With Land and Loyalty: Security and the Development of Property Rights in Thailand, political scientist Tomas Larsson presents an original and provocative study on the historical origins of Thailand's property rights regime. Thailand is something of an anomaly in Global South countries, as one of the pioneers of formalizing smallholder property rights. How did such state-backed tenure security for so many rural farming households in Thailand come about?
A neoliberal interpretation on Thai land formalization might focus upon a technocratic orientation towards enhancing smallholder productivity, and in particular, World Bank support for the Thai land titling program starting in 1982. Indeed Larsson writes that in Thailand in the second half of the twentieth century, “[l]and assets were converted into capital on a massive scale” (p. 29), as small farmers and small business owners became the “backbone of the country's economy” (p. 28). However, Larsson observes that domestic land titling in Thailand reached back to the 1954 Land Code. Moreover, in large part due to the country's avoidance of direct colonial rule, Thailand was not constrained by the historical legacies of a concession-based plantation economy, or a significant landlord class founded upon peasant evictions and dispossession. This led American foreign advisors to underplay the importance of land titling in Thailand in the 1950s, at a time when American-backed land reforms were happening elsewhere in Asia. The unresolved puzzle Larsson poses is therefore “why it had been possible to dramatically improve property rights institutions in Thailand” (p. 9) in the first place.
“Sequential securitization” (p. 149) lies at the core of Larsson's analysis, a concept that links “perception of a threat” and the “formulation of policies aimed at alleviating the threat” (p. 3). The impetus for Thai state securitization is traced to the threats of colonialism, and later communism. Each posed existential challenges for Thai elites and incentivized distinct policy responses. Land and Loyalty develops comparative case material from the history of land titling regimes in Japan, colonial Burma, and the Philippines to explain the divergent pathways of property rights formalization in relation to state security threats in these countries.
Larsson's comparative securitization approach is in the tradition of Doner, Ritchie, and Slater's work on security and state formation in Asia,Footnote 18 although Larsson places greater emphasis on understanding the elites' perception of security threats, and tracing through complex policy responses. Using a conceptual and methodological toolkit focused on delineating causal mechanisms, identifying critical junctures, and extrapolating from regional comparisons, Larsson's analysis builds upon all of the strengths of this framework, and perhaps also suffers from some of the limitations. While Larsson is attuned to complexity, and indicates that securitization was not the only important factor, nevertheless sequential securitizations are, for Larsson, the animating historical and institutional pivot points in the history of Thai land formalization.
In chapter 3, focusing on the period from 1855 to World War I, Larsson argues that Siam strategically under-invested in building institutions for the formalization of rural property rights, and elites actively promoted illegibility in land administration. Larsson forwards that during this period, the Siamese state obstructed the commodification of land, blocked large-scale land investments, and became “actively non-developmental in order to protect its sovereignty in the context of geopolitical vulnerability” (p. 33, emphasis in the original). Siam's selective adoption of Western norms regarding the rule of law, for example, in the establishment in 1901 of a Royal Thai Survey Department and the adoption of a Torrens land titling system, are interpreted as a “means to win back fiscal and judicial authority that had been lost in 1855” (p. 59). Land policy was thus enlisted into diplomatic strategy. The result was a colonial-era plantation and agricultural sector managed through Siamese, Malay, and ethnic Chinese smallholders.
The interwar period (chapter 4) witnessed continued underdevelopment of property rights formalization in Siam in response to colonial pressures for land investment (including from Japan, as well as Chinese entrepreneurs) and negotiations to end the extraterritorial rights of the colonial powers. Larsson also notes the growing role of nationalist sentiments at this time. The unanticipated outcome of such continued underinvestment in commercial agriculture in the interwar period meant that Siam (unlike colonial Burma) largely escaped the debilitating effects of the Great Depression. Larsson argues that the way in which Siamese elites linked land titling and peasant dispossession to questions of state security, and to ending the regime of extraterritoriality, are important factors in interpreting the divergent pathways of smallholder capitalism between Siam and Burma.
