Abstract
Highlights
We discuss Cambodia's Lower Sesan 2 hydropower dam as an example of “rupture”: a dramatic, adverse and cross-scale disruptive episode.
Emotions are an integral part of lived experiences of rupture.
This is because of multidimensional and emotional relationships to place, which rupture episodes deeply disrupt.
Emotions are intensified by layered and long-term experiences of change and injustice.
Rupture's emotional life can fuel new political claims, but also produces unpredictable outcomes, framed by inequality.
Introduction
Geographers have long argued that our engagements with space are profoundly emotional (Anderson and Smith, 2001). Emotions are also integral to the insecurity and uncertainty that major nature-society disruptions evoke (Albrecht, 2019; Clark, 2020; Head, 2016; Schlosberg et al., 2020). Although we
During our fieldwork in Northeast Cambodia, a group of women in the village of Kbal Romeas Chas reflected on their negotiations with company and government officials about relocating their village to make way for the Lower Sesan 2 dam project. For these women, the pressure to accept land and newly built houses for their Bunong community was incommensurate with the loss of customary ties to their lands and special places. Reflecting on these negotiations, the community leader, Davi, explained “We thought they were good people but in the end we were left with tears (
Hydropower projects such as Cambodia's Lower Sesan 2 dam (hereafter LS2) represent an episode of “rupture” in a continually changing landscape. Nature-society rupture involves adverse, dramatic, and interactive changes that ripple across scales and over time—such as those catalyzed by LS2 (Mahanty et al., 2023). Nature-society rupture may appear discrete and rapid or sudden, but often represents a punctuated episode within interactive, cascading, and accretive changes; and stem from processes of “slow violence” (Mahanty et al., 2023; see also Nixon, 2013). The intensification of change through rupture is often experienced in profoundly unequal and emotional ways. Yet this upheaval can also produce “open moments”—the potential for new forms of agency and institutional reconfiguration to be pursued (Lund, 2016; Mahanty et al., 2023). As we elaborate later, a rupture lens expands our understanding of emotionality in settings of intense nature-society disruption. Rupture additionally exposes the interactive and temporally complex character of embodied experiences and how and why these give rise to diverse forms of agency. At the same time, attention to emotions can enhance our understanding of the intensity and generative potential of these episodes.
Our analysis draws on emotional geographies, and feminist political ecology. These literatures are discussed more expansively later, but a brief introduction is warranted here, starting with the concept of emotions. Sultana (2015: 634) usefully defined emotions as the felt, expressed and conscious facets of lived experience within social and political settings. In this sense, emotions reflect conscious feelings that may be expressed through actions, and communicative acts (Burkitt, 2002: 153). Our work especially focuses on socially framed narratives and discourses about emotions, and on practices and actions—on what emotions
Feminist Political Ecologists highlight that such responses are not just individual emotional states (as suggested by psychologists such as Clayton, 2020) but must be understood in a relational sense. For example, our emotional relationships to place (Anderson and Smith, 2001; Davidson and Milligan, 2004) mean that episodes that directly disrupt such place-based relationships can elicit strong feelings, such as trauma (González-Hidalgo and Zografos, 2019), “ecological grief” (grief at the loss of valued species, ecosystems and landscapes) (Cunsolo and Ellis, 2018: 275; Head, 2016); “solastalgia” (distress at dramatic change in a loved environment) (Albrecht et al. 2007); and fear of uncertainty (Akhtar-Kavari, 2015). At LS2, the rupturing of emotional ties to significant and familiar places was often raised by community members.
A relational perspective also views subjective/embodied experiences as inseparable from broader social and political relations (Rose, 1997; Bondi et al., 2006: 7). This builds on a tradition of feminist scholarship that views embodied experience as being inevitably framed by social (including cultural), political and historical subjectivities (González-Hidalgo and Zografos, 2019; Sultana, 2015). Cultural and social axes of power (Butler, 1988: 520; Elmhirst, 2015) also shape how people negotiate their sense of self in relation to their surroundings (Schoenberger and Beban, 2018: 1340; see also Ellingson, 2011, 2017; Hiemstra and Billo, 2017; Rose, 1997; Sultana, 2015). Based on these ideas, we view emotions and the actions they spark as integral to embodied experience, to broader social processes, and to collective action (Nightingale, 2013). These ideas are now influential in studies of social movements, where subjective emotions are viewed as an important dimension of collective resistance, a theme that we return to later (Henning, 2019; Singh, 2013; Hak et al., 2021; Sultana, 2011).
In summary, we build on previous scholarship about the role of emotions in social and place-based relationships to engage Mahanty et al.'s (2023) theorization of nature-society rupture. Through the lens of emotions, our analysis shows how embodied experiences resonate at personal and community levels to shape diverse responses to rupture. We start with a discussion of rupture and its relevance to LS2, before explaining the methods we used to explore emotions at LS2. We then present a thematic discussion of our findings in relation to (i) ruptured relationships to place; (ii) the multidimensional timbre of emotions and (iii) the complex relationship between emotions and diverse social actions. We argue that emotions help us to grasp the intensity of nature-society rupture and diverse responses to the contingent spaces of agency—or “open moments”—that rupture produces.
