Land Dispossession Research Articles

Afterlives in captivity: Indigeneity and penal deportation in southeastern South America

ABSTRACT This study analyzes intersections between penal deportation and Indigenous captivity in southeastern South America during the eighteenth century. Via records on Lincompani, a cacique taken captive in the southern borderlands of Buenos Aires and exiled to the Malvinas Islands alongside other prison laborers (presidiarios), it highlights the scale of penal deportation within the early Americas and connects the practice to the formation of geopolitical borders. As colonial officials banished purported criminals to borders, rather than across them, and banished male Indigenous captives from one borderland to another, these forced migrations reinforced territorialized spatial logics and contributed to Indigenous land dispossession. Drawing upon a half century of records from Malvinas, the article also analyzes convicts' and captives' experiences of penal deportation, highlighting instances when their shared status as presidiario may have superseded or been subordinated to ethnic distinctions, considering the gendered logics that shaped their banishment, and reflecting upon the narration of their actions via colonial records.

Compounding financial frontiers: capital seeds and seeds for capital

ABSTRACT More than fifty years of civil war has left about eight million internally displaced people in Colombia, with millions struggling to make a living in new precarious urban spaces. Illicit narcoparamilitary groups, also emergent from the conflict, have dispossessed millions from their land and become vital moneylenders that enable displaced people to work and subsist in cities while profiting from them. Using the metaphor of compounding, I suggest thinking of financial frontiers as consecutive processes of expansive economic growth where one asset or principal (land dispossession and rural displacement in the Colombian case) originates exponential profits over time, benefiting narcoparamilitary groups. Such exponential gain happens gradually in circular financial transactions. Each transaction produces extra profits and opens possibilities for new financial transactions that further extract value from displacement and land dispossession. This approach helps us understand the social relations that permit capital accumulation over long periods, across geographic spaces, through political changes, and through economic shifts that determine the development of novel forms of financial power in Colombia and beyond. This article proposes a concept of compounding financial frontiers to grasp how new spaces for financial value extraction emerge and how capitalism finds the conditions for its reproduction.

Got Cultural Citizenship? A Place-Based and Socio-Historical Analysis of Postsecondary Students’ Cultural Logics and Values at a Land Grant Institution in Southern New Mexico

ABSTRACT Using data from a 2013 Student Diversity Survey, this place-based analysis examines the cultural values, beliefs, and logics of postsecondary students from an Hispanic Land Grant Institution in southern New Mexico. The analysis explores the diverse social profiles of the students in the sample and how race, gender, and class statuses shape student’s cultural logics related to educational democracy. Relying on the concepts of cultural citizenship and settler colonialism, the author imagines a post-assimilationist education trajectory that celebrates the cultural wealth of working-class, students of color, and women students as they diversify US higher education. The findings show that these postsecondary students embrace cultural logics centering on interdependence and collectivism and reject cultural logics centering on individualism and independence. The author makes a case for expanding neoliberal Diversity, Equity and Inclusion approaches in US higher education to grapple with the foundational violences of Indigenous land dispossession and ongoing settler colonialism that maintains systemic inequities and exclusions in US public education.

Flood Risk as Legacy Vulnerability: Reading the past into the present for environmental justice

Decades of environmental justice research has focused on identifying existing patterns of disproportionate burdens to environmental harms across social difference. However, relatively few studies examine the “legacy effect” of historical patterns. In flood risk studies specifically, several scholars have highlighted the role of systemic processes in historically shaping and producing observed disparities in flood risk patterns. These studies reveal that such relations are tied to histories of racialized land struggles and territorial dispossessions. In this paper, I argue that scholars need to do more than quantify today’s disproportionate burdens across social difference or explain the systemic processes causing those disparities. I suggest that “legacy vulnerability” helps identify how the potential for harm from flood risk to marginalized groups may reside in events of the past that have imprinted a spatially hidden, but spatiotemporally revealed unjust pattern upon today’s landscape. In a flood risk assessment of Sapelo Island, the initial results suggest that when comparing contemporary flood risk of Sapelo’s Geechee descendant (Black and mostly low-to-middle income) to non-descendant newcomer owners (mostly white and affluent) an environmental justice disparity in proportional flood risk burden does not exist. However, results of a counterfactual flood risk assessment show that approximately one-third of historically owned, Geechee property is located outside the contemporary 100-year flood zone compared to zero percent outside of it today. In other words, roughly one-third of Geechee property’s flood risk today is a legacy vulnerability directly tied to racialized land dispossessions that unfolded in the middle twentieth century.

