who act as the interpreters of local concerns to direct involvement of transnational activists in grassroot social movements. Given that all four of these TAMs lay focus on open, organised forms of resistance, as well as lobbying and negotiating with state officials and global institutions, Caouette rightly argues that they tend by nature to overlook or bypass everyday forms of peasant resistance. As Malseed shows for the Karen people in Myanmar, their employment of the “weapons of the weak” actually has a great deal in common with the organised and structured resistance approaches of agrarian movements (2008: 335–339). In line with Caouette's conclusion, and in opposition to generally held assumptions, the linking of transnational resistance with more subtle, unstructured forms of resistance at the local level might prove to have significant potential as a base from which to build broad-based transnational agrarian movements (Le Mons Walker 2008; Malseed 2008). The central analytical challenge for the understanding of transnational resistance that creates glocal linkages – there- in binding local struggles to global processes – is to bridge in an integrative manner the gap between micro-, meso- and macro-level approaches.
Peasant Politics: “Seeking the State”
Both Andrew Walker's
In a similar fashion to James Scott, Walker offers an account of the social psychology and agency of the peasant. But the middle-income peasant that invigorates Walker's narrative is different from earlier accounts of the peasantry in Southeast Asia, such as Popkin's “rational peasant”, Scott's “moral peasant” or the peasant of the “community school” spearheaded by Chatthip Nartsupha – even if the dividing lines between these designations were always rather porous (Rigg, Bouahom, and Duangsavanh 2004: 991). Walker's insightful discussion of power relations in rural Thailand (p. 10–21) features several points of overlap with Caouette and Turner's first two introductory chapters. He acknowledges the value of “vertical” and “horizontal” approaches for the understanding of power and politics in rural Thailand. But instead of opting for an interpretation based on the patron–client paradigm or for alternative approaches based on class struggles or civil society, he adopts a genuinely anthropological perspective: how peasants’ attitudes and behaviours toward the supernatural are reflected in their worldly dealings with the state, politicians and agribusiness representatives alike. Walker describes the Thai peasantry's orientation to power as likewise manifested in the spirit world and in the realms of politics and business. For Walker, this “highly localised version of power and potency, linked to ancestors, domesticity and, in particular, maternal relationships” (p. 27) forms a set of values that crucially informs the middle-income peasant's attitude and behaviour towards the state. This is what he refers to as a rural constitution: “an uncodified set of values that is based on the desirability of embedding political and administrative power into local networks of exchange and evaluation” (p. 29). Walker notes that the state's failure to meet the expectations of the rural constitution is met with what might appear to be classic forms of resistance. But he further points out that these acts of defiance are not oriented against the state's forceful intrusion; rather, they are directed against the perceived violation of the unwritten rules that peasants expect the state to adhere to.
Walker argues that the most important change in the state–peasantry relationship has been the shift from surplus extraction to subsidisation. Historically, this new configuration has its origins in the period of the 1950s and 1960s, when the communist threat was answered by the military Thai government with national programmes of investment in rural areas so as to improve the general standard of living. This process was further encouraged by the brief era of open democracy experienced in the 1970s and the consequent politicisation of the peasantry, which resulted in the government becoming even more concerned about a potential communist rebellion fomenting in the Thai countryside. Recognising Thailand's impressive achievements in the domains of rural development and poverty reduction, Walker postulates that “the contemporary political energy of the peasantry does not come from fear about its dissolution but from the dilemmas of its preservation” (p. 56). The relationship to the state remains a central component of Thai rural political identity, but the balance of exchange has nonetheless gradually been fundamentally altered. Instead of avoiding the state, the Thai middle-income peasant is actually seeking its closer proximity – in order to benefit from its micro-credit schemes, employment guarantees and poverty alleviation and welfare programmes. The state, on its side, has an interest in avoiding social unrest, in meeting the expectations of international donors and, of course, in sustaining the goodwill of the rural electorate.
The changed nature of the Thai peasant's relationship to the wider political system has created a new political player, one who is having extremely significant effects on the political geography of the country. Walker borrows Chatterjee's concept of “political society” to describe this altered context. The concept of “political society” derives from subaltern studies, and was created as a counter to the notion of “civil society”. Walker's interpretation of Thai peasants’ political behaviour and their orientation to power marks a break with the prevalent approach of discussing peasant responses to agrarian transformation processes through a resistance lens. He criticises many resistance studies for their alleged negation of “political complexity and cultural richness” (p. 139), with them instead interpreting the cases merely in terms of dominance and subordination. He enriches his findings by choosing a perspective based on an ethnographically dense account that takes emic perspectives and orientations to power into consideration. In this, he is in accordance with the actor-oriented approach emphasised by the two other publications at hand.