Lower Sesan 2 Dam as an instance of rupture
Our work at LS2 was part of a larger collaboration that studied nature-society rupture at Mekong hydropower dams. Located in the northeastern province of Stung Treng, LS2 is Cambodia's largest hydropower dam. The dam is operated by the Chinese–Cambodian–Vietnamese joint venture, Hydro Power Lower Sesan 2 Company Limited. First proposed in the 1990s, but not approved until 2012, LS2 became fully operational in 2018. However, the dam has since struggled to achieve its full generation capacity due to drought. Frictions have continued over resettlement, livelihood impacts, human rights violations, and the project's contribution to cumulative environmental change in the Mekong Basin (Mahanty, 2021).
Viewing LS2 as an instance of rupture draws attention to changes that are synergistic and intense. Mahanty et al. (2023) highlight interactivity (across locations, scales, and parallel developments) as the first defining feature of rupture. LS2's impacts are felt upstream and downstream of the dam site and interact with broader developments in the Mekong Basin. For instance, the upstream Yali Falls dam in Vietnam caused unpredictable flooding and other livelihood challenges for LS2-impacted communities (Baird and Barney, 2017; Wyatt and Baird, 2007). The LS2 environmental impact statement and related studies anticipated significant disruptions to fish migrations and aquatic species at the dam site and beyond (Baird, 2009; Baran et al., 2011). Local accounts confirmed that fish numbers boomed in the first 2 years of the reservoir's flooding, attracting downstream and upstream fishers, but then declined (Chann, 2019). A rupture lens enables us to interrogate such synergistic changes.
The transformations associated with rupture usually stem from and are intensified by slow and cumulative shifts (Mahanty et al., 2023; see also Baird, 2021). Nixon (2013: 3) calls these accretive changes “slow violence”—“a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight.” We found that the displacement of communities by the LS2 reservoir overlaid past dispossessions related to Economic Land Concessions (ELCs) and conservation areas (see Figure 1), as well as migration and market intensification. These cumulative changes have framed the emotional experiences of rupture at LS2.
Areas and communities impacted by Lower Sesan 2 dam.
Heightened uncertainty, insecurity and material deprivation are a third-core dimension of rupture (Mahanty et al., 2023). These were prominent at LS2 and are a well-documented impact of hydropower dams more broadly given the extent of settlement and livelihood disruption they cause (see, for instance, Barney, 2009; Baird and Barney, 2017; Hirsch, 1998; Hirsch and Wyatt, 2004). Not all the villagers who were offered resettlement packages accepted them (see Table 1 and Figure 1). Across the two villages that constituted Srae Kor commune, 73 families remained behind on farmlands near their flooded village, in a new settlement known as Srae Kor Chas (Old Srae Kor). In Kbal Romeas, 52 families remained near the original flooded village in a settlement known as Kbal Romeas Chas (Old Kbal Romeas). Those remaining behind financed their own resettlement to customary lands near their original homes, where they campaigned to gain state recognition and access to services such as education and healthcare. The households who moved to the resettlement villages received 5 hectares of farmland, a house plot with either a newly built house or a cash payment of US$6000 to build a house, as well as compensation payments that were calculated based on household assets before resettlement (Chann, 2019; Human Rights Watch, 2021). Access to a reliable water supply remained a crucial challenge in Kbal Romeas Thmei and Srae Kor Thmei. Other settlements, such as Khsach Thmei, were impacted by but received no compensation from the LS2 project or upstream Yali Falls dam (Wyatt and Baird, 2007). The combined loss of aquatic and forest products, displacement, and other resource pressures contributed to significant livelihood stress and insecurity, which were felt differently between and within settlements (combined FGDs with women, men and youth, 12–25 January 2020). As we elaborate later, discussions about these issues often had a strongly emotional tone.
Overview of case study villages.
The fourth significant dimension of rupture, and a major focus for this article, is its generative potential (Mahanty et al., 2023). By exposing existing power relations and injustices, disruptive episodes produce an “open moment” with the potential for institutions to change and for grievances to be expressed (Lund, 2016; Molotch, 1970). Yet, efforts to resist and reimagine institutions—notably in Cambodia—meet reassertions of elite power. LS2 is an important case for understanding this dynamic because of local resistance to the dam. The dam campaign received international (Thin, 2013) and extensive national media coverage. Civil society and community actors reported human rights infringements during resettlement, that were in turn refuted by the Cambodian government (Suos, 2021). This interplay between catalytic opportunities and constraints were therefore starkly evident at LS2 and are elaborated in the final Section on rupture’s “open moment.”
In summary, Mahanty et al.'s (2023) theorization of rupture provides an integrated view of LS2, through which we explore the connections between emotions, experiences of interactive and slow processes of displacement/violence, and the generative responses that ensued.
Research methods
An inescapable challenge in studying emotions is the question of how we can “know” feelings (Bondi et al., 2006: 11)—particularly in cross-cultural contexts. We avoided trying to name and categorize different emotions as some emotions researchers have (see Hak et al., 2021; Brown, 2022). Instead, we studied emotions relationally—in relation to place, within community relationships and as the basis for diverse community actions (Nightingale, 2013: 8). We rarely asked participants directly about emotions but distilled emotional timbre within discussions about current and past events (after Holland (2007)). This inevitably represents a subjective interpretation of local experience (Trogisch, 2021) and—like other emotions scholars—we have aimed to manage this through empathy, reflexivity and by triangulating our observations.
