World Food Policy Volume 3, No. 2/Volume 4, No. 1, Fall16/Spring17 | Page 87

Land, State, and Society in Laos: Ethnographies of Land Policies entrench the Lao state and its “tech- nologies of governing” in places that had hitherto largely escaped the state’s reach. Similarly, Dwyer (2013) presents two detailed case studies showing that the literature’s focus on the foreign or corruptive dimensions of land grab- bing misses the most important point, namely their strong embedding in the national and local political landscapes of Laos. resettlements, focusing on the need to consider individual agency in mobility; some Laotians have indeed been driven by aspirations of “escaping poverty”, as the official motto declares, and entering what they see as a “modern” life (see also High 2014). The problem is not so much mobility per se, but the failure of the state to provide the conditions for its success. High tries to go beyond the domination/resistance paradigm, showing how people have appropriated and reformulated the state’s discourses on development in light of their own desires. Even if High, Lund, Tan and Dwyer’s approaches are different, they share a common interest in the way land policies have become central to spreading “state relations” in Laos. Such state relations refer to social relations predicated on bureaucratic procedures, administrative authority, political deci- sions, or reference to anything emically indexed to “the state” by the interacting parties. I use this concept as opposed to “state–society relations” to refrain from an overly substantive view of the state as different by nature or separable from society. Even if the state/society dichotomy is a pervading representa- tion in modern societies, it should not be taken at face value: it is a construc- tion, not a fact (High & Petit, 2013; Li, 2005; Mitchell, 2006; Sharma & Gupta, 2006). Further, a too binary concept of state–society relations does not cap- ture interactions between state officers themselves, who may have divergent opinions or interests, nor does it cap- ture interactions between local em- ployees and citizens who use the law or other state rhetoric in promoting their views. Another critical viewpoint has been developed by Lund (2011), who is concerned by the way land policies are linked to and participate in the creation of political subjectivities. He argues that these policies do not reflect the Laotian state’s pre-existing sovereignty over land, but rather create it. In local contexts, land issues have long been settled by village or family authorities. The