Dissertation Proposal Defense - Sarah R. Rose-Jensen: Social Mobilization and Land Rights in Cambodia

Dissertation Proposal Defense
Sarah R. Rose-Jensen: Social Mobilization and Land Rights in Cambodia

Friday, May 22nd
9:00am-11:00am
Metropolitan Building 5145

Committee Members: 
Chair: Prof.Agnieszka Paczynska,
Prof. Leslie Dwyer
Prof. John Dale

This research explores land rights social mobilization in Cambodia, where Cambodian/Canadian human rights NGO LICADHO estimates that more than half a million people have been affected by land grabs and land rights issues. Based on an understanding gained from preliminary research and my own experiences in Cambodia, it appears that social mobilization and contentious collective action in the country are changing. Until fairly recently, social mobilization and contentious collective action in Cambodia were generally minimal and often the target of intense government repression. However, despite continued efforts by the government to suppress activism, the past few years have seen almost unprecedented social mobilization and collective action in multiple sectors. Given Cambodia’s low levels of development and violent history, including murders of individuals involved in land rights issues (forest activist Chut Vutthy in 2012 and journalist Taing Try in October 2014, among others), jail terms for activists (including the thirteen Boeung Kak Lake activists recently sentenced to a year in prison), and fairly regular beatings of protesters by police, we might expect to see less overt forms of contention, such as the “weapons of the weak” outlined by Scott and “street politics” as presented by Bayat. However, land rights activists and others are engaging in more direct protest. Thus, this research seeks to understand what sort of social mobilization and contentious collective action are happening in Cambodia around land rights and why these forms of contention are developing at this point. In the social mobilization literature, changing opportunity structures and globalized diffusion of norms are often used to explain how mobilizations develop and evolve. Based on social mobilization literature and my own observations, however, I also suspect that they are not enough to explain what is happening in Cambodia and that social mobilization at this point in time is shifting due to broader changes in Cambodian society. Thus I also seek to explore shifting relations of domination and subordination and their role in the development of the land rights movement.