ABSTRACT
Emotions matter in struggles over land; they influence resource access, use, and control, and shape people’s lives and relations with each other and the state. However, literature on land and resource grabs has only recently started to give attention to emotion. In this chapter, we draw on long-term fieldwork in a Khmer community and an ethnic minority community in rural Cambodia to reveal how emotions and their effects on collective action are shaped by shifting socio-political contexts and ecologies. We argue that emotions shape land grabs in two ways: first, emotions enable land grabs. State and corporate actors produce both negative emotions of fear and distrust amongst communities through threats, violence and obfuscation, while simultaneously producing desire for development and gratitude through discourses of promised prosperity, gift giving, and plantation employment, which limit collective mobilisation. Second, emotions also disable land grabs, as people organise into social movements and engage in ‘emotion work’ to build collective solidarity and encourage action to resist land grabbing. Emotions do not have universal effects; ‘negative’ emotions such as fear can at times propel collective action, and at other times, paralyse resistance. Comparing our two cases reveals the importance of sociopolitical contexts, affective ties to land, and local leadership in mobilising shared emotions and collective action.
