Political Ecologies of War and Forests:Counterinsurgencies and the Making of

National NaturesNancy Lee Peluso∗ and Peter Vandergeest†

∗Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley†Department of Geography, York University

We examine the significance of a specific type of political violence—counterinsurgency—in the making ofpolitical forests, providing a link between literatures on the political ecology of forests and the geographies ofwar. During the Cold War, particularly between the 1950s and the end of the 1970s, natures were remade inrelation to nation-states in part through engagements with “insurgencies” and “emergencies” staged from forestedterritories. These insurgencies represented alternative civilizing projects to those of the nascent nation-states;they also took place in historical moments and sites where the reach of centrifically focused nations was stilltentative. We argue that war, insurgency, and counterinsurgency helped normalize political forests as componentsof the modern nation-state during and in the aftermath of violence. The political violence also enabled state-based forestry to expand under the rubric of scientific forestry. Military counterinsurgency operations contributedto the practical and political separation of forests and agriculture, furthered and created newly racialized stateforests and citizen-subjects, and facilitated the transfer of technologies to forestry departments. The crisis rhetoricof environmental security around “jungles,” as dangerous spaces peopled with suspect populations, particularlynear international borders, articulated with conservation and other national security discourses that emergedconcurrently. Counterinsurgency measures thus strengthened the territorial power and reach of national states byextending its political forests. Key Words: Cold War, counterinsurgency, jungles, political ecology of forests, politicalecology of war, territorialization.

En este estudio examinamos la significacion de un tipo especıfico de violencia polıtica—la contrainsurgencia—enel desarrollo de bosques polıticos, creando ası un vınculo entre las literaturas sobre ecologıa polıtica de bosques ylas geografıas de guerra. Durante la Guerra Frıa, particularmente entre los anos 50 y el final de los anos 70 delsiglo pasado, las naturalezas se rehicieron a sı mismas en relacion con los estados-nacion, en parte por medio deconfrontaciones con “insurgencias” y “surgencias” puestas en accion en territorios boscosos. Estas insurgenciasse presentaron a tıtulo de proyectos civilistas alternativos para quienes tenıan que ver con los nacientes estados-naciones; ocurrieron, ademas, en momentos y sitios historicos donde todavıa era tentativo el alcance soberano denaciones enfocadas centrıpetamente. Nuestro argumento es que la guerra, la insurgencia y la contrainsurgenciaayudaron a normalizar los bosques polıticos como componentes del moderno estado-nacion durante las epocasviolentas. La violencia polıtica tambien contribuyo a que la silvicultura con soporte estatal se expandiera bajola rubrica de silvicultura cientıfica. Las operaciones de contrainsurgencia militar contribuyeron a la separacionpractica y polıtica de bosques y agricultura, promovieron y desarrollaron bosques estatales de nuevo racial-izados al estilo ciudadanos-sujetos, y facilitaron la transferencia de tecnologıas a los departamentos de silvicultura.

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101(3) 2011, pp. 587–608 C© 2011 by Association of American GeographersInitial submission, August 2009; revised submissions, February and June 2010; final acceptance, July 2010

Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.

588 Peluso and Vandergeest

La retorica crisis sobre seguridad ambiental en torno de las “junglas,” como espacios peligrosos poblados porpoblaciones sospechosas, particularmente cerca de las fronteras internacionales, se articulo con la conservaciony otros discursos de seguridad nacional que emergieron concurrentemente. Las medidas de contrainsurgenciafortalecieron de esa manera el poder territorial y el alcance de los estados nacionales al extender el ambito de susbosques polıticos. Palabras clave: Guerra Frıa, contrainsurgencia, junglas, ecologıa polıtica de bosques, ecologıa polıticade guerra, territorializacion.

The articulations of war and forestry assist in themaking of both territorial nation-states and po-litical forests. Yet, the institutional effects of

war, as a specific form of political violence, on themaking of forests, on the practice of forestry, andon the consolidation of national states’ territorializedcontrols through forestry are rarely documented andnarrowly theorized.1 We argue here for differentiatingforms of and motivations for political violence, to un-derstand better how insurgency and counterinsurgencycan bring national forests into being or strengthen exist-ing state forestry institutions (Haraway 1991; Sundberg2011).

Cases from Southeast Asia in the 1950s through the1970s serve to demonstrate the ways in which bothinsurgencies and counterinsurgencies have enabled theestablishment, extension, and normalization of politicalforests. The insurgencies in the immediate aftermath ofnationhood or during the creation of postcolonial statesconstituted “alternative civilizing projects,” contestingthe new states’ ideological hegemony. Fought inforested areas (among other sites) that were invariablyreferred to during war as “jungles,” the insurgenciestook place in historical moments and sites where theterritorial influence of new nation-states on everydaypractice was still tentative. Counterinsurgency helpednormalize political forests as components of themodern nation-state and spatially and institutionallydifferentiated forests and agricultural areas in moresites than simply those that had been differentiatedby forest reservation processes under colonialism. Inthe process, counterinsurgency operations laid thegroundwork for newer versions of racialized state forestsand citizen-subjects and enabled the transfer of militarytechnologies to state forestry departments.

We show in this article that state forestry and con-temporary ideas of forests emerged in part out of theviolent politics through which new national states andtheir ideologies were made after World War II. TheCold War period saw the establishment or shaping ofmany national entities, but the critical importance offorests—and the jungles from which they were carved—were rarely considered in political analyses of the ColdWar (for recent examples see Mamdani 2004; Wes-

tad 2005). Yet, forests were configured as quintessen-tially national or state natural resources during the ColdWar period, when “jungles” in Asia, Africa, and LatinAmerica became synonymous with political violence.

The nature of forests and their representation—asjungles or national or local territories—matters to un-derstandings of political violence, nation-state build-ing, and forestry alike. Contemporary debates about re-source wars need to examine the ways tropical forestsas theaters of insurgency have been key political en-tities (political forests) and how their spatiality andability to provide cover change their value as strate-gic resources when they are sought for their timberor other resources. Le Billon (2001, 2008) and Watts(2004) have emphasized the importance of examin-ing the historical, geographic, and spatial specifici-ties of resource-related violence and its embeddednesswithin broader political conflicts (see also Peluso andWatts 2001). Much of the (particularly policy-oriented)work on “conflict timber” and “illegal logging” by in-surgents occupying forests unfortunately does not “seethe forests for the trees”—except generalized as sites ofdeforestation.

This blind spot obscures two important lessons aboutthe institutional roles of forests in nation-building andthe construction of national natures. First, forests arenot simply ecological configurations but political andpoliticized zones. We define political forests as terri-tories that have been legislated, zoned, mapped, andclassified as permanent forest and managed by profes-sional, “scientific” government agencies. When theyare depicted as “jungles,” a particular set of geographicand political imaginaries used to justify state violencecomes into play and generates particular kinds of ter-ritorial controls. Jungles are associated with insurgencyand thus became violent versions of political forests.Second, whether or not trees remain in these contestedspaces, the very sites of contestation—often borders,often mountainous or swampy, all dubbed jungles—help in realizing nation-building projects through vi-olence, militarization, resettlement, and other territo-rial practices in counterinsurgency operations. Forestsprovide excellent cover for guerrilla warfare; thustheir continued existence or their cutting, burning,

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conversion, or appropriation and control by state au-thorities has security implications.

Political violence has helped forge both nationalterritories and the territories of state power representedby forestry and other land management agencies.Counterinsurgency strategies and practices contributedto the making of forests, extending the “work” ofscientific forestry models from Europe during the colo-nial period (which articulated with local politics) andfrom the Food and Agriculture Organization’s ForestryDivision and other international forestry agenciesduring the early postcolonial period.2 Questions of thelevel of management (strongly national rather thanregional or local) and jurisdiction, and the means bywhich management was enabled, are at the heart ofunderstanding the making of political forests.

We focus here on three Southeast Asian nation-states: Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. All threewere critical fronts in the region’s hot wars as well asthe global Cold War. None of them became a com-munist or Islamic state in the Cold War era or after,although communist or Islamist insurgencies or fearsof them were important elements in national politicsof the time. In all of these nation-states, extensive in-surgent activities were based in forested areas calledjungles, mountains, or hills—terms with specific politicalvalences then. In all three nation-states, governmentforces prevailed through counterinsurgent activity, un-like some Southeast Asian countries where insurgentforces won and took over the national government. Asinsurgent violence was repressed, the shifting culturalpolitics of states’ discursive and spatial practices aroundforests and forest-based subjects became fundamentalto understanding the making of the nation-states andnational natures.3

We bring the political ecologies of war and foreststogether through our analysis of specific moments andspaces of global conflict: the Cold War era in thesethree nation-states of Southeast Asia. The making ofnational political forests was intertwined with the vi-olent making of nation-state territories and politicalsubjects through common repertoires of violent statepractices. Certain forms of political violence are morelikely than others to bring forests into being as politi-cal entities or institutions and enable their continued“recognition” as territorial subjects.4 Indeed, the forma-tion of both territories and people as subjects of stategovernance and surveillance have much in common,as usefully demonstrated by Sioh (1998) for forests inMalaya.

Our argument consists of four connected parts.

1. The alternative civilizing projects (political oppo-sition) and the violence characterizing them (in-surgency) produced specific effects on forests andforestry that were different from those of colonial-eraforest-making and late twentieth-century notionsof resource wars. Insurgency and counterinsurgencybrought new political forests into being and vastlyextended national forest territories. Concurrently,the particular materialities of tropical forests—their biological and ecological properties and theirspatialities in terms of specific locations andextents—facilitated guerrilla warfare, a specific kindof violent engagement, associated with Cold War–era “jungle wars,” insurgencies, civil wars, or revolu-tion.

