Frontier Construction and Place-Making in Cambodia Post-Conflict Resource Landscapes

Part of the Ronald and Janette Gatty series

Speaker: Sopheak Chann, Lecturer, Department of Natural Resource Management and Development, Royal University of Phnom Penh

This paper explores place-making in post-conflict resource landscapes by elaborating on the concept of frontier-construction. Much of resource frontier literature examines conflicts over access to land and resources, but few studies look at how places emerge through the process of frontier making. This article provides an in-depth analysis of place-making in Northwest Cardamom region, a former battlefield and ex-Khmer Rouge stronghold, where the current socio-spatial relationships are formed by competing access to land and resources. I argue that the formation of place in post-war resource landscapes is the creation of frontiers where the relationship between local people and landscapes is formed through the reinforcing imagination of resource landscapes as wastelands. Everyday socio-spatial relationships in resource frontiers are established through three tensions: (1) socio-ecological intensity, (2) social confrontation, and (3) local vs state contestation over territoriality.