Empowering or disempowering? archives as a tool to support or hinder land restitution in South Africa

Archives have become acceptable evidence in the context of land restitution to prove events that occurred in the past during land dispossessions. However, some researchers contend that archives are not always available and accessible when restitution claimants seek them due to loss, restrictions and lack of intellectual control. The purpose of this study was to explore archives as a tool to support or hinder land restitution in South Africa. This qualitative study used snowball sampling to select participants from restitution claimants, while purposive sampling was used to select project officers at the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights (CRLR) and archivists at the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa (NARSSA), respectively. Data were collected through interviews. The key finding indicates that there are a large number of unresolved land claims to redress land dispossession injustices caused by missing records, language barriers, unclassified information and access restrictions. The study concludes by arguing that archives can empower the claimants if available and accessible, while, on the other hand, they can disempower the claimants if unavailable and inaccessible.

From ruins and rubble: promised and suspended futures in Kenya (and beyond)

ABSTRACT In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, much future-making in Kenya is taking place in ruins of unfinished promising projects, failed capitalist enterprises, and decades of colonial and postcolonial exclusion and marginalization. When discussing future-making in Kenya specifically and Africa more generally, especially in the context of vision-driven developmentalist narratives that rely on visions of linear progress and growth, analysts and social scientists need to account for ways that futures emerge from ruins and rubble of undelivered and uncertain promises, collapsed industries, and colonial and postcolonial dispossession of land and rights. This article establishes the overarching argumentation and framing of the “Living with Ruins” special collection, outlines key theoretical concepts like ruination, infrastructuring, and future-making, and examines ruins and ruination in key economic and political domains that make claims to Kenya’s future: capitalist boom-and-bust economies, mega-scale infrastructure projects, and urban development. In all these domains, futures are emerging through assemblages of people’s everyday practices of maintenance and the ruins that surround them, complicating facile proclamations of Africa’s rising or abjection.

Harnessing large-scale agro-based investments in the Sagcot area for inclusive agricultural transformation in Tanzania

The colonial and post-colonial large-scale agriculture has brought the far-ranging implications on the local population in Tanzania. These include dispossession of land, dislocation of migrant labourers who are also subjected to poor work conditions and induced imbalances in terms of gender and ethnic relations. The government and other actors in Tanzania have strived to reduce the effects by fostering inclusive large-scale agriculture that benefit the small-scale farmers. This includes the move to initiate a 20-year public-private partnership on large-scale agribusiness namely Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SACGOT) in 2010. Serious concerns were raised against SAGCOT especially on the extent to which it entails uprooting and taking away lands from poor rural dwellers and turning them into poorly paid casual labourers thus increasing poverty and food insecurity. Consequently, the coordinating unit of SAGCOT vowed to improve food security to hundreds of thousands of poor farmers. The primary research was designed to examine the inclusivity aspects of the six selected large-scale investment schemes under the SAGCOT partnership. The Responsible Agriculture Investment (RAI) Framework was employed to assess sustainable labour practices, community engagements and fairness in out-grower arrangements. While the investment schemes demonstrated a fairly positive outlook pertaining to social sustainability under the RAI framework, a notable variation was observed across the six schemes in relation to specific RAI indicators. For instance, a company that demonstrated the outstanding performance in corporate social responsibility also performed poorly in the domain of wages and employee relations. A set of sustainability benchmarks developed jointly by the SAGCOT Center and civil society organizations and implemented on voluntary basis by a few member investors need to be harmonized and monitored across all investment schemes. This is especially important for the small-scale sub-contracted firms which lacked the requisite skills and capacity to engage in a more sustainable manner. Key words: Inclusion, agriculture, Tanzania, growth corridor, investments, sustainability, out-grower schemes, decent work

Agrarian change and land dispossession linked to the armed conflict in Colombia – a review

Violent conflict can accelerate the development of capitalism in rural areas, entailing the transformation of land distribution patterns. However, this transformation via land grabbing in wartime is under-addressed in the literature. This paper explores the case of land dispossession (LD) in Colombia, defined as land grabbing by taking advantage of the armed conflict, a process that affected mainly smallholders and ethnic communities. By conducting a literature review it was found that agrarian elites, networking with public servants and right-wing paramilitary militias, engaged in LD by using violence but also various symbolic devices that justified LD and assisted the legalisation of usurped land. Two main paths of LD are identified, and a typology of symbolic devices used to justify LD is proposed, showing how the armed conflict hastened agrarian capitalism through land accumulation. The opportunistic participation of civilians in the armed conflict setting, the interlaces between symbolic devices and violence, and the role of the state are highlighted as factors fostering a specific path of agrarian change in wartime characterised by the marginalisation of small-scale farming.