2. Counterinsurgency strategies included transformingdiscursively, practically, and institutionally the jun-gles of wartime to forests (Slater 1995; Peluso 2003a;Sioh 2004). This process involved constructing, un-doing, and reconstituting the spatialized society–nature relations implied in the term jungle, whichreferred to both tropical forests and nearby rural ar-eas where both permanent and swidden cultivationwere practiced with other forms of agroforestry andlocal forest management. Shifting from jungles toforests distinguished forests from agriculture politi-cally, spatially, and territorially. It established dif-ferent government jurisdictions and legitimate usersand built on earlier legal–institutional efforts (Dove1993; Sivaramakrishnan 1999; Agrawal and Sivara-makrishnan 2001; Peluso and Vandergeest 2001;Vandergeest and Peluso 2006a, 2006b). The shiftto “forests” eliminated the violence specifically gen-erated by insurgency and counterinsurgency that ledthese same environments to be invariably called jun-gles (during and since that time; see also Sioh 2004).

3. State responses to jungle-based insurgencies in-volved massive spatial reorganizations of populationsthrough resettlement, colonization, and the territo-rial rezoning of property rights. These reorganiza-tions of space and of subjects’ positioning withinnational states were racialized (i.e., differentiatedalong ethnic and racial lines), producing citizen-subject categories of minorities and majorities ina national context (B. Anderson 1991). Postcolo-nial state making was deeply racialized (Goldberg2002), not only through the ways that states wereinvolved in the production of nationalism but also

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through the ways that modern states fashioned anddifferentiated territories based on racial categories(K. Anderson 1987; Goldberg 2002). Racializa-tion repoliticized subjectivities previously createdthrough colonial practices, as state authorities repre-sented some racial and ethnic groups as more loyal tothe new nation-state than others. These representa-tions were the bases for differentiated state territorialpractices, particularly in relation to groups describedas migrants, or “tribalized” by their associations withjungles, and rendered violent by alleged associationswith insurgents.

4. Insurgency and nation-state building stimulatedboth a militarization of jungles and the use of expen-sive technologies for accessing and surveilling them.The mobilization of troops for fighting, patrolling,and other security activities, as well as the military’suse of surveillance technologies, were consistentwith the needs of forest managers for forest protec-tion and surveillance.5 The expense of such tech-nologies had previously precluded their extensivedevelopment and application for forest surveillance,particularly before the timber industry became animportant part of these national resource-extractingeconomies and before the rise of international con-servation (Leigh 1998).

Positioning the violent practices of insurgency andcounterinsurgency in relation to the making of nationalforests offers several contributions to both geographicalstudies of war and to political ecology scholarship. Theresource wars argument—that valuable resources mo-tivate, fund, and fuel many contemporary civil wars—does not sufficiently explain how forest-based violenceaffects forest making and state making. Recognizing theimportance of jungle insurgencies in the developmentof political zones such as forests or agriculture helps alsoto elucidate questions of state territoriality, sovereignty,and governance.

Antecedents of Resource Wars: ViolenceMaking Forests and Forests MakingNations

Ironically, twenty years of war saved Cambodia’s forestsfrom the destruction associated with economic growth inthe ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations]region.

—Le Billon (2000, 786)

The territorial dimensions of war have been dis-cussed in various ways in geographical treatments ofinterstate wars, guerrilla warfare and other forms ofviolent insurrection, and repression. Geographicalscholars have examined how political territories andborders are made through war and violence and howwars have in turn been shaped by these territories andborders (Thongchai 1997; Flint 2005; Murphy 2005).Geographers and anthropologists studying the produc-tions of space and territory have argued that politicalterritories and borders created through wars are fluidand not limited to those associated with nation states.They can include, for example, a barricaded neighbor-hood in an urban insurrection, transnational spacespartially controlled by guerillas during the night (Mc-Coll 1967; Flint 2005), or sacred spaces (Stump 2005).Among the diverse ways that political violence andterritoriality are bound up with each other, theprocesses of state territorialization in the pursuit ofsovereignty loom large. State territorialization worksat multiple levels and through diverse encounters withthose who continue to contest state territorialization“from within” (Wainwright and Robertson 2003).These encounters can range from battles over thebuilding of a highway through land claimed by indige-nous people in the United States, to struggles overforest access in South Asia (Sivaramakrishnan 1997)and Southeast Asia (Vandergeest and Peluso 1995).State territorialization, moreover, is always unfinishedand contested by people who remember the violenceby which colonial and postcolonial states fought chal-lenges to their territorialization practices (Vandergeestand Peluso 1995a; Wainwright and Robertson 2003).

Geographers have also demonstrated that territoriesand spaces of nature are not fixed but fluid andproduced through human and nonhuman activitiesand agency.6 Forests have drawn attention in severaldistinct geographies of war. A lively literature onresource wars considers how the need to access strategicresources or the presence of extractable resources cangenerate or shape violent conflict (Klare 2002; Collierand Hoeffler 2004; Ross 2004). More specifically, inthe field of political ecology, Watts and Le Billon haveconsidered forests and other natural resources primarilyin terms of their exchange and strategic values, evenwhere they examine these in terms of the makingof “governable spaces” or the commodity-specificgeographies of extraction (e.g., Le Billon 2001; Watts2004). In a separate literature, a recent quantitativelyoriented research approach seeks to understand thespatial distribution of conflict and violence and attends

Political Ecologies of War and Forests 591

to questions of whether the cover or resources providedby forests increase the likelihood of political violencein these areas (Buhaug and Lujala 2005; Rustadet al. 2007; O’Loughlin and Witmer 2011). This is aforest-based version of the resource curse arguments ofCollier and Hoeffler (2004)—basically claiming thatthe presence of valuable resources attracts violence andcivil war. Many scholars have shown these correlationsto be spurious and environmentally determinist (e.g.,Ross 2004; Watts 2004; Le Billon 2008). Importantly,the ways in which war specifically helps constructforests as a category of state power and jurisdiction hasnot generally been a part of these debates.

How, then, do we understand the connections amongforests, territoriality, and political violence? In what isusually a distinct literature from that on the geographyof war, authors writing on the political ecology of forestshave spent a great deal of effort analyzing forests’ con-stitution as “territories,” “governable spaces,” or “spacesof contention,” whether these are claimed or held bystates, corporations, kinship groups, customary institu-tions of various sorts, or individuals.7 Yet, where forest-based violence is concerned, most political ecologiesof forestry either do not deal with the kind of politi-cal violence associated with war per se (as opposed toviolence between foresters and villagers, for example),or they do not differentiate between types of forest-based violence—conflating, for example, insurgent ac-tivity with forest-based resistance to appropriations ofcommon resources (Peluso 1992; Sahlins 1994; Neu-mann 1998). Nor do they attempt to understand insur-gency’s role in the discursive, institutional, and mate-rial making of national forests (cf. Hecht and Cockburn1989). Indeed, it is a strange gap in this literature, be-cause of the important roles that forests played—albeitdressed up as jungles—in the revolutionary wars thatled to the establishment of many post–World War IInation-states, including one of our nation-state cases,Indonesia. Beyond the documentation of violence as-sociated with the formation of state forests, an exten-sive, virtually stand-alone literature on the conflictual,often violent social relations around conservation ar-eas (only sometimes constituting forests) and naturereserves in Africa has raised the question of what dif-ference nature makes in conservation wars or wildlifewars (D. Anderson and Grove 1989; Neumann 2001;Brockington 2002). Neumann (2004) in particular hastheorized the normalization of conservation areas andpractices in nation and state building and how con-servation has changed notions of sovereignty and stateterritory.

Le Billon is one of the few authors to use a politicalecology approach explicitly to frame war and postwarsocial relations in forests. In a ground-breaking articlein 2001, he showed how shifting political conditions inand around a troubled but reemergent nation-state—Cambodia—created a “new frontier of capitalism” (LeBillon 2001, 791) in the nation’s as-yet-unexploited,timber-producing, forest areas. Like other forestfrontiers constructed through the conjunctural conver-gences of newly commoditized timber resources, accessto markets and global consumers, and the activitiesof various types of entrepreneurs (from corporate tofreelance pirates), Cambodia’s forest frontier was soonsubject to massive resource extraction.

The actors in this 1990s forest drama, unfolding inthe aftermath of the Khmer Rouge’s previous regimeof extreme violence and social displacement, wereboth connected through and competitive for the as-yetuntapped timber wealth of the democratizing country’sforests. The democratizing state and its panoply of sup-porting international and national institutions was oneset of contenders. Incorporating into the global politicaleconomy at a time when national state power was de-centralizing and weakening across the globe, Cambodiawas dependent on both international aid and interna-tional advice on how to restructure and benefit fromits debut as a capitalist economy. Almost forgotten ininternational representations were its previous charac-terizations on the world stage as a rogue state, whosevery name evoked horrific images of “killing fields.”This first set of players had gained authority in thelaw, setting the terms of the “legal” in their favor. Thisbrought them into immediate contention with anotherset of players—insurgents hoping to similarly benefitfrom the concurrent rise of democracy and capitalism.The insurgents’ claims and practices, however, had beenrendered illegal by the nascent nation-state. What con-stitutes “illegal logging,” including some carried out byassociates of high government officials, is one of Le Bil-lon’s key concerns in that landmark paper.