According to Brown (2022: 9), empathy—the capacity to “understand what someone is experiencing and to reflect back that understanding”—is crucial in emotions research. Cognitive empathy, which involves perspective-taking and being able to recognize and understand another person's emotions, is especially important (Brown, 2022: 10–11). This does not involve “accurately” categorizing the spectrum of emotions experienced by research participants. Instead, our research team drew inferences from specific Khmer terms that participants used to describe their feelings and embodied experiences, as well as the tone of the discussion. We also attended to non-verbal cues such as body language.
The interpretive character of emotions research means that our positionality as researchers framed our understandings of emotions and warrants discussion here (Holland, 2007; Rose, 1997; Hiemstra and Billo, 2017; Nightingale, 2011). Mahanty is an Australia-based cis woman of color, who has worked in rural Cambodia for over 10 years. Her basic capacity in Khmer language means that she usually works with appropriately qualified research assistants to assist with interpretation in the field. At LS2, Mahanty worked with her long-term collaborator, Suong, who is a Khmer, Cambodia-based independent consultant and works on gender and children's rights. Suong's civil society networks helped us to design the visual methods that we used in FGDs (see below). Mahanty and Suong collaborated on research in Indigenous Bunong communities between 2012 and 2014 in neighboring Mondulkiri province. Mahanty additionally worked between 2016 and 2018 in Bunong and ethnically mixed communities to study cash crop booms in Mondulkiri. Our prior knowledge of Bunong communities sensitized us to cultural practices and to the constraints of working in Khmer within communities where this was a second language, for instance, the value of engaging local interpreters when working with elderly participants. Our shared professional history also enabled open and clear communication as we explored and interpreted our field data, particularly as regards the meaning of key Khmer phrases (see Turner, 2013: 222). Overall, our collective experience in rural Cambodia and empathetic approach helped villagers to share their thoughts about sensitive matters such as relationships with state actors and with other community members.
Chann is a Cambodian national. Born in the 1980s, he has directly experienced Cambodia's post-conflict transition towards a rapidly growing Southeast Asian economy. Through national and international scholarships, Chann accessed higher education in Cambodia and Australia. His family history heightened Chann's empathy for villagers experiencing dispossession. During the mid-2000s, Chann’s family was building a house in the provincial town of Kampot. The local authorities suspended construction because of their plans to redevelop the land, even though this land had been in Chann's family since before the Khmer Rouge period. As the family's hopes for a new home turned to despair, the incident triggered his mother's post-traumatic stress from this period. Chann brought to our LS2 research these direct experiences of displacement, plus the insights of a scholar who is familiar with the political ecology of post-conflict frontiers. Within our team, Chann spent longest in the LS2 area and developed ongoing relationships with villagers, for instance, responding to calls for support with land issues, by connecting them to relevant NGOs. These interactions reflected the villagers’ high level of trust in Chann.
Three months before our fieldwork, Chann visited several communities for initial consultations and to request official and local approvals for our research. Chann, Mahanty, and Suong then undertook intensive fieldwork during January 2020. The Authors worked across the two related settlements of Kbal Romeas Thmei (or New Kbal Romeas, the resettlement village) and Kbal Romeas Chas (or Old Kbal Romeas). Chann additionally returned to these sites for 10 days during March 2020. He worked across several dam-affected settlements but draws here on his research in Srae Kor and the neighboring upstream village of Ksaich Thmei. As with Kbal Romeas, the original residents of Srae Kor were spread between the resettlement village of Srae Kor Thmei (new Srae Kor) and the informal settlement of villagers who refused to resettle in Srae Kor Chass (or Old Srae Kor).
Before working at LS2, the research team developed a shared plan for interviews and focus group discussions (FGDs). The FGDs were held with separate groups of men, women, youth, and elderly participants, and involved structured activities and discussion questions to explore historical and ongoing changes in the community and environment. One of these was a visual exercise that used a set of 120 images of symbols, nature, people, objects, and rituals to catalyze discussion about experiences of rupture. The images were placed in the center of the group, and participants were invited to select and discuss three images that reflected “what was going on in their lives right now.” This activity was designed to elicit discussion and understanding about emotional experiences in an indirect way, which gave participants the choice to engage at a level that they were comfortable with. We also undertook semi-structured interviews with community leaders, government and NGO personnel, community members with historical knowledge and those engaged in dam-related campaigns. These interviews were wide-ranging in scope, tailored to the background of participants and aimed to understand local experiences of change associated with the dam. Beyond these structured data collection activities, each researcher also documented their observations and informal interactions in field notes.
This paper draws on transcriptions of field notes, interviews and FGDs. These transcripts were coded to identify content about experiences of change generated by LS2, including livelihoods, resettlement, migration, fractured interpersonal and community relationships, and the campaign to resist resettlement. It was through this analytical process that we distilled the accounts in. This material is illustrative of the emotional experience of individual participants and should not be seen as representative of the experience of entire communities.
Overall, we found that it was our sensitization to emotions, rather than specific questions or activities that helped us to understand the emotional experience of rupture in these communities. By contextualizing and incorporating our interpretive voice in the case material—an approach long advocated by feminist geographers and within emotional geographies (Rose, 1997)—we aim to relate the stories of research participants respectfully and with integrity.
