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This dissertation explicates the remaking of sovereign rule through land reform in Phnom Penh, Cambodia through moments of social, political and economic reconfiguration. Depopulated by the Khmer Rouge in 1975, Phnom Penh was repopulated after the genocide by a mostly new urban citizenry. Then, in the spring of 1989, the socialist state introduced a comprehensive land reform program, that was critical to the regime’s retention of power in the liberal era. What followed was a brief but highly contentious transitional period in which new land reform policies led to property disputes across the country, becoming especially violent in Phnom Penh. These territorial politics shaped and were shaped by new forms of authority, political economy, and rule of law, articulating shifting conditions of ownership and belonging. Through five empirical chapters, I explore how rupture becomes the basis upon which diverse claims to sovereignty are made. In particular, drawing from in-depth interviews with sixty-four state officials, property owners and informal settlers and archival research in the People’s Republic of Kampuchea/State of Cambodia state papers, and the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia land dispute files, I consider how property and political regimes were co-constituted in the wake of the Cambodian genocide. I argue that by claiming a rupture with past, the state invites new urban populations to claim land in line with new conditions of ownership and belonging. In so doing, claimants confer power onto the regime’s reformed political regime. Critically, these shifting conditions of land ownership in Phnom Penh are deeply entwined with a racialized state rule. In co-producing property and political regime, the state is simultaneously producing the normative national subjects that can rightfully claim a space in the city.

In 2011, the eruption of the Chilean student movement broke open a nation-wide questioning of Chile’s current democracy centering on the ongoing influence of General Pinochet’s seventeen-year dictatorship. My dissertation illuminates central elements of Pinochet’s legacy and points toward possible changes necessary for a more democratic Chile in the present. Many studies examine the continuity and change between the dictatorship and the restored democracy and argue that the democratic potential of Chile’s present is bound by the political-economic inheritances from the authoritarian regime. This explanation, while accurate, stops short; the political-economic model of the dictatorship not only was installed by force, it was installed by force to eradicate a more participatory politics. As such, my research focuses on the contentious relationship between the Chilean path to Socialism and the military coup and subsequent dictatorship to elucidate the contents of this participatory politics and specify the tools of its eradication. Liberating Forestry is an historical ethnography of a territory of forestry estates in the Southern Andes that Pinochet came to call his government’s most conflictive zone. In the years between the election of Allende in 1970 and the coup in September of 1973, this territory experienced tremendous socio-ecological transformation; through political alliances, marginalized forestry workers pushed the boundaries of Allende’s Basic Program for an institutional path to Socialism and demanded the conversion of the large private estates of the area into a single, state-owned, worker-operated Forestry Complex. In this Complex, forestry workers, forestry engineering students, and governmental experts negotiated a new form of forestry production that integrated the knowledge of uneducated rural workers with the expertise of foresters, and sought to enable the long-term wellbeing of the forestry communities. Following the coup, the military regime repr

In 2011, the eruption of the Chilean student movement broke open a nation-wide questioning of Chile’s current democracy centering on the ongoing influence of General Pinochet’s seventeen-year dictatorship. My dissertation illuminates central elements of Pinochet’s legacy and points toward possible changes necessary for a more democratic Chile in the present. Many studies examine the continuity and change between the dictatorship and the restored democracy and argue that the democratic potential of Chile’s present is bound by the political-economic inheritances from the authoritarian regime. This explanation, while accurate, stops short; the political-economic model of the dictatorship not only was installed by force, it was installed by force to eradicate a more participatory politics. As such, my research focuses on the contentious relationship between the Chilean path to Socialism and the military coup and subsequent dictatorship to elucidate the contents of this participatory politics and specify the tools of its eradication. Liberating Forestry is an historical ethnography of a territory of forestry estates in the Southern Andes that Pinochet came to call his government’s most conflictive zone. In the years between the election of Allende in 1970 and the coup in September of 1973, this territory experienced tremendous socio-ecological transformation; through political alliances, marginalized forestry workers pushed the boundaries of Allende’s Basic Program for an institutional path to Socialism and demanded the conversion of the large private estates of the area into a single, state-owned, worker-operated Forestry Complex. In this Complex, forestry workers, forestry engineering students, and governmental experts negotiated a new form of forestry production that integrated the knowledge of uneducated rural workers with the expertise of foresters, and sought to enable the long-term wellbeing of the forestry communities. Following the coup, the military regime repr

