Rural Development in Southeast Asia
Dispossession, Accumulation and Persistence

This Element offers an insight into the ways in which the countryside in Southeast Asia's has been transformed over the past half century.

Jonathan Rigg (Author)

9781108719322, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 1 October 2020

75 pages
23 x 15.5 x 0.5 cm, 0.16 kg

'… this synthesis gives rural research in South-East Asia a prominent place in the understanding of the societies of the region since we see more than elsewhere the marks of forced or wanted change.' Émile Soupa, Moussons

Rural areas and rural people have been centrally implicated in Southeast Asia's modernisation. Through the three entry points of smallholder persistence, upland dispossession, and landlessness, this Element offers an insight into the ways in which the countryside has been transformed over the past half century. Drawing on primary fieldwork undertaken in Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, and secondary studies from across the region, Rigg shows how the experience of Southeast Asia offers a counterpoint and a challenge to standard, historicist understandings of agrarian change and, more broadly, development. Taking a rural view allows an alternative lens for theorising and judging Southeast Asia's modernisation experience and narrative. The Element argues that if we are to capture the nature – and not just the direction and amount – of agrarian change in Southeast Asia, then we need to view the countryside as more than rural and greater than farming.

1. Setting the scene
2. Smallholder persistence in Southeast Asia
3. Dispossession in the highlands and forests of Southeast Asia
4. The landless and land poor
5. Southeast Asian rural futures.

Subject Areas: International relations [JPS], Regional government [JPR], Political structure & processes [JPH]