Ruptured relationships to place
Experiences of rupture are emplaced (Mahanty et al., 2023). The visible and irreversible character of rupture episodes is therefore related to but also distinct from the generalized, gnawing anxiety emerging around planetary crisis (e.g. Cunsolo and Ellis, 2018; Head, 2016; Verlie, 2021). At LS2, the “planned destruction of homes,” could also be viewed as
We noted earlier that emotions are embodied in differentiated and intersectional ways. Gendered subjectivities were important in Kbal Romeas Chas, where women were prominent in resistance to resettlement, and then took on leadership roles within the community (see also Beban and Bourke Martignoni, 2021). Ethnicity was also significant given that the diverse population surrounding LS2 includes people who identify as Bunong (an officially recognized Indigenous community), ethnic Lao (recognized as an ethnic minority rather than Indigenous), Cham (a minority Muslim community that moved to the area during and after dam construction), and Khmer (the dominant Cambodian population whose numbers have boomed after the dam). Since the Bunong and Lao communities had the longest history in the LS2 area, we focus on their experiences here. As several anthropologists observe, connections to territory can be multidimensional and deep, and encompass material, social, spiritual and embodied relationships (e.g. Bovensiepen, 2009; Chao, 2022; Padwe, 2020). These heterogeneous assemblages of human and non-human lives, called “emplaced collectives” (Blaser, 2019), or “animated landscapes” (Padwe, 2020), were central to people's lived experiences of LS2.
In the Bunong settlements of Kbal Romeas Thmei and Kbal Romeas Chas, villagers expressed their sadness over lost places and connections to customary lands during FGDs and individual interviews. In one example from a women's FGD in Kbal Romeas Thmei, participants were invited to select three images from the larger set. One woman, however, very carefully selected a single picture. She shared that when she saw this picture, she thought of the old village, where there were similar rapids running over rocks. “I miss it,” she said (Women's FGD, 14 January 2020). No one spoke for several minutes, and the atmosphere was heavy with her embodied and expressed sense of loss. In another case, a man in Kbal Romeas Chas selected a picture of a pagoda. He became teary as he explained how the image reminded him of the village before the dam, with its coconut trees, pagoda, and school, where villagers could sit together in the shade of the trees and chat about life: “There was so much shade, now everything is dead—it makes me want to cry” (FGD 15 January 2020). The rupture of interconnected human and more-than human ties was similarly captured in the words of an elderly man in Kbal Romeas Chas who teared up as he spoke of the animals around their old village: “before we had birds, especially cranes, who lived by the ponds. There were so many animals and I loved them—they were attached to my heart” (Men's FGD, 21 January 2020). Another man in the same meeting shared a picture of a woman collecting mushrooms, reflecting on the many mushroom varieties they used to collect before the dam. He added that for those who moved to the new village, “everything was new, including their heart.” Hearing these stories, it would be tempting to view the LS2 landscape as a “griefscape” where displaced communities shared a deep sense of grief over all manner of lost place-based relations (in the same way that some violent and conflict-ridden settings have been called “fearscapes” by Trogisch, 2021, 2022; Tulumello, 2017). At LS2, however, we found specific experiences of and responses to loss were diverse and warranted more nuanced analysis.
In Kbal Romeas Chas, villagers often explained their decision to resist resettlement in terms of their deeply felt need to remain embedded in their customary landscapes—near significant places—or risk reprisal from the spirit world. They cited their connections to ancestral lands, especially burial grounds and spirit forests, as a primary reason for resisting resettlement (see also Ham et al., 2015). Dara, an elderly Bunong man in his 90s, explained that the burial grounds in their original village held the graves of his parents and grandparents who could not be left behind. Burial was important to Bunong people, he explained, because the Khmer practice of cremation was “too hot and painful (
Bunong villagers attributed illness and even death in their community to disruptions in their animated landscape through the concept of
The belief that sickness and ill fortune would ensue if people left their traditional lands was reinforced by cases of inexplicable death and illness among resettled families. Villagers widely attributed such incidents to the destruction caused by the dam, as well as the lack of respect shown by newcomers—especially Cham settlers—towards When the Cham bring their boat past the spirit house of Neak Ta without asking permission, the Bunong are the ones who get punished by Neak Ta for not being able to manage and take care of the village. It is the same when the Cham settlers do not look after water resources. (Interview, 18 January 2020)
Aside from competing with Bunong fishers for catch, the Cham's more utilitarian connections to their adopted place ignored Bunong requirements to respect and placate
The conflict over resettlement had a far-reaching impact on individual and community lives. In both Kbal Romeas and Srae Kor, the community was so deeply divided that they “could not look each other in the face” (FGD with elderly women, Kbal Romeas Thmei, 14 January 2020). In individual and group discussions, we repeatedly heard that families were “torn apart” ( I only heard this from others, he didn’t even tell me. My relatives told me, “Your husband registered to move already.” I didn’t say anything then—if he wanted to go, he could go but I wasn’t going to go. A few days later he came and made a fuss and accused me of listening too much to my relatives who wanted to break up our family … I lost my inhibition … I said that … if he wants to go, he can go. I'll stay with my parents in my old village. I’ll stay near the forests; this is my hometown. Since I was born, I have only seen this village, this chamkar (a term for swidden field or small farm plot). I only have those … So, we went different ways, he went on his way, and I went on my way. Then we prayed to the ancestors to separate. (Interview 24 January 2020).