This dissertation explicates the remaking of sovereign rule through land reform in Phnom Penh, Cambodia through moments of social, political and economic reconfiguration. Depopulated by the Khmer Rouge in 1975, Phnom Penh was repopulated after the genocide by a mostly new urban citizenry. Then, in the spring of 1989, the socialist state introduced a comprehensive land reform program, that was critical to the regime’s retention of power in the liberal era. What followed was a brief but highly contentious transitional period in which new land reform policies led to property disputes across the country, becoming especially violent in Phnom Penh. These territorial politics shaped and were shaped by new forms of authority, political economy, and rule of law, articulating shifting conditions of ownership and belonging. Through five empirical chapters, I explore how rupture becomes the basis upon which diverse claims to sovereignty are made. In particular, drawing from in-depth interviews with sixty-four state officials, property owners and informal settlers and archival research in the People’s Republic of Kampuchea/State of Cambodia state papers, and the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia land dispute files, I consider how property and political regimes were co-constituted in the wake of the Cambodian genocide. I argue that by claiming a rupture with past, the state invites new urban populations to claim land in line with new conditions of ownership and belonging. In so doing, claimants confer power onto the regime’s reformed political regime. Critically, these shifting conditions of land ownership in Phnom Penh are deeply entwined with a racialized state rule. In co-producing property and political regime, the state is simultaneously producing the normative national subjects that can rightfully claim a space in the city.

This dissertation examines the production of rural struggle in Guatemala' indigenous eastern highlands, a place where after decades of silence, 36 years of civil war and two centuries of marginalization, the seemingly unthinkable--organized resistance and alternative proposals--became palpable. In the face of crisis, attempts to turn rural producers, into neoliberal subjects of credit resurrected the historical specter of dispossession and catalyzed an unlikely alliance to oppose unjust agrarian debt that transformed into a vibrant movement for defense of Maya-Ch'orti' territory. Yet, the contours of that alliance, its limits, and possibilities, its concrete splits and expansion are deeply linked to both place-based histories and memories of racialized dispossession, specific reworkings of 1990s discourses and practices of development and "peace"-making, and the concrete practice of starting from "common sense". I sieve a total of 26 months of participant-action research that spanned over four years with this nascent organization through a Lefebvrian method of rereading the past through the light of the present. Through this spatially and historically relational analysis based on critical ethnographic practice, I present an analysis where the present speaks powerfully to the past making three fundamental contributions.First, I produce an analytic that challenges narratives of spontaneous rebellion and/or seamless neoliberal development, demonstrating concretely how neither adequately address the relationship between racialized dispossession and ongoing rural efforts of repossession and or maintaining possession. Instead I draw attention to how the limits of neoliberal projects shape the contours of rebellion and spontaneous rebellions limit the aims of neoliberal projects: yet how these processes of entailment unfold hinges on particular articulations of past processes of dis/possession, development and difference.Second, I offer a rereading of the Guatemalan Civil