We would argue that the pretransition phase inwhich Cambodia’s forests stayed relatively intact wasnot merely an irony, as suggested in this section’s epi-graph. Rather, those twenty years of war can be seen asexemplary of a common pattern. In Indonesia, Malaysia,and Thailand, the insurgencies fought between 1950and 1980 helped construct the political forests in thosespaces—or led to their state-sanctioned agriculturalconversion. In the course of all those conflicts, forestsserved the purposes of warfare not for the commodityvalue and wealth of their marketable timbers but in

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their roles as both cover and strategic territory. Rulingnational states and alternative civilizing powers foughtover these spaces to govern or control access to them.As such, the relationship between war and forests can beunderstood in relation to a longer term history of insur-gency in which forests have been important primarilyas cover for insurgents and as sought-after strategicterritory, producing in turn a systematization of militarycounterinsurgency practices aimed at controlling forestterritories, insurgents, and resident subjects. Thesestrategies of war and rule have been documented inmanuals of war as well as in military books and journals.8

Why are these connections between insurgency,nation-building, and forestry important today? It wasonly after the consolidation of national forests throughstate territorialization and enclosure in Malaysia, In-donesia, and Thailand that the massive commerciallogging and conservation efforts that characterized the1970s through the present time could take place. Coun-terinsurgency contributed to how these spaces were pro-duced as political forests, to widely accepted definitionsof legal and illegal logging, and to notions of nationalsovereignty and territory. In terms of global politicalecologies, the histories of these relations shaped thepossibilities for contemporary and future environmen-tal politics.

Jungle Insurgencies andCounterinsurgency in Southeast Asia

The Japanese occupation of much of SoutheastAsia (1942–1945) generated forest-based (among otherkinds of) political resistance, first to the Japanese troopsand military government occupation officials and sub-sequently to colonial powers returning to the regionafter World War II. Both periods of political violenceinvolved occupation, war, and revolution, resulting inforest destruction and major population movements(Soepardi 1974; Kathirithamby-Wells 2005). Duringthese wars, state forestry continued in those parts ofSoutheast Asia that had been organized by colonial-eraforestry departments, but the mandate for state agencieswas generally to contribute to the war effort. In Java,Indonesia, for example, the Forestry Department wasput under the Japanese Department of War. The lega-cies of war included extensive timber cutting and theproduction of other crops (such as castor oil plants) forstrategic purposes. The Japanese forced people to colo-nize certain forests to cut timber for industrial fuel or togrow castor oil; in some places villagers hid in forests to

escape Japanese occupiers. Even colonial-era forestersdestroyed forests and forestry infrastructure as part ofthe Allies’ scorched earth policies (Soepardi 1974).

After World War II, the British returned to Malayaand the Dutch to Indonesia. Thailand had not beenformally colonized and, as a Japanese ally, was not occu-pied formally during the war. In Indonesia, the return-ing Dutch faced immediate resistance. The IndonesianRevolution (1945–1949) affected forestry in Java, andespecially that island’s teak forests, from which the rev-olutionary government required teak fuel wood. Teakwas used as fuel for trains and for railroad ties. In colonialMalaya, the British declared an “Emergency” in 1947.The Malayan Communist Party (MCP), fighting theJapanese from jungle bases, became increasingly mili-tant against the British colonial government returningafter the end of the Pacific War and the occupation.The planned decolonization of the peninsula was de-layed as the British responded with counterinsurgencytactics that became a model for subsequent counterin-surgencies around the world, as described later (Thomp-son 1963). Malaya became independent in 1957 af-ter the insurgency had been effectively defeated. In1963, Singapore and the Borneo states of Sarawakand Sabah joined Malaya to form the Federation ofMalaysia. Singapore soon withdrew, establishing itselfas a nation-state. In Sarawak, armed resistance to thisFederation by communist forces was supported inter-nationally by, among others, neighboring Indonesia’sPresident Soekarno. This situation produced anotherjungle-based international border conflict, an interna-tional one, the so-called Konfrontasi (Confrontation;1963–1966).

The Malayan and Sarawak emergencies and Con-frontation were antecedents to the Cold War–era,jungle-based insurgencies, which affected every South-east Asian country with significant nonurban territo-ries, as well as many other countries around the world.9

Anticolonial revolutions of the post–World War II pe-riod had been viewed as the models for these Cold Warperiod insurgencies (e.g., McColl 1967). Such insur-gencies are increasingly dubbed civil wars but, by anyname, they characterized the situations in many newnation-states during the post–World War II decades,as competing groups fought for control of nationalregimes’ ideological and practical structure. We baseour arguments here on the following cases: the 1948–1957 Malayan Emergency in Peninsular Malaya; theCommunist Party of Thailand’s insurgency from themid-1960s to the early 1980s; the violence betweenIndonesia and Malaysia (Sarawak) in Borneo as part

Political Ecologies of War and Forests 593

of the Confrontation (1963–1966), and the complexcommunist-led insurgencies in Indonesia and Sarawakin the 1960s and early 1970s.10 The Indonesian nationalgovernment carried out some eight years (1966–1974)of counterinsurgency operations in Sarawak and WestKalimantan.11

Maoist revolutionary ideas, encapsulated in thephrase, “Let the countryside surround the cities,”inspired most of these insurgencies. This slogan wasmeant to mobilize insurgents to influence, organize, andinspire peasants and other rural subjects (jungle-basedor not) to rise up and take over the cities where newlyemergent nation-state governments were based. It wasa call to arms explicitly in search of territory (McColl1967). Not all forest-based insurgencies of this periodwere communist, however. Islamic militants desiringan Islamic state in newly independent Indonesialaunched rebellions in certain regions of Indonesia(1950–1957), particularly in mountainous areas ofwestern Java, Sumatra, and Sulawesi. We include themin our considerations here, as they also representedalternative civilizing projects and used the tactics ofguerrilla warfare employed by Maoist-inspired insur-gents. They were part of the Darul Islam (Islamic State)movement and involved Tentara Islam Indonesia (theIslamic Army of Indonesia), referred to in Indonesiaand among scholars as DI/TII. Unlike the Maoistrebellions, the United States, Britain, and otherWestern powers supported these Islamist conflicts,because at that time they worried more about thegeopolitical loyalties of then-president Soekarno, whothey saw as too accommodating of communism.

We differentiate the political nature of insurgentforest-based violence from the local resistance and vio-

lent contestations that resulted from the imposition ofcolonial or postcolonial forestry controls.12 What wascontested in the insurgencies and counterinsurgenciesdiscussed here was not access to forest resources or landper se, but the ideologies, territorial forms, and hege-mony of the emergent nation-state itself—a point aptlydemonstrated by E. P. Thompson (1975) in his classictext on eighteenth-century England, Whigs and Hunters.“Power and property rights” were at issue then as well asin these late twentieth-century jungles. Indeed, manyjungle-based insurgencies took place in what were at thetime heavily forested borders or difficult-access moun-tainous areas, where political forests had yet to be cre-ated or where both state forest management and statepower were ineffective and weak because they were ei-ther not economic or practical (see Table 1). Further,insurgents did not reject the nation-state form but op-posed the guiding ideologies and, in some cases, the ter-ritorial composition, of the nation-states taking shapein the wake of the Japanese occupation of World War II.

Some insurgent groups enlisted, attracted, or forcedlocal people already living in and around these forestedareas to engage in antistate violence or to provide shel-ter and provisions to their guerrillas. However, the po-litical violence generally was not started by residentforest villagers. Rather, students, organizers, party mem-bers, combatants, and other participants “went down”to the countryside or “into” the jungles and mountainsintending to carry out (to launch or continue previ-ously started) insurgencies from there. Their strategiesincluded training or convincing villagers of the advan-tages of resisting the nation-state and winning their“hearts and minds.” This latter strategy became a stan-dard counterinsurgency strategy as well.

Table 1. Political forest areas in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand

% land reserved by % land reserved by Increase in % landgovernment as forest government as reserved as forest

Site 1930 (approx.) forest, mid-1980s 1930s–1980s (approx.)

Java (Indonesia) 17 (1929) 19.9 2.9Federated Malay States (Malaysia) 27.6 (1939) 24 (1976)a −3.6Siam (Thailand) 0 42 42Sarawak (Malaysia) 0.8 (1929) 37.6 36.8Dutch Borneo/Kalimantan (Indonesia) 0.007 (1927) 82b 82

Note: The postwar nations that these colonial territories became part of are given in parentheses. Source: Vandergeest and Peluso (2006a, 36).aMahmud (1979, 90).bThis amount includes about 15 percent of the land cover of all four provinces of Kalimantan. That land, according to the Consensus on ForestLand Use (TGHK), could be converted to other uses, but at the time was under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Forestry. Calculated from thegovernment of Indonesia (GOI) 1986, Vol. III: 87. The number seems high as the amount estimated for national forest territory varies in publishedaccounts from 70 percent to 74 percent. For West Kalimantan alone, the amount was 59 percent.

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The degree to which local people were actually en-gaged in these alternative state projects varied, which isalso important to understanding the site-specific waysin which political ecologies of war and forestry cometogether. In some insurgencies, for example, a strict dif-ferentiation of the actors as “external” insurgents and“local” people is misleading. These representations arecrucial, however, to understanding the responses andlegitimating narratives of ruling states in the course ofviolence and the subsequent imposition of state forestryand also to comprehend the continuing divisions of theforested and cultivated components of these agrarianand agroforestry environments into forests and agricul-ture. When insurgent forces took control of these jungleareas, they helped create the conditions for more in-tense and violent nation-state activities in these locali-ties, solidifying the incorporation of remote and borderterritories and subjects within the political geobodiesof these still contested nation-states (Trouillot 1991;Winichakul 1997; Li 1999).

