Marketization of sand in Cambodia: global networks, conflicts and materialities

沙子并不是一种许多人认为与冲突有关的资源。因此，全球化进程导致的对沙的日益开采很少成为科学和公众辩论的对象。但是，尽管人们普遍认为沙子既不稀有也不珍贵，但它已演变为世界许多地区最重要的建筑材料和稀缺资源，特别是那些人口迅速增长和城市化的地区。在建筑业蓬勃发展的东南亚地区，大量的沙子和砾石被用于建筑物、基础设施和土地开垦。因此，沙子已发展成为一种日益宝贵的经济资源，被广泛开采和远距离交易。然而，不断扩大的采砂活动并非没有后果，而是导致了大规模的生态破坏和与受影响人口的冲突。沙子的商品化可以被解释为自然资源市场化的更大进程的一部分，在人文地理学中被称为“自然的新自由主义化”。相关研究表明，资本主义的资源开发逻辑往往具有负面的社会和生态影响。与此同时，他们认为，新自由主义化或市场化的进程和机制在不同的背景下发挥不同的作用，并产生异质和矛盾的影响。该项目分析了柬埔寨沙子市场化的冲突，这是资本主义市场进程的表现，以及它们与所涉及的物质的相互作用。借鉴Michael Burawoy（2000）和安娜青（2005）的全球民族志方法以及在新唯物主义辩论中发展的思想（Bakker 2010; Mattissek und Wiertz 2014），该项目采用一套定性和定量方法来分析三个主要研究问题：（1）哪些全球性和区域性因素影响着东南亚沙市场的构成和变化，其各自的结构条件、贸易路线和关系？(2)参与建立沙子市场或抗议和动员反对沙子开采和交易的行为者发挥什么作用？它们各自的战略和做法如何受到多尺度影响和网络的影响？(3)地质、生物物理（非人类）和社会过程以及沙市场实体如何相互作用，它们如何塑造沙的市场化？

Sand is not a resource that many people associate with conflicts. Accordingly, the increasing exploitation of sand due to processes of globalization is rarely the object of scientific and public debates. But despite the common perception that sand is neither rare nor precious, it has evolved into the most important building material and a scarce resource in many regions of the world, especially those characterized by rapid population increase and urbanization. In Southeast Asia, a region marked by an intensive boom in the building sector, vast quantities of sand and gravel are used in the construction of buildings, infrastructure and land reclamations. Thereby, sand has developed into an increasingly valuable economic resource that is extracted extensively and traded over long distances. However, the expanding sand extraction remains not without consequences, but leads to massive ecological damages and conflicts with the affected sections of the population. The commodification of sand can be interpreted as part of larger processes of the marketization of natural resources which in human geography is discussed as "neoliberalization of nature". Respective studies demonstrate that capitalist logics of resource exploitation often have negative social and ecological effects. At the same time, they argue that processes and mechanisms of neoliberalization or marketization play out differently in different contexts and produce heterogeneous and ambivalent effects. This project analyzes conflicts over the marketization of sand in Cambodia as a manifestation of capitalist market processes and their interactions with the materialities involved. Drawing on the Global Ethnography approach by Michael Burawoy (2000) and Anna Tsing (2005) and on ideas developed within the debate on New Materialism (Bakker 2010; Mattissek und Wiertz 2014), the project applies a set of qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze three main research questions: (1) Which global and regional factors influence the constitution and transformation of the Southeast Asian sand market, its respective structural conditions, trading routes and relations? (2) What role do actors play that are involved in the establishment of sand markets or protest and mobilize against the extraction and trade of sand? How are their respective strategies and practices affected by multiscale influences and networks? (3) How do geological, biophysical (non-human) and social processes and entities of the sandmarket interact and how do they shape the marketization of sand?