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

沙子并不是许多人将其与冲突联系在一起的资源。因此，由于全球化进程而日益增加的沙子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，但在世界许多地区，特别是那些人口快速增长和城市化的地区，沙子已经演变成最重要的建筑材料和稀缺资源。在以建筑业密集繁荣为标志的东南亚地区，大量沙石被用于建筑、基础设施和填海造地。因此，沙子已经发展成为一种越来越有价值的经济资源，可以广泛开采并进行长距离贸易。然而，不断扩大的采砂并不是没有后果，而是导致了大规模的生态破坏和与受影响的人口部分的冲突。沙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，在人文地理学中被讨论为“自然的新自由主义”。各自的研究表明，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。同时，他们认为，新自由主义或市场化的过程和机制在不同的背景下发挥着不同的作用，并产生异质和矛盾的效果。该项目分析了柬埔寨沙子市场化的冲突，认为这是资本主义市场进程及其与所涉及的物质的相互作用的表现。该项目借鉴了Michael Burawoy(2000)和Anna Tsing(2005)的全球民族志方法，以及在关于新唯物主义的辩论(Bakker 2010；Mattissek und Wiertz 2014)中提出的观点，应用一套定性和定量的方法来分析三个主要研究问题：(1)哪些全球和区域因素影响东南亚沙子市场的构成和转型，其各自的结构条件、贸易路线和关系？(2)在沙子市场的建立或抗议和动员反对沙子开采和贸易的参与者中扮演什么角色？它们各自的战略和实践如何受到多尺度影响和网络的影响？(3)沙地市场的地质、生物物理(非人类)和社会过程和实体如何相互作用，以及它们如何塑造沙地市场化？

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?