This dissertation examines the production of rural struggle in Guatemala' indigenous eastern highlands, a place where after decades of silence, 36 years of civil war and two centuries of marginalization, the seemingly unthinkable--organized resistance and alternative proposals--became palpable. In the face of crisis, attempts to turn rural producers, into neoliberal subjects of credit resurrected the historical specter of dispossession and catalyzed an unlikely alliance to oppose unjust agrarian debt that transformed into a vibrant movement for defense of Maya-Ch'orti' territory. Yet, the contours of that alliance, its limits, and possibilities, its concrete splits and expansion are deeply linked to both place-based histories and memories of racialized dispossession, specific reworkings of 1990s discourses and practices of development and "peace"-making, and the concrete practice of starting from "common sense". I sieve a total of 26 months of participant-action research that spanned over four years with this nascent organization through a Lefebvrian method of rereading the past through the light of the present. Through this spatially and historically relational analysis based on critical ethnographic practice, I present an analysis where the present speaks powerfully to the past making three fundamental contributions.First, I produce an analytic that challenges narratives of spontaneous rebellion and/or seamless neoliberal development, demonstrating concretely how neither adequately address the relationship between racialized dispossession and ongoing rural efforts of repossession and or maintaining possession. Instead I draw attention to how the limits of neoliberal projects shape the contours of rebellion and spontaneous rebellions limit the aims of neoliberal projects: yet how these processes of entailment unfold hinges on particular articulations of past processes of dis/possession, development and difference.Second, I offer a rereading of the Guatemalan Civil

This dissertation explores contradictions of development within market-based carbon forestry projects that aim to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions associated with climate change. Through the mechanism of the carbon market, forestry-based offset projects are in theory intended to reduce carbon emissions in a cost-effective manner, while also generating development and livelihood co-benefits for communities that participate by growing carbon-sequestering trees. However, I have found that in the multiple dimensions of sustainable development - the economic, social, and ecological - carbon forestry has largely failed to generate sustainable development benefits. This finding largely corresponds with previous empirical studies exploring questions of development through the carbon market. This dissertation, however, takes a different approach, in an attempt to understand not only project impacts but how and why market-based efforts at sustainable development have attracted participants despite failing to meet stated social and environmental goals. Through an engagement with debates on sustainable development, neoliberalization of nature, and agrarian change in Mexico, I draw on a relational approach and political ecology analytical framework. This framework gives attention to the social relations of carbon forestry development in Chiapas, in historical and geographical perspective. And the approach allows for an analysis that goes beyond mere recognition of the failure of development through carbon markets; it also demonstrates the ways in which project contradictions are produced and integrated with earlier and ongoing processes of development and agrarian transformation. I argue that this historical perspective, combined with an understanding of the interconnected relations of power stretching from local rural communities through national and global arenas of policy making and governance, can help better guide political strategies aimed at more just and plausible

This dissertation explores contradictions of development within market-based carbon forestry projects that aim to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions associated with climate change. Through the mechanism of the carbon market, forestry-based offset projects are in theory intended to reduce carbon emissions in a cost-effective manner, while also generating development and livelihood co-benefits for communities that participate by growing carbon-sequestering trees. However, I have found that in the multiple dimensions of sustainable development - the economic, social, and ecological - carbon forestry has largely failed to generate sustainable development benefits. This finding largely corresponds with previous empirical studies exploring questions of development through the carbon market. This dissertation, however, takes a different approach, in an attempt to understand not only project impacts but how and why market-based efforts at sustainable development have attracted participants despite failing to meet stated social and environmental goals. Through an engagement with debates on sustainable development, neoliberalization of nature, and agrarian change in Mexico, I draw on a relational approach and political ecology analytical framework. This framework gives attention to the social relations of carbon forestry development in Chiapas, in historical and geographical perspective. And the approach allows for an analysis that goes beyond mere recognition of the failure of development through carbon markets; it also demonstrates the ways in which project contradictions are produced and integrated with earlier and ongoing processes of development and agrarian transformation. I argue that this historical perspective, combined with an understanding of the interconnected relations of power stretching from local rural communities through national and global arenas of policy making and governance, can help better guide political strategies aimed at more just and plausible

This conversation, transcribed from a conference in April 2002, is intended to illuminate current debates about the use and abuse of the embeddedness concept in economic sociology.

This conversation, transcribed from a conference in April 2002, is intended to illuminate current debates about the use and abuse of the embeddedness concept in economic sociology.

Processes of income formation