Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Impact of Land Law on Stabilization and Development Efforts

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

Since 2008, social scientists have documented a global land rush of unprecedented scale, with over 80 million hectares changing hands in the last decade. The vast majority of such land deals are taking place in the global South, where the impetus for short-term economic development often overshadows concerns for sustainable peace and development. For this reason, land deals often lead to dispossession for ethnic, indigenous, and other marginalized peoples and exacerbate existing conflicts over territory, resources, and power. This can in turn destabilize entire regions where the U.S. might have strategic economic and political interests. This project, which trains a graduate student in methods of rigorous, empirically-grounded scientific fieldwork, examines the relationship between land law and sustainable peace and development efforts. Cornell University doctoral student, Emily Hong, under the direction of Dr. Annelise Riles, will undertake the research in the Burma-China-Thailand borderlands, with a primary base in Kachin State, Burma. Taking an ethnographic approach to examining policy in practice, the researcher will examine the significance of land law for ordinary people often left out of expert-dominated discussions on development. Burma/Myanmar provides an ideal setting for understanding these dynamics, due to the centrality of land and ethnic identity in ongoing peace talks and legal reforms. Through year-long ethnographic fieldwork with activists, farmers, and intellectuals, the researcher will investigate two spheres in which Kachin people attempt to shape their political future: land law and indigenous media through extensive interviews, focus groups, participant observation, and archival research. On a national level, the researcher will focus on a current campaign for customary land law, part of a growing global trend that seeks state recognition of ancestral or indigenous land use practices; on a local level, she will examine the work of local activists and farmers who document land-based dispossession, cultivate local solutions to development problems, and create their own widely-circulating media. The project seeks to understand not only the impacts of state-led processes of law and development in the global land rush but how ordinary people actively shape alternatives for sustainable peace and development. The project will advance the fields of cultural anthropology and law and social sciences, particularly in the areas of political anthropology, legal anthropology and the interdisciplinary study of human rights, studies of indigenous sovereignty and political change, and collaborative ethnography.