Although villagers blamed resettlement for these conflicts, Mony broadened our understanding when she observed that there had been ongoing issues in this relationship that were accentuated during resettlement discussions. In this sense, community ruptures had historical layers, where LS2 deepened and fractured prior intra-community and intra-familial tensions.
Building on Blaser's (2019) view that disruption to territorial collectives is experienced intersectionally, a generational dimension was sometimes visible in family rifts at LS2. An elderly man, Dara, who remained in Kbal Romeas Chas reflected on his experience when first his cousin and then his children moved to the resettlement village: I was sad and it was very difficult, but in their heart they wanted to be there so I had to let them go. I shouted, “If you go, take everyone! Don’t leave kids or anyone behind—I won’t look after them!” I was mad with the company that made people move from the village. I told my wife, “If you want to go, then go! I will stay here and let the mosquitoes bite me” [indicating his determination to stay, despite any discomfort]. She stayed here with me. (Interview 22 January 2020)
Although resettled family members had started to visit Kbal Romeas Chas again for weddings, funerals, and family visits, Kbal Romeas Chas villagers shared that they still lacked trust in these fractured relationships. They felt that resettlees had undergone a “change of heart” (
The designation of symbolic places and storytelling were a way of recognizing disrupted ties to places. In Srae Kor Chas, for instance, symbols like the flooded pagoda and burial grounds reflected a shared trauma of displacement from this animated landscape. A man in his mid-60s, Bonthourn, shared the story of his late wife's funeral when the dam reservoir was flooding Srae Kor: If you talk about unhappiness (
Bonthourn expresses here his personal suffering and the significance of disrupted access to their flooded burial ground (Figure 2).
A new grave near the flooded burial ground in Old Kbal Romeas (Photo: Sopheak Chann).
Similar landscape relationships were evident in Srae Kor, where the intensity of shared feelings for significant symbolic places made them key flashpoints for conflict. The Srae Kor temple was the base from which the community first opposed LS2 (Baird, 2009). The families who agreed to resettle wanted to move the Buddha statue from the flooded pagoda to a new pagoda in Srae Kor Thmei. The Srae Kor Chas villagers, however, asserted that they had the clearest claim to the statue. The conflict became so entrenched that the statue remained inside the flooded pagoda for 2 years until villagers from Srae Kor Chas dived underwater to extract the statue—they ultimately installed it in a newly built pagoda at Srae Kor Chas.
These examples show us that the rupture caused by LS2—as an emplaced form of socio-spatial disruption—was embodied and emotional. People's accounts of their experiences departed from Cartesian mind-body dichotomies; instead, their embodied emotional experiences were material, social and cosmological (see Scheper-Hughes and Lock, 1987: 31; Blaser, 2019; Padwe, 2020).
Emotions within layered and interactive rupture
As discussed earlier, since rupture stems from ongoing processes of “slow violence,” experiences of rupture can also be temporally and spatially complex and layered. Historical research on our specific field sites was limited and did not include archival work. However, historical studies of Cambodia's northeast, especially Ratanakiri, are instructive. Padwe (2020: 19) shows that French colonialism and subsequent displacement and disruption have been endemic to the region's story of “civilization.” However, processes of violence have not completely overridden multi-dimensional relationships to landscapes, as we showed earlier (Padwe, 2020).
Like other parts of Indochina, this region has been impacted by the many institutions the French installed to control land and populations in economically valuable spaces (Guérin, 2003, 2009; Padwe, 2009, 2020; Mahanty, 2022). These included colonial interventions to control traditional practices such as swidden cultivation because they were regarded as destructive and inefficient (Guérin 2009)—such interventions were renewed in various forms after independence. The region has seen different degrees of state engagement—from facilitating the development of booming industrial crops such rubber, to various attempts to assimilate Indigenous communities into wider society (Mahanty, 2022; Padwe, 2020). In Cambodia, the establishment of rubber plantations first started in lowland areas such as Memot, Kratie, and Stung Treng, reaching the northeast in the post-independence era (Baird, 2020; Padwe, 2020). Early rubber projects had a wide footprint, however, because of the labor and land governance institutions they required (Slocomb, 2007). France's transfer of Stung Treng province from Laos to Cambodia in 1904 was also significant as it played into territorial contests and identity politics between ethnic groups and framed the current situation of Lao communities in this area (Baird, 2010). Currently the Cambodian state does not recognize contemporary Lao communities as “Indigenous,” with implications for their land rights.
After Cambodia gained independence from France in 1953, Prime Minister Sihanouk made a determined effort to integrate upland communities within his program of “Khmerisation” (Baird, 2011; Padwe, 2020). Indigenous groups were strongly encouraged to adopt Buddhist practices, speak Khmer (Padwe, 2020), and abandon swidden cultivation (Ehrentraut, 2013). Baird (2020: 26) documents the forced resettlement of Indigenous communities to ensure they attended Khmer language schools. State authorities additionally encouraged lowland Khmer farmers to migrate to upland regions. Security interests produced a stronger military presence in Mondulkiri and Ratanakiri provinces between 1959 and 1962, and the development of rubber in border regions (Guérin, 2009; Padwe, 2020). In an ironic twist, these plantations became a hub of revolutionary activity—both for the Vietnam war and domestically (Padwe, 2020: 108). Khmerization thus involved a range of forceful state interventions, which were met with flashes of Indigenous resistance (Padwe, 2020; Slocomb, 2007) and ultimately contributed to the emergence of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK, hereafter Khmer Rouge).