Merely liberals? Du Bois and Plaatje as radical critics of racial capitalism

ABSTRACT A wide range of scholars ratified Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction as his radical turn. Prior to its publication, “liberal” was an epithet used in reference to his work. Across the Atlantic, Plaatje’s Native Life invoked his appellation as a “Black Victorian”. As a counter, this article argues that both intellectuals, who were in communication and whose work resonated with each other, understood the historical development of modern capitalism as an “extension” of an old racialised system. Common threads are found through their analysis; firstly, capitalism required and depended on the exploitation of Black labour. Secondly, the Land dispossession of Black people was a congruent rationale for the accumulation and expansion of capitalism. Lastly, the making of Black people as inferior is entangled with salvaging the white working class. Thus, Plaatje and Du Bois articulated this historical development within the problematic of racial capitalism.

Intersectional Identities and Land Dispossession

Land grabbing has long been present in Southeast Asia, but with the spike in commodity prices in 2008, land grabbing intensified. The procedure is highly problematic as it often occurs at the expense of peasant farmers, land stewardship, food sovereignty, and human rights. So far, the literature has paid insufficient attention to the vulnerability of indigenous women and their intersectional vulnerability of gender and ethnicity when facing land dispossession. Such neglect poses far-reaching analytical limitations and questionable political implications. It is essential to bridge the gap between land-grabbing studies and the gendered implications of land dispossession on indigenous women to generate more nuanced analyses of the issue. Through a qualitative in-depth comparative analysis of the general implications of land dispossession on indigenous women in Southeast Asia and two case studies of the Cordillera Administrative Region in the Philippines and Kalimantan in Indonesia, the paper tries to answer how does the gendered politics of land dispossession affect indigenous women? It finds that indigenous women have higher physical and economic vulnerabilities due to land dispossession than non-indigenous women. These vulnerabilities are further heightened due to the lack of representation in decision-making. However, how these vulnerabilities play out highly depends on national and local factors.

Interpreting spatial struggles in the historical record: Indigenous urbanism and erasure in 20th-century Mexico

This article explores a historical struggle for a right to the city in Oaxaca, Mexico, when a mostly Indigenous-run street market resisted an elite-led urban renewal campaign centered on removing the market from city center. Bringing this case of Indigenous urbanism from Latin America in conversation with work on Indigenous productions of space and the settler colonial city mainly produced in Anglophone contexts, it demonstrates the utility of concepts central to settler colonial theory “dispossession and erasure” for the Latin American urban context. It does so through an exploration of the possibilities and limitations of discourse analysis as an interpretive strategy for uncovering the racial dynamics of such socio-spatial struggles using state archives in Mexico during a time period for which racial identifiers were rarely used. The article shows the dispossession of Indigenous lands and lifeways as not only foundational to the colonial city but also ongoing, produced through different mechanisms in different historical moments. At the same time, by foregrounding an Indigenous struggle against peripheralization and erasure, the project is shown to be perpetually incomplete.

Border abolition and the struggle against capitalism

Immigration controls do not prevent human movement, nor do they protect citizens. In fact, borders produce many of the social harms they claim to prevent, including loss of life, inhuman and degrading treatment and multiplying inequalities. Nor do borders in any way address the conditions that shape migration processes in the first place - global disparity, the dispossession of lands and livelihoods, climate breakdown: instead, they render people all the more vulnerable to various forms of exploitation and abuse. What we call border abolition is concerned with expanding the freedom both to move and to stay. This article examines the question of immigration controls and work, and discusses how border abolition connects to the struggles of workers for better conditions and wages. It also argues that border abolition is inherently internationalist: it involves a challenge to all the relations that underpin the permanence of borders - vast global inequalities, ongoing processes of dispossession and extraction, and the mirage of 'development'. Anti-capitalists should remember that there can be no socialism in one country, and no progressive labour movement that puts 'natives' first. Because walled workers cannot unite, anti-capitalism is necessarily internationalist, which means committed to border abolition.

