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About this episode

A presentation by Nancy Peluso, Professor in the Department of Environmental Science Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley.Part of the University of Chicago Program on the Global Environment's inaugural conference on the Social Life of Forests, held May 30-31, 2008. In this paper we look at the ways that the construction of political forests and professional forestry in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia were shaped through political violence. From the 1950s through the 1970s, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand experienced “Emergencies” and insurgencies during which political violence was staged in or from many of these countries’ forests—then called “jungles”– in reference to their use for staging insurgencies. We show how these political movements are best framed not as comprised of “recalcitrant” “unincorporated” national subjects, but as alternative civilizing and state-making projects that used the forests as sites from which to launch territorializing projects. Both the insurgencies and counter-insurgency strategies were organized around perceptions of ethnic identification with national states. Millions of people were moved, with suspect ethnic groups generally moved out of forests, and more trustworthy ethnic groups settled into forests to practice agriculture. Counter-insurgency practices also channeled huge resources into “development” in particular zones. This development was meant to alleviate the poverty that was understood to make subjects susceptible to alternative civilizing projects, and into intensified surveillance of forests. Surveillance technologies and information could subsequently be used by forest departments to strengthen territorial control of political forests. The outcomes across the sites examined in this study thus varied according to the particular ethnic character of the different insurgencies and states; the relative influence of forestry departments who preferred strategies that cleared people out of forests, as well as diverse ecologies, military power, and broader state capacity to monitor and control peoples’ activities.

• Category

  Learning

• Release Date

  May 30, 2008

• Runtime

  32:46