'A new landlord' (dia chu mói)? Community, land conflict and State Forest Companies (SFCs) in Vietnam

Abstract

In much of Southeast Asia, the rise of rural land conflicts and struggles often parallels market expansion into frontiers, a collage of historical state interventions, negotiations over state authority and contested legitimacy. Scholarship on Vietnam has yielded important insights on the changes wrought by new commodity booms and hybrid forms of state engagement in markets. With the recent escalation of land conflict between Vietnam's State Forest Companies (SFCs) and farmers, this paper builds on past research to examine why this current wave of SFC-farmer conflict is occurring, and what it means for the relationships between SFCs, farming communities and the central state. Based on our ana..