Table 1 shows the difference in areas of politicalforests that were gazetted or reserved by states inthese three countries during the 1930s, at the peakof the region’s pre–World War II colonial power, andagain during the mid-1980s, when insurgencies wereeffectively over and most forest reservation completed.Table 1 indicates that the regions most associated withthe international trade boom in tropical hardwoods ofthe 1950s through 1980s were not the same as thosereserved as forest in the colonial era. Java and the Fed-erated Malay States (now part of peninsular Malaysia)were the most successful sites of colonial forest practiceand were the sites where the most permanent politicalforests were formally created under colonial rule. Itwas only after World War II that Sarawak (MalaysianBorneo), Thailand, and Kalimantan (IndonesianBorneo) had significant percentages of their landedarea set aside as political forests.

These upland and border “forests” were rarely if everpristine, untouched forests at the onset of the insurgen-cies. These areas have long and complicated historiesof human occupation. Most had been occupied andfarmed by swidden cultivators, settled agriculturalists,and hunter-gatherers; thus the term jungles actuallybetter described the melange of conditions on theground. Everyday access to these areas for the purposeof farming, hunting, and other livelihood activities wasstill controlled largely by the people who lived therewhen insurgencies broke out (Bowie 1992; Jonsson2005). Even in cases where colonial state territorieshad encompassed them on paper, state control ofthem through effective practice on the ground was still

elusive or tentative. In each region, the specific waysthat governments asserted control over these peopled,violent spaces they pejoratively called jungles or moun-tains or hills shaped the future practices of state forestry,the forests themselves, and the relationships betweenthe forest-based subjects and the national states.

Violent Territorialities, AlternativeCivilizing Projects

Before going into detail about the processes of tak-ing the jungle out of the forest, we should clarify thepoint that many of the groups involved in forest-basedpolitical violence during the Cold War were no longerresisting territorial incursions by returning colonizingstates but aimed to build alternatively oriented stateswith strong rural bases, using Marxist, Maoist, or Is-lamist ideas. A mixing of ideas at this time was com-mon across these various “people’s” movements. Forexample, a famous Indonesian general wrote about thestrategic importance of jungles and mountains in hisbook on guerilla warfare, drawing freely on Maoist strat-egy (Nasution 1953). He had been positioned in twodifferent ways in relation to guerrilla warfare: first as arepublican guerrilla fighter during the Indonesian revo-lution against Dutch colonial power and later as a gen-eral in the national Indonesian army. In the latter role,he used his own experience as a guerrilla to strategizeagainst Islamist insurgents fighting Soekarno’s syncreticnationalist vision. At the same time, these insurgentssaw themselves as alternative nationalists, not as out-siders living in areas that might be construed as nonstatespaces. In the case of DI/TII, they were former mem-bers of Indonesia’s national army seeking to control thestate, not secede from it.

Territorial control was a central feature of the Maoistmodel that emphasized the need for a “base area” fromwhich insurgents could operate and eventually surroundthe cities. According to various theories of revolution,base areas were believed most effective if they had accessto major political targets such as cities or transportationinfrastructure, were sites of previous political violenceindicating rural populations alienated from urban states,had potential for gaining logistic and provisioning sup-port from local populations, and had terrain with cover(McColl 1967).

Except in the Borneo territories, the communist par-ties in Southeast Asia were initially largely urban based,moving to the “countryside” after they were criminal-ized or violently attacked by national forces. Indonesiadiffered from Thailand and Malaysia in the sense that

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the Communist Party (PKI) and other left-wing par-ties and affiliate organizations were legal; they consti-tuted key players in Indonesian politics until 1966 whenIndonesia’s second president, Suharto, criminalizedthem. Communism was perhaps best organized in ur-ban areas of Indonesia, but various pushes to engageworkers in the forestry and plantation industries in Javaand Sumatra, as well as peasants all over the country,had also generated sizable rural organizations.13

Sarawak was something of an exception here, havingonly one small population center, Kuching, that couldbarely be called urban. In addition, Sarawak was a stateof smallholder agriculturalists, with few landless peas-ants or large masses of urban proletarians (Porritt 2004).However, nation-state-related territorial questions didconcern some of its citizens, who opposed an allianceof Peninsular Malaya with Sarawak and Sabah in theform the British had proposed; that is, as the Federa-tion of Malaysia. Left-leaning organizations were inter-ested in other political arrangements, including eithera North Kalimantan state made up of Brunei, Sabah,and Sarawak, or some kind of territorial connection(provincial or independent) with the Indonesian partsof Borneo; these imaginings constituted what we havebeen calling alternative civilizational projects. Insurgentsopposing the Federation of Malaysia operated from Bor-neo jungles on either side of the international borderbetween Malaysia and Indonesia.

Whereas jungle- and mountain-based insurgentsmight have understood themselves as parts of alter-native civilizing projects, state powers in the regiondepicted them as uncivilized and opposed to the mod-ernizing goals of the urban-based states. Similar “wild”associations were made about the jungle spaces occu-pied by insurgents. These labels were used to cast doubton the capacity of alternative visions and visionaries tolead in the post–World War II world. National stateleaders recognized that these competing civilizationalprojects could, potentially, depose and replace theirown. This possibility was demonstrated, not least, bythe ultimate military successes of communist partiesin neighboring nations such as China and the nation-states formed out of the colonial-era territory knownformerly as Indochina.

Articulations of Counterinsurgency andPolitical Forestry

We have already shown that the making of the po-litical forest was articulated with state making by dif-

ferentiating political forests from other kinds of landuse zones or state land management territories and theconcurrent making (or remaking) of racialized polit-ical subjects associated with certain forest territories.In the remainder of this article we draw on specificcases in parts of the countries known today as Malaysia,Indonesia, and Thailand. We examine discursive andmaterial practices through which nation-state territori-alities were constructed through insurgency and coun-terinsurgency and how counterinsurgency contributedto the making of political forests and the racialization ofbodies and territories. We focus on three key processesby state institutions and actors:

1. “Taking the jungle out of the forest”: Making clearboundaries between forests and agricultural areas, inlarge part by criminalizing what was deemed to beagriculture in forested areas. This involved discursivestrategies as well as material practices such as reser-vation of forests and the designation of certain areasfor settlement and permanent agriculture (industrialor smallholder private).

2. The relocation of people into and out of these forestareas through resettlement, evictions, and consol-idations of settlements, with specific practices fre-quently based on racialized understandings of loyaltyto the nation-state.

3. The militarization of forest areas through the de-ployment of troops, establishment of military bases,and transferring personnel and technologies of coun-terinsurgency and surveillance from the military toforest management agencies and timber companies.

Reorganizing Space and Reconstituting the Nation:Taking the Jungle out of the Forest

Taking the jungle out of the forest involved firstdepicting the jungle as a wild place occupied by wildpeople (Slater 1995; Peluso 2003b; Sioh 2004). Therhetoric of jungles was important to both insurgentsand counterinsurgency; jungles, like mountains, hills,uplands, and mangrove swamps, were often marginalpolitical and economic spaces—at the edges of statehegemony.14 Forests (lowland or upland) and moun-tains as base areas also provided cover—physically andpolitically—both in the terrain and its thick, oftenlofty vegetative cover. Insurgents sought out spacesthat were not entirely uninhabited: They intendedto win over the inhabitants of these areas or terrorizethem into assisting them if they could not win themover (e.g., Nasution 1953). Insurgents saw themselves

596 Peluso and Vandergeest

as alternatively oriented nationalists, but states charac-terized them as recalcitrant subjects, wild people, notquite full citizens or even fully human (Rachman 1970;Soemadi 1974). These representations lent legitimacyto state projects to control these regions and the peopleassociated with them—both long-settled peoples andthe insurgents who moved in.

A key aspect of counterinsurgency practice wasthus thwarting insurgents’ access to local peopleby cutting the links between insurgents and forestresidents (McColl 1967). This meant cutting offfood and supply lines, as well as preventing physicalaccess between the two sets of jungle dwellers asmuch as possible, to prevent prior residents’ politicalreeducation, recruitment, and logistic or empatheticsupport. In this way, counterinsurgency goals clearlycoincided with those of state forestry (and later,conservation areas and “reserves”): to transform junglesfrom peopled, untamed, dangerous mixtures of peopleand allegedly wild and separate natures into moreorderly, state-managed (or at least administered), andintegrated though differentiated forests and agriculturalareas, with people settled neatly and securely in villagesnext to them (Slater 1995; Peluso 2003b).15

Counterinsurgency operations involved movingpeople in at least three ways, each concurring with thecontemporary or subsequent objectives and interestsof political forestry. First, some residents, notably ruralChinese in Malaya, Sarawak, and Kalimantan, wereforced out of the area’s jungles. In these places, Chinesewere suspected of supporting insurgents or of beingcommunist or left-leaning and thereby of compro-mising national security. A second strategy involvedordering jungle dwellers to live in consolidated spatialsettlements, a strategy known later as strategic hamlets.Consolidation was thus applied both to Chinese, whowere forced to live behind barbed wire in Malaya orcontained in Sarawak, and to upland minorities—tribalpeoples—in Thailand and Indonesian Kalimantan,although the strategy’s long-term effects on people ofthese groups differed. A third type of movement wasthe resettlement of ethnic majorities into conflictedjungle zones in large resettlement or colonizationschemes. This was done where the governmentsbelieved that colonists would be more dependent ongovernment services, more loyal to the national center,and not supportive of insurgents (Soemadi 1974; Uhlig1984). Colonists were expected to clear forests forpermanent agriculture, changing the environment ofthe insurgent area as well as the region’s ecologicalmakeup.

Regardless of which strategy was adopted—andoften all three were deployed—the intention was todivide forests and agriculture into separate territorial-institutional domains of state authority—taking thejungle out of the forest—to isolate insurgents fromthe cover and sustenance provided by the jungleand its inhabitants. Political forests and permanentagriculture were not new technologies of power butserved the ruling governments well in these violentborder environments.