Borderlands Curanderos: The Worlds of Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedrito Jaramillo by Jennifer Koshatka Seman

Reviewed by: Borderlands Curanderos: The Worlds of Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedrito Jaramillo by Jennifer Koshatka Seman Jethro Hernández Berrones Jennifer Koshatka Seman. Borderlands Curanderos: The Worlds of Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedrito Jaramillo. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. 224 pp. Ill. $29.95 (978-1-4773-2192-8). Jennifer Seman’s Borderlands Curanderos is a cultural and microhistory of borderlands medicine that examines the healing activities of Teresa Urrea and Pedro Jaramillo as well as their cultural and social contributions to support the wellbeing of Mexican American communities in California and Texas, marginalized by cultural norms and state policies in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Building on the work of Alan Goldberg, John McKiernan, and Natalia Molina, who have examined the racialized construction of disease and sanitary interventions in the region, Seman argues that these curanderos provided medicine for the oppressed at a time when medical innovations promised to shape healthier communities—at the cost of marginalization and abuse. With their medicine, these curanderos helped shape the Mexican American identity, one marked by mestizaje—mixture of cultures that helped these curanderos and their communities navigate and negotiate their lives in the United States. Seman examines each curandero in two chapters, describing their healing skills, their shifting practices across the border, the racial and gendered framing and reception of their activities, the effect of different national cultures on healer-patient-community relationships, and the expansion of their healing to the social body through activism. Chapter 1, “The Mexican Joan the Arc,” places Urrea’s healing practices in the context of rebellion and resistance against Porfirio Díaz’s regime (1884–1911) in Mexico. Teresa’s altruistic healings constituted a political inspiration for the dispossession- and labor-based Yaqui—indigenous communities that live in the limits of the states of Sonora and Sinaloa in Mexico—rebellions. In addition, influential friends framed her healings as an alternative model of modernity that disrupted gender, religious, and medical norms, challenging the limitation of women’s action to domestic spaces, Catholic devotion based on miracles and faith, and the científicos’—Díaz’s technocrats—authority over the physical and the social body. Díaz’s government exiled her in the United States from where she continued her healings and political activism. Chapter 2, “Laying on Hands,” examines U.S. audiences’ reception of Teresa’s healings. If the diverse U.S. medical marketplace accepted her therapies associating them with botanical medicine, mesmerism, and homeopathy, the public description of her hands—key in her therapies—as “lovely, slender, gentle, magnetic, electric, and white” (p. 65) suggests that gender and race mediated such acceptability, for only her sexualized hands, charm, and whiteness rendered her closer to the U.S. society. The chapter concludes examining the racialized public health policies in Los Angeles that excluded Mexican immigrants from social services based on their status as vectors of incurable disease and that contributed to shaping Urrea’s practices as a cultural refugee space. Chapter 3, “All Roads Lead to Don Pedrito Jaramillo,” focuses on Los Olmos Ranch as a place of pilgrimage. Seman uses Ann Harrington’s cultural scripts to explain the power of pilgrimage as a healing narrative that boosted the effect [End Page 162] of Pedro’s healing interventions. This cultural script was essential for the Rio Grande Valley’s communities of Mexicans who endured internal colonialism, land dispossession, a severe drought, famine, and an economic depression in the late nineteenth century. Jaramillo supplemented his water cures with other activities that benefitted the community such as finding water, digging wells, and providing food. Chapter 4, “In the Clutches of Black Magic,” examines the tensions between academic medicine and Jaramillo’s healing activities. Using newspaper articles that denounced the treatments as sorcery and that defended Jaramillo for his community work, Seman describes how race shaped definitions of disease, medical interventions, the lack of state services, and the defense for the curandero’s livelihood. The case filed against him for postal fraud by members of the American Medical Association shows how his unpaid services, lack of academic medical training, and use of traditional healing approaches did not fit the growing...

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Dobbs in Historical Context: The View from Indian Country.

