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We engage geography's longstanding debate on what "counts" as resistance by introducing slow resistance to account for temporal‐political strategies against unjust developments, particularly under authoritarian conditions. We draw on over a decade of fieldwork in the Salween River Basin where dams and diversions have been proposed since 1979, including the most recent iteration, the Yuam River water diversion project in Northwest Thailand. We find that resistance by impacted communities and civil society encompasses slow, strategic, and considered actions over time and generations. Such resistance is necessarily protracted to contest developments (re)proposed over decades. By foregrounding the strategic use of time and temporality, we highlight often overlooked actions and strategies of resistance by a diverse range of actors, showing how resistance movements are incremental and interconnected over time, even when "under the radar". These strategies are key to contesting and (re)shaping the conditions of development in the Basin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How have Thailand's environmental politics changed across the last five decades? How have they remained the same? What role do environmental movements in Thailand play in the country's current moment of extended military-led rule and global environmental change? This article addresses these questions by presenting a critical genealogy of Thailand's environmental politics. It begins with a larger framing of environmental movements within the context of Thai history and then traces these struggles through to the twenty-first century. Rather than argue that environmental politics are distinct from other forms of politics, we contend that environmental struggles should be understood as unfolding within and shaping Thailand's changing social, economic, and political landscape. Although Thailand's environmental movements have opened new pathways towards more just politics, they have also re-entrenched old political orders and, at times, deepened political divisions. By attending to these complex effects, this article highlights the ambiguous relationship between environmental politics and pro-democracy mobilisation. Rather than assume that environmental activism is inherently progressive, it demonstrates how Thailand's environmental politics are complex, neither linear nor determined in their relationship with democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of 'post-politics' provide a lens through which to analyse contemporary urban development. Yet empirical studies examining this 'age of post-politics' are few, especially outside of Europe and North America. This article examines the promise and limits of notions of post-politics through the case of planning for New Yangon City, a multi-billion dollar urban development in Myanmar (Burma). While the 2021 military coup has now made the future of the project uncertain, our research conducted in 2019 revealed similar dynamics at play to those described more broadly in the literature on post-politics. We highlight familiar processes of delegation of decision-making, a proliferation of governance actors and an individualisation of policy issues. What is distinctive in Myanmar is the way a coalition of elite decision-makers have diluted and defused policy disagreements through the construction of a utopian vision of a modern international city. We see this imaginary of the modern city as a tactic to support the broader efforts of depoliticisation. This diverges from arguments that the imagination of social change is curtailed through the pragmatic post-political notion that 'there is no alternative'. Instead, in the context of New Yangon City, utopian vision is integral to depoliticisation and limiting dissent. We conclude that attention to processes of depoliticisation is crucial in relation to mega project planning in Asia, and that a productive way forward for studies of urban development is not wholesale acceptance or dismissal of the notion of post-politics, but robust engagement with its critiques and promise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental change and governance operate across multiple, interconnected scales. In Southeast Asia, there are calls to broaden the study of transboundary environmental governance to address the range of scales, actors, and flows in analysis. In response, we propose a framework to move beyond statist framings of 'transboundary' in the region by drawing on van Schendel's proposal for flow studies on the one hand, to overcome the 'geographies of ignorance' that stem from fixed studies of nation‐states, and mobile political ecology on the other, to emphasise the role of resource users and their mobilities in environmental governance. We focus on transboundary sand and sediments in rivers, the rise in sand mining in the region, and its impacts on livelihoods and cross‐border flows. Research was conducted from 2015 to 2019 along the transboundary Salween River in the Myanmar‐Thai borderlands. This research shows that sand extraction not only impacts existing sand‐based livelihoods, like riverbank gardening, but also intersects with migration patterns. Migration here is being exacerbated by sand mining alongside processes of environmental and political‐economic change, but these intersections would be overlooked in a fixed or statist approach. We illustrate these complex changes by presenting two 'sand stories' that emerge from our research. This primary research combined with a novel conceptual framing expands our analysis of transboundary by revealing and highlighting the linkages between mobilities and transboundary resource flows. In doing so, our analysis brings people, livelihoods and mobilities to the centre of transboundary environment governance and opens scholarly and practice‐based discussions to the range of actors, scales and resource regimes involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land and loyalty: Security and the development of property rights in Thailand By TOMAS LARSSON Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. Pp. 208. Figures, tables, bibliography, index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463413000490 Is [...]

Microfinance has attracted increasing attention, not only for its goals to empower the poor but for its potential negative effects that can serve to undermine that core goal of empowerment. In this paper, we examine microfinance debt in the context of Cambodia's cassava boom and its particular history of resource extraction. Focusing on cassava farmers in Pailin province, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold in northwestern Cambodia, we find that post-conflict Pailin cassava farming is linked with indebtedness to microfinance institutions. As the burden of debt erodes community life and heightens individual anxiety, our analysis of interviews conducted in 2018 shows that Pailin's small-scale cassava farmers lose capacity to build the solidarity necessary to address problems collectively. Drawing on critical work on debt and historically-situated political ecology, we see a situation shaped-but not determined-by a history in which local elites have controlled significant portions of the local economy, extracting personal benefits. We argue that, in this context, microfinance initiatives extend this longer history of resource extraction as concentrations of power and wealth go unchallenged. Microfinance loans are thus better seen as part of a system of depriving marginalized farmers of choice, rather than empowering them, as part of what Silvia Federici terms the financialization of reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cambodia's ruling party cracked down on the press, civil society, and opposition in the lead up to the 2018 national elections. Drawing on interviews with Cambodian journalists who lost their jobs, as well as long-standing research on rural struggles in Cambodia, we argue that the Cambodian state's crackdown on media is part of an ongoing transformation of authoritarian populism that has reduced the space for rural collective action. The state's repression and co-optation of media also signals a change in the ruling party's brand of populist authoritarianism: from simultaneously courting and spreading fear amongst rural voters, to casting rural people aside. The media is a space of both emancipatory and authoritarian potential, and for the journalists who saw themselves as building the post-conflict democratic state, the crackdown signals the loss of a more emancipatory, democratic imaginary. This study contributes to analyses of authoritarianism as practice by drawing attention to the various scales and spaces in which it is produced, enacted, and imagined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]