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Podcast: New Books in Anthropology
Episode: Miles Kenney-Lazar, "Socializing Land: Plantations, Dispossession, and Resistance in Laos" (U Hawai’i Press, 2025)
Description: Since 2008, there has been tremendous public interest in the social and ecological ramifications of the global land rush, a rapid increase of capital investment into land, especially for the establishment of agricultural and tree plantations. In Laos, the government has granted five percent of the national territory to investors as long-term land concessions since the early 2000s. Land investments, globally and in Laos, have violently and unjustly dispossessed peasants and Indigenous peoples of their life-giving land, leading to their immiseration. Yet, targeted communities have rarely accepted the theft of their land outright, often struggling to protect their land rights...