Racializing Insurgent Landscapes

Central to counterinsurgency discourses were themaking of jungle inhabitants and insurgent populationsinto national-level minorities and the association ofinsurgency with certain minority populations. By us-ing the term racialization, we aim to invoke the waysin which social and political characteristics of a groupare naturalized or simplified to an essence (Anthias andYuval-Davis 1992; Hall 1992; Vandergeest 2003). Forour purposes what is important is less whether coun-terinsurgents understood ethnicity or race as biologi-cally based or an outcome of social history (Goldberg2002) but, rather, how specific kinds of politics wereprojected onto racialized groups.

During the period under discussion, nation-states hadjust recently come into being as the predominant re-gional macropolitical organization. It was often the casethat so-called tribal peoples (or hill tribes) were remadeinto national minorities and the larger lowland eth-nic groups were constructed as national majorities. InIndonesia, for example, Dayaks, Punans, Malays, andPapuans, among others, might have held regional ma-jorities but, once joined with tens of millions of Javaneseas citizens within a “unified” Indonesia, overnight be-came national minorities. The same process affectedIban, Land Dayaks, and other minority residents ofSarawak and Sabah when those Borneo states joined theFederation of Malaya with its majorities of Malays andChinese. Some ethnic minorities were used or forcedto ally with government forces in counterinsurgencyoperations, and those who were not directly involvedwere demonized by national governments and militaries(Nasution 1953; Stubbs 1988; Porritt 1997).

In areas where majority populations lived in both up-land and lowland environments, such as in Thailand,uplanders associated with those jungles were more sus-pect than were lowlanders. Association with commu-nist parties and affiliate groups in Malaysia, Indonesia,Thailand, or with upland Islamists in Indonesia also

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rendered individuals living in the vicinities of theirstrongholds more suspect to national governments—asin the areas where the Darul Islam movement in partsof western and central Java had bases (Van Dijk 1981;Peluso 1992). Some ethnic minorities were recruitedto aid in the nationalizing projects but the politics ofloyalty could shift suddenly. Complicating these pro-cesses of racializing loyalties and territories was the factthat tribal peoples’ purportedly “natural” knowledge ofthe jungle was as important to counterinsurgency oper-ations as it was to resident or mobile insurgents.16

Racialization was not a new process; rather, racial-ized identities were refashioned by military strategistsout of preexisting ideas of subject groups’ origins,violent or governable predispositions, territorialhistories, and presumed associations with insurgentand counterinsurgent forces (Soemadi 1974), as wellas with geographical ideas of who belonged whereor in what place. In Southeast Asia, such ideas hadoriginated with anthropologists, geographers, andcustomary law specialists (Ellen 1999). Racializationwas an important aspect of rule and the law: Colonialadministrators classified people by racial groups andsubsequently presumed customary or native laws andinstitutions. They then ruled most groups “indirectly”through (selected) customary authorities. The efforts todocument customary practices called adat by the Dutchin The Netherlands East Indies served this purpose(Vandergeest and Peluso 2006a). What was new afterthe formation of nation-states were ideas of these groupsas national minorities, either tribal or formerly alien, andhow minority status was seen to relate to national goals.

Racialized ideas were acted on as if people ascribedethnic identities possessed certain political character-istics. “Tribal” peoples such as Hmong (in Thailand),Karen, Dayaks, and Orang Asli were fashioned asbackward, as well as, in some cases, innocent becausethey lived far from the nation-states’ centers andpracticed swidden agriculture. For example, Rachman(1970, 179) in a history of the Army Command PostXII in West Kalimantan, said that “people in theinterior of West Kalimantan [meaning Dayaks] wereblind to politics” before Indonesia’s Confrontationwith Malaysia.17 This alleged lack of politics also had“an effect on [national] security measures and efforts tostabilize/establish nationalist politics and ideologies”18

(9). He further attributed the “problem” of establishingnationalist awareness and loyalties, to the unfriendlyand “undeveloped environment,” stating that “trans-port connections in the vast interior of Kalimantanwere still extremely backward” (179). The senior

army officer who authored this document graphicallydescribed the border area between Sarawak and WestKalimantan, peopled by Dayaks, as presenting problemsfor their troops, as shown in this passage:

The entire border region, especially on the Indonesianside, is an area that has not yet been opened/developed,so that the roads are still paths, and the terrain is difficultto traverse. This natural environment enables [guerrillas]to hide from attacks and observation, thus encumbering[our] troops’ movement during the day and at night, be-cause the forest is dense and dark. The swamps are full ofmud and difficult to pass through and in the rainy seasonthey become wide lakes, obstructing movement. Large andsmall rivers are obstructions to movement, but also are theonly major means of communication in West Kalimantanat this time. (Rachman 1970, 180)19

Many tribal peoples were represented as being aswild as their environments: naturally war-like, fierce,and violent. This character, combined with their in-nocence, seemed a threat to Rachman (1970), amongother government advisors, who feared that junglepeoples would use their tribal warfare skills to supportorganized and subversive political violence againstthe urban-based states. Indeed, during the Japaneseoccupation, groups along this same border had beenencouraged by foreign allies to use long-forbidden “tra-ditional” practices of headhunting against the Japanese(Reese 1998). Their alleged backwardness fed therepresentation that they were too primitive to recognizegood civilization and reject “bad” alternatives, suchas the offers of insurgents willing to help tribal peoplefarm or to provide medicine in exchange for theirloyalty or participation in insurgency (Rachman 1970).

The shifting state narratives about forested uplandsas spaces inhabited by primitive tribal peoples are thuscrucial to understand because of their underlying po-litical content and motives. An excellent example isprovided by Thongchai Winichakul’s (2000) accountof early twentieth-century travel writing by Siameseelites, showing how their depictions of the strange anduncivilizable tribal people they encountered in junglesand wilderness were set against descriptions of rural orvillage Siamese (now called Thai) people, who werebackward but loyal to the Siamese king. The Lao ofSiam’s Northeast, who we discuss again later, were sit-uated somewhere between these two kinds of others.We are not romantic about the views of those involvedin alternative civilizing or state-building projects, whooften held similar condescending views of jungle-basedpeople. Leaders, theoreticians, and strategists in these

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parties were neither “tribal” minorities nor of forestvillage origins. The treatment of jungle-dwelling peo-ple under communism, had it succeeded in Thailand,Indonesia, or Malaysia, might have been as coerciveand insistent on removing them from forests as werethe nation-states that succeeded in defeating theseinsurgencies.20

Even more suspect to new national states wererural people of Chinese background self-constructedor ascribed as overseas Chinese, Indonesian Chinese,Sino-Thai, or locally called by the Chinese dialect orlanguage they spoke most frequently21—Khek (Hakka),Foochow, or Teochieu, among others. In Malaysia andIndonesia, Chinese were constructed as aliens or mi-grants, following colonial classifications of people forpurposes of imposing plural legal systems as part of theirpolitics of rule (Hooker 1978). In Malaysia and WestKalimantan, the governments explicitly associated Chi-nese (as opposed to other ethnic subjects such as Malaysand Dayaks) with membership in communist parties orgroups, although most serious research indicates thatsome people of nearly all ethnic backgrounds joined orsupported communist groups. In the 1950s the Com-munist Party of Malaya consisted primarily of urbanand Chinese intellectuals; Chinese in rural areas weretargeted for resettlement to better control their move-ments. Many resettled Chinese had moved into ruralareas to farm for subsistence during the Japanese occu-pation, joining rural and farming Chinese populationswho had settled much earlier (Hack 2001). In ruralWest Kalimantan, tens of thousands of people were clas-sified formally as Chinese by the government, and manymore had some Chinese ancestry (Heidhues 2003).

A third group of racialized subjects, national ethnicmajorities, presented a more complex picture whencomparing across nation-states, especially because ofthe particularly complex ethnic mixes in Indonesiaand Thailand. Javanese constituted a national majorityin Indonesia but they were not the only nontribalizedethnicity—people of various ethnicities associatedwith Sumatra, Sulawesi, and Bali were consideredethnically different from Javanese but not “tribal.”22

This was in part dependent on whether most ethnicsubjects of a particular group professed Islam (or in Bali,Hinduism) as opposed to an animist belief system.23

Further, because in Indonesia communism was legaland represented by a powerful national party underthe first presidential regime (until 1965), it couldnot be represented as embraced by a single ethnicgroup; rather, it cut a broad swath across minority andmajority populations. When President Suharto took

over, regional differences shaped the ways adherents tothis political ideology were represented. In Java, Bali,and Sumatra, it was clear that people of varying ethnicheritage were communist—and communist strugglewas at least ideologically based on class or village lines.In West Kalimantan, however, the military conflatedcommunist sympathies with being both rural andChinese, even though Chinese were as poor or morelikely to be poor as middle class or well off.24

Islamist insurgencies in Indonesia, DI/TII, were lessracialized, as insurgents and their supporters weremainly part of national or regional ethnic majorities inJava, Sumatra, and Sulawesi. In Thailand, the primar-ily lowland Thais fit a “majority slot,” although distinctregional identities in the north, south, and northeastmade some people more ethnically Thai than others, asdescribed later. In Malaysia, on the other hand, Malayswere the dominant national ethnic group, although inEast Malaysia (i.e., the Borneo states) this was con-tentious, as many Malays were migrants from the main-land.

