This wide-ranging book looks at one of the greatest ongoing transformations in Southeast Asia: rapid processes of rural and agrarian change, which have led to land cover modification, transformations in the use of land, and land conflicts. This work, which comes out of the ‘Challenges of the agrarian transition in Southeast Asia’ programme led by several Canadian universities, and which fits squarely in the important field of research on agrarian differentiation, specifically ‘focuses on the changing ways in which people are excluded from access to land’ (p. 4). As the authors note, exclusion is a double-edged sword, as it is both a necessary condition for land use as well as a source of conflict; in this, ‘exclusion creates both security and insecurity’ (p. 8).

The authors choose to focus on four major factors that have led to land exclusions in Southeast Asia: regulations, force, the market, and legitimation. In the realm of regulation, the book points out the diffuse informal and formal rules that govern access to land, from traditional local usufruct rights to national zoning laws. Force is used to expropriate land from users, either in conjunction with or sometimes in violation of, regulations, although the book points out clearly that it is not always the state that is the wielder of force. The market is a dominant pressure as well, since ‘most obviously, the price of land is a primary determinant of who can gain access to land and who cannot’ (p. 17). Finally, legitimation is a process of justifying who has moral and social rights to land, and can be mobilised by actors claiming indigenous rights to land or by states asserting that modernising nations require large-scale land expropriation for hydropower development and other schemes. The challenge for those trying to manage land, whether states, local communities or individual families, is to deal with these competing claims and processes of exclusion. In other words, ‘People want the right to exclude, but don't want to be excluded’ themselves from claims on land (p. 188).

Each of the six main chapters explores a different practice of land transformation, often involving more than one of these processes of exclusion, ranging from formalisation of land rights through state land titling and redistribution, to the preservation of designated conservation areas, to shifts in landownership that have come about from boom crops such as coffee, rubber and shrimp, to urbanisation and deagrarianisation, to local exclusions between kin and between communities, often on the basis of ethnic differences. Each chapter takes three or more specific case studies from a different Southeast Asian country to illustrate these processes, which range across the region (although Burma unfortunately gets little attention). For example, in chapter 3 on the expansion of exclusionary conservation claims to land, such as national parks and forest reserves, examples are taken from co-author Tania Li's work in Indonesia around Lore Lindu National Park, a community-based natural resource project in Cambodia, and the Nam Theun 2 hydropower project in Laos. The book concludes with a look at emerging land challenges in Southeast Asia, such as the global financial crisis which has driven many urban dwellers back to their rural roots, and pressures on global food supplies, which peaked in 2007 and set off riots and protests in many areas. Such pressures are likely to increase given the complexity of issues surrounding land analysed in the book.

One of the strengths of the book is that it does not blame the transformations and conflicts that are documented on faceless neoliberalism like far too many social science books currently do. Markets are one tool of neoliberalism, but they are not the only transformative process at work; in some cases, as the book points out, markets may not even be the most important factor in land conflict. One question that could be asked of this volume, however, is how it could have been designed to speak to policymakers who are grappling with these dilemmas. The authors note early in the introduction that ‘We have no prescriptions to offer’, focusing instead on the analysis of how exclusion occurs and what the social ramifications of this process are. But offering mostly critique without alternatives is likely to render this volume less useful for such policy-oriented readers. Additionally, some of the arguments could have been bolstered with quantitative data to avoid criticisms that the book is based mostly on anecdotal case studies. For example, some basic statistics on trends in landlessness across the countries examined would have been useful.

Overall, though, this is a welcome volume that covers a wide territory. The extremely useful bibliography and careful range of case studies should make this an indispensible volume for graduate students in particular, while scholars of this field will find the book a useful summation of a number of ongoing and interlinked processes of land-use change.