Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Impact of Land Law on Stabilization and Development Efforts

自2008年以来，社会科学家记录了一场规模空前的全球土地热潮，在过去十年中，有超过8000万公顷的土地易手。这类土地交易绝大多数发生在全球南方国家，那里短期经济发展的动力往往盖过了对可持续和平与发展的关切。由于这个原因，土地交易往往导致少数民族、土著和其他边缘化人群的剥夺，并加剧了现有的领土、资源和权力冲突。这反过来又会破坏美国可能拥有战略经济和政治利益的整个地区的稳定。这个项目训练一名研究生进行严格的、以经验为基础的科学实地考察方法，研究土地法与可持续和平与发展努力之间的关系。康奈尔大学博士生Emily Hong将在Annelise Riles博士的指导下，在缅甸克钦邦的缅甸-中国-泰国边境地区进行研究。采用民族志的方法来审查政策在实践中，研究人员将检查土地法的意义，普通人往往被排除在专家主导的讨论发展。缅甸为理解这些动态提供了一个理想的环境，因为在正在进行的和平谈判和法律改革中，土地和民族身份的中心地位。通过与活动家、农民和知识分子长达一年的民族志实地考察，研究人员将通过广泛的访谈、焦点小组、参与者观察和档案研究，调查克钦人试图塑造其政治未来的两个领域：土地法和土著媒体。在国家层面上，研究人员将关注当前的习惯法运动，这是寻求国家承认祖先或土著土地使用做法的日益增长的全球趋势的一部分；在地方层面上，她将考察当地活动家和农民的工作，他们记录了土地被剥夺的情况，提出了解决发展问题的地方方案，并创建了他们自己的广泛传播的媒体。该项目不仅试图了解国家主导的法律和发展进程对全球土地热潮的影响，还试图了解普通民众如何积极塑造可持续和平与发展的替代方案。该项目将促进文化人类学和法律及社会科学领域，特别是在政治人类学、法律人类学和人权跨学科研究、土著主权和政治变革研究以及合作人种学等领域。

Since 2008, social scientists have documented a global land rush of unprecedented scale, with over 80 million hectares changing hands in the last decade. The vast majority of such land deals are taking place in the global South, where the impetus for short-term economic development often overshadows concerns for sustainable peace and development. For this reason, land deals often lead to dispossession for ethnic, indigenous, and other marginalized peoples and exacerbate existing conflicts over territory, resources, and power. This can in turn destabilize entire regions where the U.S. might have strategic economic and political interests. This project, which trains a graduate student in methods of rigorous, empirically-grounded scientific fieldwork, examines the relationship between land law and sustainable peace and development efforts.Cornell University doctoral student, Emily Hong, under the direction of Dr. Annelise Riles, will undertake the research in the Burma-China-Thailand borderlands, with a primary base in Kachin State, Burma. Taking an ethnographic approach to examining policy in practice, the researcher will examine the significance of land law for ordinary people often left out of expert-dominated discussions on development. Burma/Myanmar provides an ideal setting for understanding these dynamics, due to the centrality of land and ethnic identity in ongoing peace talks and legal reforms. Through year-long ethnographic fieldwork with activists, farmers, and intellectuals, the researcher will investigate two spheres in which Kachin people attempt to shape their political future: land law and indigenous media through extensive interviews, focus groups, participant observation, and archival research. On a national level, the researcher will focus on a current campaign for customary land law, part of a growing global trend that seeks state recognition of ancestral or indigenous land use practices; on a local level, she will examine the work of local activists and farmers who document land-based dispossession, cultivate local solutions to development problems, and create their own widely-circulating media. The project seeks to understand not only the impacts of state-led processes of law and development in the global land rush but how ordinary people actively shape alternatives for sustainable peace and development. The project will advance the fields of cultural anthropology and law and social sciences, particularly in the areas of political anthropology, legal anthropology and the interdisciplinary study of human rights, studies of indigenous sovereignty and political change, and collaborative ethnography.