All three nation-states created the conditions fornewly racialized landscapes by actively organizing or en-couraging the movement of majority or loyal subjectsto remote jungle areas to cut down forests and convertthem to permanent cash cropping. This became a keystrategy for pursuing the territorial expansion of na-tional states (Dove 1985; De Konick and Dery 1997).In forest areas where these presumably loyal subjectshad been resettled by national policy, and around in-ternational border areas where political affiliations hadlong been mixed and shifting across various politicalborders, governments constructed majority populationsas “needing military protection.” This military protec-tion was often pursued by organizing loyal villagers—national minorities or majorities—into self-defensemilitias such as village scouts or border patrols (Stubbs1988; Bowie 1992). Local people in the areas occupiedby insurgents were also encouraged to become tied tocentral states through incorporation into agriculturaldevelopment schemes, reforestation of national foreststhrough taungya (plantation establishment by allowingnearby farmers to plant agricultural crops between thestate’s main tree species for a limited number of years)and other state-sponsored development programs.

Importantly, the landscape effects and manage-ment goals of counterinsurgency varied, including theanticipated postinsurgency allocation of jurisdictionsand property rights. In some cases, counterinsurgencyhelped to produce forests that were devoid of humansettlements, at least from an administrative point of

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view. This privileged forest resurgence, protection, orextraction. In other cases, counterinsurgency led to thereplacement of forests with permanent agriculture, toforestry’s detriment and forest decline. The new prop-erty rights and state territories—such as forests or in-dustrial agricultural zones—served both accumulationand security purposes. Although this was not the intent,political violence and development represented prim-itive accumulation at its most basic: States expropri-ated forest-based (or jungle) subjects’ land in the nameof national security, reallocating it (often to others) innew forms of property (Glassman 2006), and eventuallyforced the intensification of market relations throughwhich surplus value could be appropriated.

In the remainder of this section, we present some(necessarily schematic) examples of how the conver-gences of counterinsurgency and forest making playedout in a few specific sites, and for certain ethnic sub-jects. These examples are not meant to be exhaustive,but they provide examples of different ways that coun-terinsurgency helped concurrently to produce nationalstates, political forests, and racialized landscapes.

The production of racialized strategic territoriesin northern borderlands of Malaya. During field-work in the northeastern state of Kedah in Malaysia,Vandergeest found that forest maps confirmed inter-view accounts and other research (Kuroda 2002) de-tailing how upper watershed hamlets were moved tolowland sites during the early 1950s. These hamletsincluded people classified as Malay (Malay-speaking,Islamic), Siamese (Buddhist, Siamese-speaking), and“Sam-Sam” (Siamese-speaking, Islamic). Where theemptied upland areas were not already gazetted as forestreserves, resettlement was accompanied by forest reser-vation, meant to consolidate the territorial control ofthe forestry department.

Racial classification did not affect whether peoplewere moved, but it did organize the resettlement pro-cess. Ethnic “Siamese” (considered alien populationsin Malaya) were contained in fenced camps (Kuroda2002). “Malays” (glossed as natives and the nationalethnic majority) were provided with new villages andland for growing rice and rubber. In a clear exampleof the making of ethnicity and the racialization of thelandscape, people previously classified as Sam-Sam, whowere Muslim Siamese speakers, were absorbed into theMalay category when they were moved. They were re-made into Malays through the agricultural practicesthey were allowed to continue and through their lo-cations within the new rural landscapes.

After the height of the Emergency had passed, thecamps containing Siamese were opened and residentswere allowed to establish rubber smallholdings on statelands, as had previously been promoted among reset-tled Malays. Unlike Malays, however, most Siamesenever received formal land titles. Their marginal posi-tions were maintained not through violence or coercivemovement but through exclusion from legal access tothe resources of the state, especially the formal recog-nition of their landholdings through land titles.

The incomplete hegemony of these arrangementshas been underlined by older villagers’ stories. In vil-lages adjacent to reserve forests in Kedah, intervieweessaid that displaced villagers continued for decades totravel seasonally to their old village sites to harvest fruit,especially durian from multigenerational trees. Thesevisits ceased only when the fruit trees were submergedby reservoirs from new dams, or claimed by ecotouristresorts located on reservoirs. Today conservationists,government foresters, and their supporters are likelyto represent these sites as pristine or conservationforests.

Identifying Chinese as the enemy and enclos-ing or evicting them from rural “jungles.” Duringthe Malayan and Sarawak Emergencies half a mil-lion Chinese forest “squatters” were moved into campscalled “New Villages” (Stubbs 1988, 286; Sioh 2004).The counterinsurgency link to forestry was differentin Malaysia, including both Peninsular Malaya andSarawak, and Indonesia in Borneo, specifically in WestKalimantan. In Malaysia, the Forestry Department de-veloped silviculture models specifically for reforestingland where forest cover had been cleared for farmingand farmers had been removed into New Villages. Insome areas, the declaration of the Emergency allowedthe Forestry Department to promote this technique asa scientific rationale for expelling Chinese and othercultivators who occupied forest villages and were sus-pected of supporting MCP insurgents (Wyatt-Smith1947, 1949; Ali 1966). These scientific practices werethus both silvicultural management techniques and for-est department strategies for reclaiming land as politicalforests. They were successful because they built on andreinforced counterinsurgency practices.

Similarly, in West Kalimantan, the Indonesian armyforcibly engaged tribespeople, other locals, and non-Chinese migrants to evict long-settled rural Chinesefamilies in the late 1960s, after Suharto’s rise to powerand the accompanying agrarian and anti-Chinese vio-lence in Java and other parts of Indonesia. All people

600 Peluso and Vandergeest

officially identified as Chinese were glossed as commu-nists or supporters of communist guerillas, and manyof their village living sites were referred to as jungles(rimba). They were forced to move to refugee campsand resettlement areas or to find refuge with familiesin urban areas (Davidson and Kammen 2002; Peluso2003a, 2003b). Dayaks (various ethno-linguistic groupsconsidered native to Kalimantan), Malays, and othernon-Chinese residents were made to prove their loyal-ties to the Indonesian state by participating in—or notobstructing—these evictions. Some frightened villagersand insurgents took refuge or sought new bases in jungleareas closer to the international border with Sarawak.Dayak villagers in particular were forced to supportthe national military’s counterinsurgency during theIndonesian army’s subsequent seven years (1967–1974)of jungle operations in the province, mostly byserving as “jungle guides” (Rachman 1970; Soemadi1974).

The year the evictions started, 1967, the first nationalForest Law was established for Indonesia; previouslymost forested areas had been under the jurisdiction ofcustomary authorities or provincial governors. As na-tional minorities, Dayaks—who had been a provincialmajority—now had different political relations withthese forests once they were rendered national. Lineswere drawn on maps to create huge national forest ter-ritories in West Kalimantan and other provinces, disre-garding prior and conflicting customary claims and uses.The Indonesian army was given a wide swath of terri-tory (20 km wide) as a security and revenue-producingconcession along Kalimantan’s 1,000-km border withthe Malaysian state of Sarawak, expanding the nationalsecurity role it had been given by President Soekarnoin 1960 (Robison 1986). This extensive border conces-sion under national military control made the violentnational state a highly visible material entity in formerly“remote” West Kalimantan.

Planned and spontaneous settlement by “ethnicmajorities.” Resettlement and colonialism led to es-pecially diverse outcomes, resulting from the states’decisions to either turn jungles into political forestsor to convert them to permanent agriculture. WestKalimantan and West Java came to be connected in thisway, as many West Javanese (Sundanese) transmigrantswere resettled in West Kalimantan. Government-sponsored transmigrants were (unbeknown to them)given land in areas that had been forcibly abandoned byChinese. Although the transmigration tracts were cov-ered in dense secondary growth—jungle—by the early

1980s, two decades earlier that land had constitutedrural areas inhabited for more than 200 years (Heid-hues 2003). The Chinese had left hundreds of thou-sands of hectares of irrigated and rain-fed rice paddies,vegetable garden land, and fruit and rubber gardens,exceeding what could be taken over and used by lo-cals who expropriated these lands after the evictions.Transmigration also enabled the conversion of massiveamounts of jungle or secondary forest into rubber andoil palm production and enabled changes in propertyrights from customary to private (Elmhirst 2004).

In addition, retired or decommissioned soldiers andpolice were resettled into areas considered dangerous orongoing security threats (rawan) in West Kalimantan.This practice has been commonly used by the victoriousafter many wars throughout history.25 These ex-soldiers,as well as the resettlement sites and the new army basesbuilt to accompany new forces stationed there, providedanother powerful, everyday symbol of the national In-donesian state occupying the former jungles of WestKalimantan, but in a different part of the landscape—heavily populated agroforestry areas (Peluso 2009).TheIndonesian military thus imposed itself symbolically andin material practice in the West Kalimantan landscape:The army fought against insurgency in these jungles(1967–1974), the various branches of the military wereawarded timber concessions when the first national for-est law was passed (1967–1980s), new national securitybases were built in the province at significant locations,and retired soldiers were given land in the province tocultivate (1980s–1990s).

In Thailand, agricultural expansion overrode themaking of political forests in most areas. Counterinsur-gency efforts affected extensive areas that had been orwere in the process of being demarcated and gazettedas reserve forests. These were occupied by millions of“spontaneous” migrants, not part of official resettlementprograms but sanctioned by the state (Uhlig 1984;Hirsch 1990; Vandergeest 1996). Although clearingwas in violation of forest law, these settlements werecondoned and even encouraged by authorities whosaw the movement of people into these areas as a wayof decreasing forest cover for insurgents, as well as acounterinsurgency strategy aimed at winning over theloyalties of land-poor farmers susceptible to insurgentpropaganda. The government also planned and estab-lished colonies in forest areas, sponsoring the movementof lowland “Thai” farmers into these areas. Leblond(2010), for example, drawing on his exhaustive researchon the question of rural population displacement, de-scribed how the government developed a policy

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during the 1970s of surrounding insurgent strongholdswith deforested land and new villages populated byloyal subjects who received government developmentprograms. The approach was implemented through theSelf Defense Border Village project, which established578 villages between 1978 and 1981 close to bordersand communist strongholds around the country, as wellthrough smaller royal projects and other programs.