Chapter 5 traces the outcomes of land titling from the 1954 Thai Land Code. While the legal land tenure system was heavily bureaucratic, and was arguably still illegible in many respects, the key distinction for Larsson is the transition from state neglect of property formalization to “active developmentalism” (p. 108). For Larsson, the key historical juncture is the emergence of communism as a new, internal threat to elites. In the Cold War period, a lack of formal property rights was associated with rural poverty and to some extent dispossession due to landlordism, and poor, dispossessed farmers were viewed as susceptible to communist overtures.
The period from the 1960s to the 1980s witnessed the dramatic enlargement of the Thai forest reserve system, which rendered quite insecure the farm holdings of millions of people at the forest frontier. Fascinatingly, Larsson notes how in 1971, Thai schoolteachers, village headmen, and even students were enlisted to “clear up a backlog of 50,000 land certificates” (p. 124) due to the shortage of officials in the Department of Lands. But for Larsson, this bifurcated property regime (tenure security for many, but tenure insecurity for those living within reserve forest), also relates to securitization. Here I suggest Larsson's securitization thesis begins to lose its traction. Larsson argues that in reality the Thai Interior Ministry encouraged settlement in forest reserve territories as a means to win rural “hearts and minds” (p. 138), while by the 1980s the environment was also becoming viewed as a national “security” issue. An alternative perspective to a securitization thesis for this period in Thailand could focus on diverging bureaucratic interests and territorial strategies between the Royal Forestry Department and the Ministry of the Interior,Footnote 19 although forms of securitization were certainly directed toward some forest reserve dwellers and ethnic minority uplanders during this period.Footnote 20
In the last chapter, Larsson reflects upon the implications of the study regarding the origin of property rights for the contemporary period, as the security threat perceptions of colonialism and communism have passed. In southern Thailand, some officials continue to view property formalization as a means to disarm insurgency. More generally however, Larsson argues that regional integration and globalization has “desecuritized” (p. 150) issues of foreign landownership. In numerous developing countries (but notably with Thailand not among them), the last decade of global land investments has instead resulted in cases of institutional breakdown in land administration, rent seizing by state officials, and an apparent willingness to privatize state sovereignty to concessionaires. Neighboring Laos and Cambodia are two exemplars of this phenomenon. Following Larsson's analysis, a relative lack of moderate-intensity internal or external security threats to elites would be a factor in an apparent undermining of state discipline, and rather low responsiveness to rural populations in Laos and Cambodia. Indeed, there is as yet no Via Campesina-type, broad-based civil society movement, mobilizing viable “exit” options for rural populations in these regional authoritarian states.
With Land and Loyalty, Larsson has developed a detailed and innovative historical analysis of the emergence of formal property rights in Thailand. The book is the product of serious scholarship. I find the analysis broadly convincing, particularly in explaining the colonial period and the maneuvers of the Siamese state to avoid colonial control and to end the system of extraterritoriality. Indeed, the question of sovereign state control over land and natural resources external actors continues to be an issue in Thailand and in other developing countries, and Larsson has introduced a novel conceptual lens through which to consider these questions.
Yet, I am also left wondering how Larsson's narrative of a generally benevolent form of state securitization, and of state elites viewing Thai farmers as the “backbone of the nation,” could transform into elite views of, for example, the Farmers' Federation of Thailand, as an internal security threat to be dealt with through brutal means.Footnote 21 Indeed, the contrasting cover images of the two books—with Land and Loyalty showing a 1953 photo of Thai Prime Minister Phibun Songkhram officiating at a farmer's land title ceremony, and Revolution Interrupted showing a 1975 image of a group of northern farmers and student activists detained by Thai authorities—seems to highlight a Janus-face of state governance in agrarian relations. This also suggests the limits of securitization as a singular mobilizing concept, and points towards the role of the state in class formation more broadly. Methodologically, this would imply extending analysis beyond causal mechanisms, critical junctures, and elite coalitions, and incorporating more of the relational, historical, and geographical dimensions of agrarian-state-capital relations, and aspects of rural people's agency, into the field of analysis.
