Relations of sovereignty: The uneven production of transnational plantation territories in Laos

Abstract

The contemporary emergence of land grabbing across the Global South has been framed by critics as a threat to the national territorial sovereignty of postcolonial societies. Such concerns hinge on conventional notions of sovereignty as an abstract form of power possessed by the state and lost to global forces. However, the transfer of domestic lands into the hands of foreign investors is complicated by the contested and relational nature of authority in resource frontier spaces. Critical scholarship has shown that sovereignty in practice – the production of control and authority within spatial fields – is dynamic, contested, and variegated. It has further staked out an ontology of sovereignty as relational, although not explicitly stated in such terms. This paper employs the insights of relational geography to advance theorisation of sovereignty’s relationality: the contested and consensual relations among heterogeneous actors that produce and transform authority in complex and variegated spaces. I demonstrate the value of this approach by examining Vietnamese and Chinese industrial tree plantation companies’ differential access to land in Southern Laos, based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork. Each company differed in their access to land granted to them by the central Lao government due to the types of socio‐political relations that they developed at various administrative scales of the Lao state. Such relations shaped their co‐production of sovereignty driven by logics of centralised state territorialisation and capital accumulation. When such state–capital relations broke down, opportunities emerged for resistance by peasants who shifted relations of sovereignty toward their own interests.