Racialized agricultural conversions in Thailand.Thailand is a useful illustration of the racializationof counterinsurgency operations, as the Thai nationalstate has often been considered less racialized than,for example, Malaysia, where the postcolonial nationalstate has maintained and solidified the racial classifi-cations introduced by the colonial state. The contrast-ing approaches to counterinsurgency in the north andnortheast of Thailand make this point. Ethnic Lao orIsan people, regionally dominant in the northeast of thecountry, were considered suspect in terms of nationalloyalty compared to the central Thai. The region hada history of supporting left politics, and thousands ofpeasants had joined the jungle-based resistance to theJapanese and Thai alliance during World War II (Som-chai 2006). As Buddhists, however, and wet-rice culti-vators who spoke a language close to Thai, they weredefinitely not politically treated in the same way as up-land, tribal peoples of the north. The counterinsurgencyand forest management approach was therefore not toresettle them out of forests but to find better ways of link-ing them to the urban state center through developmentprojects and facilitating the expansion of permanentagriculture through road building and the promotionof upland cash crops linked to international markets.Ways were found to recognize their land rights evenin forest reserves (Vandergeest and Peluso 2006b). Notsurprisingly, then, the most rapid decline of Thailand’sforests during this period was in the northeast. Accord-ing to the Royal Forestry Department, forest cover innortheast Thailand declined from about 42 percent in1961 to just 15 percent in 1985 (Hirsch 1993, 55).

In the north of Thailand,26 however, forests wereassociated with “hill tribes,” who were considered muchmore difficult to enlist into the national civilizingproject.27 Counterinsurgency measures here involvedresettling upland ethnic groups into consolidated forestvillages, as previously described. Hearn (1974) listed101 tribal villages that were abandoned or destroyed innorthern provinces. Those villagers, some 12,000 peo-ple, were resettled in thirteen sites in 1972. Althoughthese resettlement efforts were rapidly abandoned and

replaced with the policy described earlier of surroundingcommunist strongholds with loyal subjects (Leblond2010), the overall effect contrasted with the effectsof counterinsurgency in the northeast. Fewer loyalsubjects were settled in the forests of northern Thailandcompared to the northeast, and initial attempts weremade to limit the access of northern ethnic minorities(hill tribes) to forests. These policies have since beenreinforced legislatively by making Reserve Forests intoNational Parks and Wildlife Sanctuaries (Sturgeon2005; Atchara 2009). In 1985, a few years after theinsurgency ended, Forestry Department statistics(reproduced in Hirsch 1993) showed that 50 percentof the land area in the north remained under biologicalforest, down from 69 percent in 1961. Over a similarperiod in the northeast, the forest cover declinedfrom 42 to 15 percent. Clearly, the distinctivenessof counterinsurgency tactics and strategies did notprovide the only reasons for these regional differences;topography (the north being more mountainous) alsoshaped how people moved. Counterinsurgency strategywas, however, a major contributing factor in producingthe contrasting forests of the north and northeast. Theperiod’s security impetus generated the subsequentstringent restrictions on “forest farming” (shiftingor swidden agriculture; Kunstadter and Chapman1978) that have drawn the attention of researchersstudying the political ecology of forestry in northernThailand.

We finish this section with a few comments on dif-ferent means by which forest-based political violencecontributed to the separation of jungle into forest andagriculture. One reason was simply that during insur-gency and counterinsurgency, forest areas became dan-gerous places for farmers and forest product (previouslycalled “jungle produce”) collectors. For example, on theIndonesian side of Borneo, Dayak villagers said theywere afraid to make new swidden fields, fearing thatIndonesian soldiers from Java and Sumatra would mis-take them for rebels. Farmers, especially women, wereafraid they might run into combatants (government oroppositional) in the forested areas and stopped graz-ing cattle and collecting forest products as well. In-surgents, like government soldiers, suspected villagers,too. Stories abound in all these study sites about notbeing able to trust anyone during these times. DI/TIIexplicitly forbade West Java villagers from burning theforest, afraid that their bases and hiding places wouldbe revealed (Peluso 1992). Moreover, after large tractsof land were allocated to the military in Indonesia,local people were afraid to complain or act if they

602 Peluso and Vandergeest

lost access to customary land, trees, and other forestproducts.

In sum, throughout this period of insurgency andcounterinsurgency, millions of people moved into andout of jungles. These movements helped set the con-ditions under which forest departments could subse-quently practice forestry and the terms by which theycould challenge government claims of exclusive controlover political forests. The movements of forest subjectshad ecological effects because of changes in everydayand institutional forestry practices. This era was alsocrucial in relation to the refashioning of racialized statesubjects, reconstituting their spatial relations to polit-ical forests and agricultural areas and their positioningand political relations within the nation-state.

Deploying Military Resources in Jungle Emergencies

Our final argument is that conflicts generated bycompeting state-building projects drew huge militaryresources into enhancing surveillance and facilitatingstate access to and control of forested areas. The effectwas to reinforce the coercive power of state forest de-partments, police, and militaries, and thus their abilitiesover the long term to enforce the separation of agricul-ture from forests. We briefly highlight some of the waysthat insurgency, militarization, and counterinsurgentprograms and practices contributed to transformationsin forestry.

A crucial way that militaries supported forestry wasthrough the intensified surveillance and mapping offorest areas. In Thailand, the Royal Survey Departmentbecame in many ways an arm of the U.S military.The department used aerial photos to produce thewell-known series of 1:50,000 maps of all forested areasstarting in the 1950s, which were periodically updatedbased on new aerial photographs. These maps presentedtopography, vegetation, crops, village locations, andso on and were shared with other government depart-ments, in particular the Forestry Department, wherethey became the base maps for forestry work. Theywere the base maps used to demarcate reserve forests,with the boundaries of reserve forests often drawn alongthe contour lines and vegetation zoning (Vandergeest1996, 2003). By the early 1970s over 40 percent of theterrestrial area of Thailand was demarcated on suchmaps as reserve forest, with minimal ground checkinginto local forest use. Similar stories about mappingcan be told about Malaysia, Sarawak, and Kalimantan(Harper 1997; Barr, Brown, and Casson 1999).

Rural development in insurgent areas was explic-itly a form of counterinsurgency. Field research in the1990s in Sarawak and West Kalimantan indicated thatboth the SALCRA scheme for smallholder cash cropsin western Sarawak and the distribution of fruit treeseedlings and rubber smallholding projects (PPKR) inWest Kalimantan prioritized sites near insurgent bases.In Thailand, the significant development program wasthe Accelerated Rural Development (ARD) scheme,supported by U.S. Agency for International Develop-ment funds (and employing many Peace Corps andCanadian Universities Service Overseas volunteers),in needy provinces where insurgency was most active.The primary ARD activity was road building (Muscat1990).

Roads had multiple purposes, including easier mili-tary access for troop and supply movement and surveil-lance; as integral components of logging operations,forest conversions, and other capitalist projects; anddrawing existing populations further into the sphere ofcentral state rule by increasing their access to domesticmarkets. Roads were often built through reserve forests(Uhlig 1984). Between 1960 and 1980, total road lengthin Thailand tripled (Hirsch 1990). It more than tripledin West Kalimantan and Sarawak during the same pe-riod. Road building facilitated “spontaneous” migration,as land-poor farmers flooded to the forests to grow bothsubsistence and cash crops (maize, cassava, sugar cane;Uhlig 1984; Hirsch 1990). Road building was criticalto transmigration as well as commodity marketing and,of course, logging in West Kalimantan and Sarawak.

Militaries also transferred other technologiesand organizational cultures to forestry departments.Helicopters, for example, started out as a technology ofwar and became a technology that assisted foresters tomonitor forest cover change, rural settlement, and theillegal cutting of swidden fields, and generally proveduseful for intimidating resident peoples who violatedthe forest–agriculture boundary (although many con-tinued to do so nonetheless; Atchara 2009). The organi-zational structures and institutional patterns of forestryhad long imitated the military, as reflected in the territo-rial structure of forest range management, the rotationof foresters to avoid their becoming too attached to thepeople in their districts, and in some cases the arming offorester enforcement units (Kaufman 1960). In some ar-eas, forestry departments and militaries worked togetherboth to control and to profit from forest exploitation,as we saw in the example from West Kalimantan wheretimber concessions were allocated to PT Yamaker,an army timber concession on the long international

Political Ecologies of War and Forests 603

border between Indonesian and Malaysian Borneo.Retired military men were (and are) frequently hiredby timber companies for security, and both timbercompanies and other forest product traders generallypaid “taxes” to local army bases along their routes fromforest to market.

During violence, the deployment of troops—thousands of men—inside and at the edges of the junglesoccupied by insurgents kept foresters as well as villagersout, unable to tend their tree or field crops during thosetimes. In Kalimantan, new military bases were builtthroughout an extensive “border area” that extendedsouth from the international Sarawak border throughthe city of Singkawang. These symbols of the nationbecame permanent landscape installments, with terri-torial jurisdictions over land and forests in the vicinitydecades after the end of physical violence.

Even after the insurgents no longer posed a seri-ous challenge to the national states we have discussedhere, national security arguments continued to shapethe practice of professional forestry in border areas. Thefear of further insurgencies helped motivate the reshap-ing of property rights to land and forest products, thepractices around forestry, the location of population set-tlements, and the use of military personnel as privateguards for forest enterprises. These practices continuedto put foresters, militaries, and big extractive businessesinto close proximity and to shape what happened to theforests.