Dobbs in Historical Context: The View from Indian Country Brianna Theobald (bio) Even as the field of reproductive history dedicates greater attention to racial subjectivities and other forms of difference, attention to Native peoples and Indian Country remains limited; this relative absence persists despite Indigenous feminists’ frequent engagement with the topics of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. The cause of such marginalization is not a complete mystery. The marginalization of Native reproductive histories reflects continuing patterns of Indigenous erasure in the context of U.S. settler colonialism and derives from the specificity of tribal nationhood, sovereignty, and Native nations’ trust relationship with the U.S. government, all of which defy tidy integration into the field’s existing narratives.1 It is also a product of the methodological challenges that these realities pose for nonspecialists. I wrote Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century in part to intervene in these trends. Published in 2019, Reproduction on the Reservation is the first book-length history of reproduction that centers Native American women.2 It contends that in a nation like the United States, colonialism is a vital frame for understanding histories of reproduction. This is the vantage point from which I have been assessing the consequences of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and from which I approach this forum. A Native-centered historical analysis underscores the limitations of a narrow scholarly or political focus on the now overturned Roe v. Wade and the question of abortion’s legality, a point long emphasized by Indigenous women, women of color, and working-class [End Page 39] women. As Indigenous Women Rising founder Rae Lorenzo (Mescalero Apache, Laguna Pueblo, and Xicana) recently argued, “Roe v. Wade has never been a reality for Native people.”3 Nor, one might add, has Roe ever been enough to meet Native people’s needs, as they have faced countless other obstacles in the pursuit of abortion access, reproductive health, and bodily autonomy. And yet, as Native attorneys and reproductive activists powerfully argued in an amicus brief submitted for the defendants in Dobbs, the overturning of Roe portends particularly harmful consequences for Native peoples.4 While in tension, these realities—that Roe was illusory in the lives of many Native people and that its repeal carries particular burdens and dangers—reflect the duality of federal control and neglect that the sociologist Barbara Gurr has identified in the provision of “imperialist medicine.”5 They speak to the need for robust reproductive justice agendas that attend to settler colonialism in the past and present and imagine vibrant Indigenous futures.6 Native reproductive agendas have long been informed by the exigencies of Native women’s struggle to have children and Native families’ struggle to raise them in safe, healthy, and culturally centered environments without undue external intervention.7 For centuries, Native peoples have endured the efforts of policy makers, Bureau of Indian Affairs employees, and missionaries to assimilate them into U.S. society, a thankfully unsuccessful yet nonetheless destructive attempt to eliminate Native cultures and dissolve tribal nations. The education of Native children was a cornerstone of federal assimilation efforts. Well into the twentieth century, authorities removed Native children from their homes and communities to carry out this education, an intentional effort to destabilize children’s ties to their families and homelands. Authorities justified these actions [End Page 40] in part on allegations of Native maternal apathy or incapacity.8 Such stereotypes existed alongside and buttressed self-serving tropes regarding Indigenous promiscuity and domestic deficiency, even as colonization rendered Native women vulnerable to sexual violence.9 Colonial surveil-lance of and intervention in Indigenous home and family life rested on racist assumptions about the need for “moral uplift” of individuals and communities. Health and healing, too, were sites of assimilationist intervention in Indian Country. The reservation system that federal officials embraced following the Civil War produced a cascade of public health disasters. Native nations faced land dispossession, a forced sedentary lifestyle, malnutrition due to government neglect, and economic underdevelopment. These conditions facilitated the rapid spread of disease, and infant mortality and maternal morbidity rates reached alarming heights in many locations. The federal government further hindered communities...

Experiencing Land Loss: Land Dispossession in the Name of National Security in Sylhet District, Bangladesh

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the inhabitants of Ratargul living next to the Sylhet Cantonment of the Bangladesh Army. Since 1977, construction of the cantonment has gradually driven villagers from their land, with no significant opposition. This alienation will soon reach full completion through the new extension plans of the cantonment. Villagers anticipate this expansion with fear and express anger at the poverty caused by land appropriation. However, in their accounts, dukkho (grief) overshadows their fear and anger. What do they grieve for, exactly? The article suggests that dukkho is an expression of grief over material losses but also of pain over the disappearance of previous forms of life. Additionally, dukkho represents villager’s regret over missed opposition opportunities that did not materialize because they were misled; as low-caste Hindus they lack solidarity; and it is still unclear who is responsible for the land capture: the army or the government.