Undoubtedly, Walker's study is a thorough and compelling account of the economic and political realities of Thailand's modern countryside. But the obvious advantage of an ethnographic case study, and its accompanying cultural richness, is contrasted by the downside of potential limitations in terms of comparability. While the case of Ban Tiam might be representative for the general trajectory of rural transformations and their outcomes in northern Thailand, the question arises of to what degree his findings are applicable to other regions. This is particularly relevant with regard to the political implications of Walker's findings for the northeast, Thailand's most populous region and heartland of the Red Shirt movement, as well as for the south with its relatively stable electoral loyalty to the Democrat Party. From a regional perspective, it further poses the question of whether the middle-income peasantry and its political values and beliefs are an anomaly to the specific historical case of (north) Thailand, or if this concept finds an equivalent in other Southeast Asian countries. In this light, comparative studies of rural change and peasant politics in the different countries of the region would be highly welcome.
Lastly, it appears that the concept of the middle-income peasant tends to oversimplify Thailand's rural social structure, even though for Walker's focus on broad state–society relations it obviously has great explanatory strength. But in the same way that it is objectionable to depict the Thai state as a monolithic entity, the social composition of Thailand's countryside appears to be more diverse than how it is described by Walker. The concept of a middle-income peasantry appears to be overly broad and clearly neglects inter-rural differentiation. As has been pointed out by Baker (2000), rural activism in Thailand emerges from among roughly two different types of peasants: the poor and landless and the wealthier landowners. Members of these two groups differ in their aspirations and interests, which naturally translates into them exhibiting different political behaviours. It is, therefore, extremely important to further scrutinise these differences, so as to fully understand the nature of Thailand's rural social composition – as well as its implications for the country's political system.
Conclusion
The experiences of agrarian change in Southeast Asia, and the processes that constitute contemporary forms of societal transition there, have proven to be highly versatile – and thus need to be understood as embedded in each country of the region's historical and social context. While it remains difficult to separate between drivers and outcomes of agrarian transition, general trajectories of change in the region are exemplified by the increasing market integration of rural production into the national and global economy, the diversification of rural livelihoods, changing mobility and migration patterns and ongoing processes of industrialisation and urbanisation. Rural populations’ responses to these profound changes in the worlds that they live in vary greatly – ranging from hidden forms of everyday resistance to organised protest movements.
A discussion based on the close review of three recent publications has allowed us to draw a number of conclusions about the nature of rural change in, and its implications for, the different societies of Southeast Asia. Herein, against the backdrop of the various new contexts and changed empirics of rural societies that gradually emerged during the 1980s, the editors of, first,
Understanding rural and urban transformations as being simultaneous, interconnected processes, the second set of editors suggest to employ Castell's concept of the “space of flows” – as a way to highlight the multidimensional and networked nature of the socio-spatial relationships existing between the two domains. Conceptually, this blends in well with Caouette and Turner's multi-scalar approach to resistance that seeks to integrate and link the local, regional, national and transnational. These authors mindfully argue for a fluid understanding of scale, one that emphasises connections and oppositions in the context of diverse social processes. In this regard, E. C. Thompson et al. and Caoutte and Turner are in fundamental agreement in their recognition of the need to approach the social processes of change in Southeast Asia as intertwined and multi-directional dynamics unfolding between and across spatial categories. In light of the complexity of agrarian change, as constituted in various intersecting processes, the value of inter-and multi-disciplinary approaches becomes very apparent in and from both anthologies. While the significance of Anthropology, Sociology and Political Science for the study of rural transformations in Southeast Asia remains strong, the recent advent of Human Geography has introduced new concepts and valuable contributions for the study of rural change. The application of a multi-scalar approach in
Furthermore, Caouette and Turner's argument for a conceptual integration of micro- and macro-level processes, in the context of collective action, reveals a possible mediating position in Social Science's debate about the significance of, and the connections between, structure and agency. The combination of actor-oriented approaches that recognise agency with broader structural perspectives is clearly able to enhance our understanding of the nature of agrarian transformation, as well as of its economic, social, political and cultural implications. Likewise, an approach that combines classic theories of rural resistance with the rich body of literature existent in social movement studies, as applied by Caouette and Turner, promises a more robust framework within which to account for the high diversity and context-dependency of peasant resistance. This integration of separate theoretical fields needs, however, to be further developed if it is to reach its full explanatory potential.
As Tim Forsyth remind us in the concluding chapter of