Discussion and Conclusion

The overall effect of insurgent political violence andcounterinsurgency on forestry practices in Indonesia,Malaysia, and Thailand was to intensify and strengthenthe legal and institutional processes used in the makingof professional or scientific forestry and forests in South-east Asia. “Jungles” as theaters of insurgency were tamedthrough massive rearrangements of property rights, landuse zones, vegetative cover, and human settlements.The political violence provided a justification as wellas a mechanism—military deployment and tactics—forintensive and extensive national state intervention inlandscapes over which it had had only weak hegemonicpower. Political violence preceded both forest enclo-sures and state territorializations.

The period of widespread insurgency we describe inSoutheast Asia was also the period that the Food andAgriculture Organization was promoting its “forest-for-development” model of professional forestry (Westoby

1987). Forestry for development was generally precededby enclosure and reservation of forests and the dispos-session of rural people from huge tracts of forest lands,except as forest labor. Like forest enclosures and reserva-tion, counterinsurgency operations also aimed to evictpeople from jungles to facilitate permanent conversionof the land to industrial agriculture. It is ironic that thetactics of counterinsurgency often included governmentpersonnel (foresters or military) burning huge tracts offorest to rout out insurgents.

These forms of violence against subjects and forestswere followed by apparently more ordered spatial prac-tices: the creation of state territories. As applied in thosejungles of Southeast Asia where ruling states did notadopt communist forms, forestry for development wasnot only a strategy for development or forestry but con-currently for counterinsurgency, nation-state building,and the production of national natures. Thus the ide-ologies and institutional practices associated with theconservation era’s romantic notions of preserving rain-forests, primary forests, and pristine forests were bothpreceded and enabled by this earlier, violent period inwhich the jungles were made into primary forests ordivided between political forests and agriculture. Theserealities of forest history are ignored or forgotten in mostcontemporary conservation discourse. The peopled jun-gles of the Cold War era do not fit the notion of pristineenvironments.

During the Cold War–era insurgencies, the junglesof Southeast Asia represented a variety of frontiers: notonly those at the edges of “civilization” and nationalstate hegemony but also the frontiers of brutal extrac-tions of biomass. Contemporary state forestry and theshapes and ecologies of the political forests are as muchproducts of this era as from colonial institutions anddiscourses. Today, in these countries where centralized,national control was solidified, jungle discourses havelargely disappeared from references to the managedstate forests, nature reserves, and timber concessionsthat populate the landscape. Use of the term junglescontinues, however, in reference to those tropicalforests where antistate political violence (insurgency)is occurring in border or other marginal and contestedforests. In other words, jungles still exist in certain partsof the Philippines (Mindanao), Burma (Myanmar),and West Papua, to name a few.

Political forests formed of violence are thus like the“imperial debris” recently described by Stoler (2008,193), caught up in “the evasive space of imperial for-mations past and present as well as the perceptions andpractices by which people are forced to reckon with

604 Peluso and Vandergeest

features of those formations in which they remainvividly and imperceptibly bound.” The debris, or left-over effects of imperialism, that we discuss in this articleare not only those that were created through the impe-rial projects of traditional colonial powers. Other effectsarose from the reinvention or extension of colonial-eraimperial practices by newly formed nation-states tryingto make their control of territorial formations withinthe nation-state seem “normal” and “natural.” We haveshown here that jungle counterinsurgency operationsaffected territorial control and “national security” and,at the same time, produced or reproduced racializedsubjects connected to the national state and politicalforests in new ways. Even today, those groups whoseloyalty to the central state was most suspect are mostlikely to lack formal land rights.

In sum, we have shown that it is difficult to un-derstand the ecological and political lives of contem-porary forests without understanding their connectionsto Cold War–era insurgencies and counterinsurgencies.These specific forms of political violence are connectedto forests and forestry in ways that are distinct fromthose identified in other critical geographies of politicalviolence and forests. For this reason, except in lingeringcases of forest-based insurgency and counterinsurgency,or in the fantasies produced to lure adventure tourists,tropical forests are jungles no more.

Acknowledgments

This article was based on data collected underthe auspices of National Science Foundation grant9896220, Law and Social Sciences Program. We are,as always, appreciative of Denise Leto for her editingand assistance, to Jo-Ellen Parry for her organizationalassistance, and to Dorian Fougeres and David Harris forresearch assistance. We have benefited from the com-ments of colleagues at University of Toronto’s Asia In-stitute, the York University Geography Department,the University of Georgia Geography Department,the Association of Asian Studies, the Association ofAmerican Geographers, and the Environmental His-tory Association, at whose colloquia and meetings ear-lier versions of this article were presented.

Notes1. The direct impacts on the environment are well known

and have been well documented. Violence betweenforesters and forest-based populations has also generateda significant literature, too vast to list here.

2. On this, see our earlier work, in particular Peluso andVandergeest (2001) and Vandergeest and Peluso (2006a,2006b).

3. See also Sioh (1998) and Neumann (2004).4. On the pitfalls of recognition as national political sub-

jects for indigenous groups, see Povinelli (2002).5. The sources of these technologies were largely foreign:

the United States, Australia, Britain—and in some cases,the Soviet Union and China—setting the stage for newglobal hegemonies of the Cold War and its aftermath.

6. This is a vast literature. For relatively recent interven-tions see, for example, Neumann (2004) and Watts(2004). On forests specifically, see Peluso and Van-dergeest (2001) or Potter (2003).

7. This is also a huge literature. See, for example, Hecht andCockburn (1989), Guha (1990), Peluso (1992), Peluso,Vandergeest, and Potter (1995), Vandergeest and Peluso(1995), Bryant (1997), Sivaramakrishnan (1999), andAbe, de Jong, and Lye (2003).

8. For example, see the different versions of the “SmallWars Manual United States Marine Corps,” available onthe Internet (e.g., http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/swm/index.htm); or, on Indonesia, Fundamentals ofGuerrilla Warfare by Nasution (1953).

9. Many countries in Central and South America, includ-ing Guatamala, Peru, Brazil, and Chile, were wracked bysimilar types of “jungle wars” in the 1950s through the1970s.

10. Also during this period of agrarian violence in Indone-sia, peasants and landless farmers in Java and Sumatrain communist and socialist organizations invaded plan-tations and privately held large holdings.

11. The latter occurred when the second president of In-donesia criminalized communism and was hunting downboth West Kalimantan and Sarawak members of theguerrilla forces trained by Soekarno and his army in-side Indonesia (and by the Indonesian army). For adetailed account of these low-impact wars, see, for ex-ample, Mackie (1974), Coppel (1983), Dennis and Grey(1996), and Davidson and Kammen (2002).

12. These are often the primary subject of political ecologiesof forestry (Guha 1990; Peluso 1992; Neumann 1998).

13. Indonesian communism in some ways failed because itorganized in rural areas through village patrons, ratherthan in class-based organizations (Mortimer 1974).

14. Although we do not go as far as Scott (1998, 2009)and see these as fully “nonstate spaces” or “ungovernedspaces.”

15. Note that not all “jungles” were rendered politicalforests: Some were seen as too degraded and either con-verted to agriculture or left to be converted.

16. See, for example, Nasution (1953), Leary (1995),Endicott (1997), Peluso (2003a), Vandergeest (2003),and Jonsson (2005).

17. “Penduduk pedalaman umumnja [sic] buta politik.”18. “Hal ini membawa pengaruh terhadap usaha ketahanan dan

stabilisasi idiologi dan politk bernegara.”19. “Sepandjang daerah perbatasan terutama didaerah Indonesia

merupakan daerah jang belum dibuka/dibangun, sehinggadjalan2 masih merupakan “djalan setapak” dan meru-pakan medan jang sulit ditempuh. Keadaan alami mem-berikan keuntungan berlindung dari serangan dan penintaian

Political Ecologies of War and Forests 605

sehingga menjulitkan gerakan pasukan baik siang atau malamkarena hutan jang lebat dan gelap. Rawa2 merupakanpangkalan jang penuh dengan lumpur2 jang susah dilaluidan dimusim hudjan mendjadi danau air jang luas sehinggasangat menghalangi gerakan. Sungai2 besar dan ketjil meru-pakan penghalang gerakan, tetapi djuga merupakan satu2njaalat komunikasi penting di Kalimatnan Barat sampai saatini.”

20. As has been the case in Vietnam and more recently inLaos.

21. Many spoke several dialects in addition to other lan-guages used regionally on a daily basis.

22. Cf. Li’s (1999) use of “tribal slot” and Trouillot’s (1991)now classic “savage slot.”

23. Christianity—Catholicism or Protestantism of anysort—did not carry the same weight, as it was generallyheld that missionaries during colonialism often went to“tribal” (animist/pagan) areas searching for souls to con-vert. See, for example, Henley (2008).

24. See Rachman (1970) on the strategy and Davidson andKammen (2002).

25. For example, in the United States after the Revolution-ary War, in various Central American countries after the1980s and 1990s wars, and in post–World War II SovietUnion (Brown 1999), ancient and contemporary China(Menzies 1992), and elsewhere.

26. The “north” of Thailand as it is used in Thailand does notinclude what we have referred to here as “the northeast.”

27. The situation in the north was further complicated bythe presence of other military powers interested in opiumand the violent politics in Burma, Laos, and China (Mc-Coy 1972; Sturgeon 2005).

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Correspondence: Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley, 139 Giannini Hall, #3114, Berkeley,CA 94720, e-mail: npeluso@berkeley.edu (Peluso); Department of Geography, York University, 700 Keele Street, N405 Ross, Toronto,Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada, e-mail: pvander@yorku.ca (Vandergeest).