What happened when the land grab came to Southeast Asia?

This introduction to the collection seeks to determine to what extent the specialist regional literature on agrarian and environmental transformations in Southeast Asia has responded to land grab studies, and how scholarship on Southeast Asia contributed to the broader field. We argue that at the centre of land grab studies is what Mara Goldman calls a ‘standardized package’ that we use to explore the ways that the field of land grab studies has been taken up in the Southeast Asian literature; the places and topics that receive the most attention and those that tend to be deemphasised and underrepresented; and efforts to critique and ‘decentre’ the global land grab and processes of land grabbing in the existing literature and in the contributions to this collection. We suggest that Southeast Asian scholars contributed to the dynamism of the field by pushing for greater nuance, context and historical specificity, and integration of longstanding academic theories and concerns. These efforts are part of the productive tension between opening up the range of topics and processes under study on the one hand, and maintaining unity and centring of the field on the other, that has been fundamental to land grab studies.

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Journal Article