Although Indigenous communities enjoyed a special place in Khmer Rouge rhetoric, as natural revolutionary allies who were “nontraders” and embodied “class hatred,” the Khmer Rouge nonetheless attempted to “peasantise” them into settled agriculture, so that they could “better contribute” to the revolution (Kiernan, 1996: 303). In Mondulkiri province, for instance, Bunong communities were forcibly moved to the lowlands to cultivate rice, where they lived until the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979. Like the regime they displaced, the Khmer Rouge forced ethnic minorities to speak and act Khmer (Ehrentraut, 2013). Among the Jarai of upland Ratanakiri, Padwe (2020: 144) documents prohibitions on traditional religious practices such as the brewing of rice beer, funerary practices, and enforced secularization, all of which had far reaching impacts. One Bunong women in Kbal Romeas Chas captured this dynamic with her quiet comment that state authorities still “see them as wild forest people” (Women's FGD, Kbal Romeas Chas, 20 January 2020).
After the Khmer Rouge was overturned in 1979, the newly installed (Vietnamese-supported) government recognized upland communities as culturally distinct from lowland Khmer (Baird, 2016a). Although Cambodia's 1981 and 1989 constitutions mentioned upland ethnic minorities, neither provided for specific rights (Baird, 2016a). This came later with the 2001 land Law, which recognized Indigenous people and their collective rights to lands where they lived and practiced “traditional” agriculture (Article 25). Subdecree No. 82 in 2009 then enabled these communities to apply for Indigenous communal title over specific customary lands. These rights were available to specified Indigenous groups, like the Bunong, but not the Lao (Baird, 2022). The emerging nexus between Indigenous legal and political rights and land has seen Indigeneity gain greater significance in Cambodian political discourse (Baird, 2011; Scheer, 2021), and it was certainly central in LS2, as we discuss in the next section.
In our discussions, villagers had more recent episodes of dispossession at front-of-mind, but this historical review highlights patterns of unequal state-society relations and ongoing processes of displacement. In OId Kbal Romeas, villagers viewed the first ELC on their customary lands in 2007 as the “start” of land dispossession. They explained that the Khmer company that initially held the concession started to clear the land and plant rubber, but then sold it to a Chinese company in 2009 (see Figure 1). Company workers developed an “ant-like” network of tracks (
Srae Kor Chas villagers similarly reported that concession development drove land dispossession well before LS2. At the time of our research, the villagers lived on a former Community Forest (a category of locally managed, state-owned forest under Cambodia's
The construction of LS2 thus overlaid a longer history of dispossession, resource extraction and tensions between Indigenous villagers, private developers, and state actors. The flooding of 30,000 hectares in 2018 overlaid and intensified these earlier experiences. Furthermore, villagers in both Srae Kor Chas and Kbal Romeas Chas viewed the dam as an unfolding process that took about 10 years, rather than as a sudden change. They marked 2007 as the commencement of LS2, when “people from Vietnam came to measure water levels and our rice fields” (Kbal Romeas Chas Women's FGD, 20 January 2020). Then came visits by government officials, who promised electricity and showed them a range of housing designs. At that early stage, however, the villagers did not fully grasp that these houses were to be constructed in a completely new location (Women's FGD, Kbal Romeas Chas, 20 January 2022). A decade passed between these feasibility studies, and the flooding of the dam reservoir with associated resettlement.
Aside from direct land dispossession and livelihood changes wrought by the dam, Lao and Bunong villagers lamented the influx of Khmer and Cham settlers who competed for land and did not respect their beliefs and practices. In Northeast Cambodia, ELCs are often a significant driver of migration, because they require labor to clear land and establish crops; these laborers typically settle in the area, claiming or buying land, or work as day labor on the ELCs (Fox et al., 2018; Mahanty, 2022). On top of the ELC-related population influx, the LS2 reservoir drew Cham settlers from further downstream to settle and deploy their fishing skills and equipment in commercial fishing ventures.
These developments produced conflicts between the Bunong and Lao communities, and new Cham and Khmer settlers. We touched on this in our discussion of
Srae Kor Thmei villagers added that they felt helpless to protest resettlement because they feared state reprisals. Multiple participants repeated the Khmer proverb that they could not resist state development because “you cannot escape rain while living beneath the sky.” Interviewees and participants in the Srae Kor Thmei Women's FGD (18 January 2020) said that this proverb had even been quoted to them by local and state authorities, including police, commune and village heads, in discussions about the project and resettlement. In using this expression during meetings, the provincial and district governors sought to coerce the villagers and emphasize that they could not escape the state's development plans.
In summary, contemporary experiences of dam-instigated rupture overlayed institutions, interventions and feelings about prior processes of violence and dispossession. Villagers stated this quite explicitly, explaining their historical experiences of injustice and violence by corporate and state actors as integral to their experience of LS2.