Negotiating Land in Rurban Bengaluru, South India

Recently, there have been calls to decenter theories of the urban to theorize the rural as a formative force. While recognizing that the urban remains structurally dominant, scholars point towards the interconnectedness of the urban and the rural under present capitalist transformation processes. We proposed to study recent urban–rural entanglements through the heuristic of rurban assemblages. We focused on rural groups and how they negotiate their integration and disintegration into the urban cosmos while remaining embedded within their rural context through the lens of land. This article adds to the debate on the contradictory meanings and uses of land in the context of land dispossession and commodification for urban and industrial development. The work specifically paid attention to the reshaping of subject–land relations and analyzed how implicit or explicit references to the city and the countryside permeate the construction of values and uses of land among the old and new social groups in the metropolitan region of Bengaluru, South India.

The Costs of Passing in the Transvaal

This essay anticipates twentieth-century arguments about the production of the ideal transgender subject as those who are harbingers of an extractive ethnonationalism and have a right to transnational mobility. In looking at Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883), this essay frames the white English settler and landowner Gregory Rose as a proto-transwoman. Gregory’s seamless gender-passing, to the point that they can move across national boundaries with ease, without declaring their citizenship, while still maintaining private property elsewhere, throws into relief the mobility of whiteness and the immobility of Blackness and Brownness within the Transvaal, and South Africa more broadly. Such a narrative of white settler womanhood imbricates the prototranswoman in the exacting of colonial land dispossession. The proto-transgender settler subject’s privilege of passing, both in gender presentation and across geographical borders, is predicated on the dissolution of Native African customary land law and the exacerbated surveillance of indentured laborers of Asian descent under legislative acts called “pass laws.”

Mapping the frontiers of private property in New South Wales, Australia

AbstractThis article addresses the process and patterns by which private property has been applied on the Australian continent. Alongside both lease‐holdings that are limited by term or perpetual and squatting practices, identifying and documenting private property in both individual cases and in aggregate over a large geography offers a compelling approximation of the appearance and spread of British–Australian settlement. Plots and patterns of private land ownership can be read in relation to other forms of land use and tenure each subject to specific historical legal instruments and definitions. We explore how, in particular, the first‐generation alienation of private property might be constructed, represented, and theorised using a critical approach to GIS tools and practices. What technical considerations are required to identify the extent of a site and map its transfer into private hands? How far can the process of mapping the initial alienation of parcels of Crown land over time expose legacies of colonial practices in present‐day methods and serve as a testbed to generate other layers that capture, for instance, patterns of informal privatisation or interact with other phenomena—most notably that of frontier violence—that likewise occur on land, in time? Such work can be located among those wrestling with problems of mapping colonial land occupation with technologies that share a heritage with the surveying tools that allowed that same acquisition and can enhance a critical approach to GIS in relation to appropriation and dispossession of Aboriginal land.

People and politics: Urban climate resilience in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

The rapid growth Cambodia has experienced over the past two decades has resulted in a dramatic transformation of its built environment, in particular, its largest city, Phnom Penh. The shape this urban development has taken echoes that of many developing countries whose urban landscape features gleaming skyscrapers, apartment buildings, and edge-city projects spread across a rapidly expanding urban area. Such a pattern of urbanization is occurring in Phnom Penh while the city faces increased flooding, lack of adequate urban infrastructure, and vulnerability to impacts of climate change. At the same time, embedded within national policy discourses of climate change and social/economic planning, and backed by international donors, are calls for strengthening or developing resilience. Yet, in the city there are signs of land dispossession, marginalization, inequality, and exacerbated poverty. In parallel to high-level discourses of urban resilience, on the ground there have been “everyday forms of resilience” that show how people enact and build resilience through collective action and advocacy for the rights of the urban poor. In reconciling this dichotomy, we argue that the continued reproduction of a technocratic-focused discourse on resilience in Cambodia by national and international actors overshadows the everyday contestations, strategies and resilience-making practices of people in urban areas. Through three examples, we showcase the varying ways in which these contestations and strategies occur in, and despite, an environment of suppression, and how they are challenging the status quo. In doing so, we shed light not only on the politics of resilience but, more importantly, the implications of the political agendas that ultimately contribute to exacerbating vulnerabilities of urban residents, even as calls continue for increased urban “resilience.”