Unwritten Rule: State-Making through Land Reform in Cambodia by Alice Beban (review)

Cambodia’s integration into regional and global economies has accelerated the demand for land for real estate development and agricultural plantations. Rising land demand within the context of Cambodia’s poor property regimes has produced high incidents of land conflicts and land grabbing. In Unwritten Rule, Alice Beban situates data drawn from her extensive ethnographic fieldwork within an interdisciplinary literature to provide a thick description of the complexity of land conflicts in Cambodia. More specifically, the book focuses on the land titling programme—known as Order 01 or ‘leopard skin’ land reform—promulgated by Prime Minister Hun Sen in 2012.

Order 01 surveys and issues land titles to rural Khmer and indigenous communities located in and adjacent to land economic concession zones. Hun Sen has taken pride in the programme’s win-win strategy because it offers these Khmer and indigenous communities title to their land and thus land security while conferring large agricultural companies legitimacy over their land concessions. By mobilizing university students—perceived as trustworthy, idealistic and not corrupt—Hun Sen was confident the programme would reach Cambodia’s frontiers, which were dominated by illegal logging and plantations and which previous land titling programmes had failed to reach as they had been hijacked by corrupt local officials and elites. Based on capitalist private property regimes, the government hoped that Order 01 would establish land tenure security for rural villagers—a condition that would expand access to credit, investments in land and generate employment. Unwritten Rule’s findings, however, point to a mixed outcome. On a smaller scale, Order 01 produced relatively equitable, less corrupt and less elite-captured land titling in communities that had strong networks with informed members and deep connections to local elites. On a broader scale, however, Order 01 failed to achieve its objectives of promoting land tenure security and improved well-being for rural communities.

While the reasons underpinning the failure of Order 01 are multiple and complex, the following points raised in the book are worth examining. The first pertains to Cambodia’s political economic terrain that is entrenched in patrimonial networks built and perpetuated by Hun Sen. Order 01 is thus not a clear legal document; rather, it is Hun Sen’s “oral pronouncements and secretive unwritten rules [that] guide state-actors” (p. 17). The strong man’s utterances allow the elites at different levels to collude with one another to plot “anticipatory land grabs” (p. 84) through clearing forest land to stage claims or by tricking villagers into supporting their claims that encroach on state and community forest land.

The second concerns the deployment of predominantly male, ethnic Khmer students as implementers of Order 01. Not only did their positionality produce ‘gendered’ land titling that discriminated against women, but it also prompted them to discriminate against indigenous communities, downplaying the symbolic and economic significance of communal land ownership. The latter was exacerbated by their training in capitalistic modern farming that led them to prioritize cash crop farms and private plots over vital communal land and community forests.

The third relates to the strategies employed by non-governmental organizations “working through legal channels to gain state recognition of land rights rather than through overt protest or other forms of activisms”, thus perpetuating the “hegemonic social relations” (p. 168). As such, local elites have the power to employ “obfuscation, bureaucratic delay, and overcomplicated procedures” (p. 169) or even threats of violence to manufacture fear and uncertainty to divide the rural communities. The resulting sense of disunity and resignation would thus lower the possibility of resistance from the communities to the manipulative and extractive actions of the elites. The success of manipulation by the elites is evidenced by the low rate of government approval of community forest and communal land titles.

Amid fear, uncertainty, fractured communities and government repression, Unwritten Rule also documents evidence of community solidarity and resistance to state-capital encroachment on community land and livelihoods. Such community actions are articulated...