Emotions and agency in rupture's “open moment”
Finally, we turn to how emotions figure in rupture's “open moment,” when the exposure of existing injustices can spark opportunities for institutional change and new claims (Lund, 2016; Molotch, 1970). As Mahanty et al. (2023) observe, however, efforts to resist and reimagine institutions also elicit reassertions of power. The generative potential of rupture therefore lies in this interplay between catalytic opportunities and constraints. In this context, it is valuable to consider agency more broadly than the usual attention to resistance, to capture the diverse practices, habits and ideas through which actors might reproduce but also transform institutions and social relations (after Emirbayer and Miche, 1998: 970). This can include working within dominant structures rather than overtly challenging them (Dyson and Jeffrey, 2022: 2).
The flooded village of Kbal Romeas was an symbolic location for the NGO-supported campaign against LS2. We opened this article with Davi's words on how the people from this village went to protest against the dam “in the rain with tears.” These tears were emblematic of a complex emotional milieu, as Davi elaborated. She expressed grief at the impending loss of their places and lands, frustration with the authorities, and determination to fight for their lands. She said the key ingredient that sustained the movement was the sense that “they all had the same heart,” referring to a sense of solidarity and a shared experience of injustice and grief. Their shared feelings gave her confidence that “everyone would turn up straight away if I called them” (Interview, 22 January 2020). Davi's account resonates with the nexus between subjective/embodied experiences and collective political action discussed by feminist scholars (Rose, 1997; Bondi et al., 2006: 7). The LS2 case adds to existing evidence on how the emotional experiences of rupture—and associated land dispossession—can drive collective resistance (Henning, 2019; Singh, 2013; Hak et al., 2021; Sultana, 2011). Davi's story also illuminates how social ties and emotional connection provide the social “glue” to sustain political campaigns (Bosco, 2006; Brown and Pickerill, 2009) and to mobilize “social labour” in these campaigns (Bosco, 2006: 354; Hardt and Negri, 2004: 108; Singh, 2011). In the LS2 context, social and emotional ties were deeply emplaced and tied to Indigenous identity and land claims, which differentiates them from campaigns where such ties are less locality-dependent and operate at a more abstract level of “meanings and feelings” (Bosco, 2006: 360).
We found that memorialization of flooded villages was crucial in maintaining solidarity and motivation over time. Davi explained that they viewed the flooded village which villagers called
Still grieving his lost home, a former Srae Kor resident recalls his community's struggle against the dam. (Photo taken on 7 March 2020 © Thomas Cristofoletti/Ruom).
Villagers’ expressions of agency and connection were countered through various state tactics with an emotional edge. Beban (2021) observes the instrumentalization of emotions by the state in Cambodia, where the embodiment of fear and trauma from the country's violent past leaves land activists open to political manipulation and discipline through fear (see also Schoenberger and Beban, 2018). When some villagers started resisting resettlement plans for LS2—a time they recalled as a “hot period” (
It is important to note here that we do not view states as unitary entities, but as “a set of practices enacted through relationships between people, places, and institutions” (Desbiens et al., 2004: 242). At LS2, there were differences in relationships depending on the character and ties that between individuals had with different tiers of government and different agencies. For instance, the oldest resident of Kbal Romeas Chas told us he directly approached Prime Minister Hun Sen to gain his support for their land claim when the PM visited LS2 for the dam opening in 2018, noting that the PM expressed surprise at their circumstances and asked a subordinate to follow up (Interview, Kbal Romeas Chas, 22 January 2020). State processes of “boundary making” were highly dynamic (Nightingale, 2018), with assertions of authority and recognition in constant play within broader processes of state formation (Sikor and Lund, 2009; Nightingale, 2018). For instance, from a situation of forced eviction, villagers were able to claw back recognition of part of their overall customary land claim, but state agencies were continually undermining and reopening discussions on what villagers’ thought had been agreed. Some civil society organizations also played an important role by actively nurturing community agency and others by confining active resistance (see Baird, 2016b). These experiences suggest that any transformative work in rupture settings must grapple with the opening and closing of political spaces within dynamic and authoritarian state-society relations.
State recognition and non-recognition of Indigenous status was crucial in framing spaces of agency. As a state-recognized Indigenous group, the Bunong community could apply for formal recognition of areas of customary land, but this was not an option for the Lao villagers of Srae Kor, as discussed earlier. The Bunong community in Kbal Romeas Chas prepared their application for communal title with civil society help. However, the initial claim of around 7000 hectares was whittled back to 400 hectares by the provincial government. Then in September 2020, a leader in Kbal Romeas Chas reported to Chann that the provincial government was pushing the villagers to accept a much smaller area under communal title—a common state tactic in the negotiation of communal land titles (Milne, 2013; Beban and Bourke Martignoni, 2021). The Provincial Land and Planning Office threated legal action if they did not accept the reduced area, as the land proposed for communal title was part of the Siv Geuk ELC. Later, a land area of 941 Hectares was offered to the Kbal Romeas Chas community, but the negotiations reached a stalemate as this was still well below community aspirations (Keeton-Olsen and Techseng, 2020). A complex interplay of state recognition—based on essentialist ideas of Indigeneity—as well as local mobilization of available land institutions was at play here. Ultimately, however, community rights were confined through state refusal to recognize the full extent of Bunong land claims.
As this brief overview shows, even the reduced customary land available to the Bunong was highly insecure: the process was slow, subject to sudden changes and required constant vigilance by community members to defend their land. Davi explained that they were “not happy yet” and “still worried a lot about their land” (Interview, Kbal Romeas Chas, 20 January 2020). Participants in the Women's FGD similarly said that “they could breathe better now” because of the legal support that helped them gain a degree of recognition their claims—but they were not really “happy” yet because of the uncertainty ahead (Women's FGD, Kbal Romeas Chas, 20 January 2020), reflecting the complex emotions involved in this dynamic space of negotiation.
