Making place and creating frontiers: Examining land and resource struggles in Cambodian post-conflict resource landscapes

This article explores place-making in post-conflict resource landscapes by elaborating on the concept of frontier construction. Much of resource frontier literature examines conflicts over access to land and resources, but very few studies look at how places emerge through the process of frontier-making. This article provides an in-depth analysis of place-making in Northwest Cardamom region, a former battlefield and ex-Khmer Rouge stronghold, where the current socio-spatial relationships are formed by the competing access to land and resources. I argue that the formation of place in post-war resource landscapes is the creation of frontiers where the relationship between local people and landscapes are formed through the reinforcing imagination of resource landscapes as wastelands. Everyday socio-spatial relationships in resource frontiers are established through three tensions: (1) socio-ecological intensity, (2) social confrontation, and (3) local vs state territorial contestation.

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