Property, Resources, and the Globalization of Legal Systems

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9310921 PELUSO This project will investigate the links between transformations in local and national property relations and the construction of nation states in Southeast Asia. The research will describe and explain the reasons for similarities in outcomes which conform to global models, the reasons for variation within these similarities across the study region, and the sources of conflict over property issues. The project will focus on sites in Thailand (never colonized), Malaysia (colonized by England), and Indonesia (formerly under Dutch law), to provide comparisons across three different legal traditions. Major sources of variation in national and local sociolegal processes include differences among pre- colonial states, in center-periphery relations, in local property relations, and in different colonial histories. The research will show how these historical differences at the state level produced diverse ways of dealing with "customary" or local property relations during the transition from the colonial period to nation states and market economies. The project will contribute to empirical and theoretical understanding of the relationship between local property law and practices and global legal and economic processes, and particularly how this relationship affects the allocation of forest and other land resources. The project will employ the method of "incorporated comparison" to assess how similarities and differences in local and national sociolegal processes across the region were influenced by and contributed to processes of global change. The investigators will collect data from several sources in various countries: cases from both colonial legal archives and local legal systems, records of changes in the natural environment, legal documents concerning land administration and transactions, maps and land surveys across historical periods, and interviews with local leaders and legal practititioners. The research will detail the different sequenc es through which territorial states constructed private property regimes and under what conditions these different sequences led to conflicts between the state and local people and among local people. In this light, the project will describe and assess the many implications of these sociolegal processes for understanding global change. ***