In Srae Kor Chas, where state recognition for the Lao community was lacking, party politics played a greater albeit risky role. The social division between Old and New Srae Kor reflected political polarisation between the Cambodian People's Party (CPP, Cambodia's ruling party) and the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP). Significantly, the CPP lost both the 2013 and 2017 commune elections in Srae Kor Chas. In refusing resettlement, this community was badged as opposition sympathizers (
These examples of state-induced fear, uncertainty and unpredictability made for a complex and fragile “open moment.” Like the slow and punctuated processes involved in rupture, these spaces of negotiation were dynamic and required sustained engagement on the part of communities and their supporters. They called for diverse and long-term trajectories of “slow dissent” (Murrey, 2016) and “slow justice” (Neville and Martin, 2022). At LS2, Place-based emotional engagements were significant to these slow forms of dissent, but communities also had to contend with assertions of state authority and attempts to instill fear which ultimately fractured and curtailed resistance.
Conclusion
The LS2 case shows us that the emotional life of rupture is emplaced, layered, and generative. We acknowledge the challenges of grasping emotions as part of embodied subjectivities and social action but affirm the importance of trying—with a stance of empathy. Particularly powerful in this cross-cultural context was the use of visual methods that provided an indirect pathway to emotions and affect, allowing participants the agency to reflect as deeply as they felt able to. As our colleague Lisa Trogisch expressed in our 2022 workshop on emotional political ecology, “You cannot know another person's emotions, but you can find resemblance, approach it from different sides like a wild animal. You can see emotional colour and texture and sense the atmosphere” (Pers comm. 6 September 2022). In our work, a similar standpoint took us from a focus on correctly categorizing emotions, to understanding emotions as changeable and generative.
A particular insight from LS2 for our understanding of emotions is their layered and temporal depth. This “longue duree” of emotions adds to the intensity of experiences of nature-society rupture. We encountered a long and layered history of dispossessions that effectively created an emotional tinder box, which LS2 ignited (Mahanty et al., 2023; see also Ahmann, 2018; Davies, 2019). Importantly, villagers were highly conscious of how this interactive history accentuated their contemporary experiences of trauma and loss. These Indigenous communities experienced loss in multi-dimensional ways, within intersecting material, social and cosmological disruptions (see Hoover (2017) and Schlosberg et al. (2017) for parallels in Indigenous North American and Australian communities). Their experiences manifested in their bodies as anxiety, worry, sadness, loss, and “sickness,” and rippled through communities as shared trauma, as well as social frictions. Critiques of infrastructure-driven displacement often cite the limited capacity of financial and in-kind compensation to compensate for lost land and disrupted livelihoods (e.g. Baird and Barney, 2017). Emotions and their effects seem even more incommensurable, raising questions for how we can fully consider trade-offs and impacts in mega-infrastructure projects and other planned contributions to nature-society rupture.
Connections between embodied and collective emotions were forged through community discourse and memories of shared trauma and struggles. Discourses about symbolic places were especially significant, such as the burial grounds in both communities and the pagoda in Srae Kor Chas. These places became loci for community loss and anger and symbolic of shared trauma. In the Cambodian context, the use of proverbs underscored shared understandings of experiences, while articulating indirect critique around contemporary developments (Rechtman, 2000). Yet embodied and collective experiences of rupture could also undermine solidarity. For example, the emotional experience of rupture in Kbal Romeas Chas fueled resistance but also fractured relationships within families and between community members who accepted or rejected resettlement. Across the board, emotional connections to place and community were significant, closely related, and linked embodied and collective emotions.
Emotions have been studied as instruments of subjugation (Beban, 2021) and as a motivating force for social movements (González-Hidalgo and Zografos, 2019). At LS2, given the factors discussed above, we found that emotions played an unpredictable role. For some, developments around the dam triggered fear, while for others it galvanized resistance. These emotions were unsettled—moments of being able to “breathe” could suddenly give way to anxiety as villagers were reminded of their relative powerlessness in Cambodia's asymmetrical political economy. As Beban (2021) observes, the Cambodian state often engages emotions such as fear as a means of social control. We found echoes of this among the villagers who acquiesced to resettlement, who felt intimidated by the direct and tacit threats deployed by state actors (see Schoenberger and Beban, 2017). But we suggest there is a more complex picture at play here. In Kbal Romeas Chas, interactions with the state also fueled community grief, anger and other emotions that motivated resistance. We therefore find that efforts to instrumentalize emotions, including by state actors, were not necessarily successful.
Within the current flourishing of work on both emotions and environmental crisis, our research demonstrates the multi-dimensional character of emotions within embodied subjectivities, shared histories and community politics. These subjective, temporally layered, and social dimensions of emotions need to be understood over the long durée to grasp their intensity and dynamic character. As scholars, we also need to watch the tendency to privilege the instrumental or transformative role of emotions over their fracturing and unpredictable dimensions. The contingencies and histories that shape emotions therefore call for caution in efforts to strategically mobilize emotions towards social transformation.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Declaration of conflicting interests
Funding
ORCID iD
