Global land rush and local resistance: political struggles in ‘failed’ land deals

This paper examines two cases of land deals in Kachin State, Myanmar, using a case study approach informed by critical agrarian studies and a landscape perspective. The research draws on household surveys and interviews to analyze an 80,000-hectare corporate-pursued biofuel crop concession and a 58,000 hectare ‘pin prick’ land accumulation for banana plantations. Immersed in the broader political economy of geopolitics, dispossession, and armed conflict, both cases reveal that while most studies focused on operational land deals, ‘failed’ land deals are also sites of important and complex political struggles. However, outcomes of land struggles–whether in the form of ‘public victory’ or ‘silent return’ (of land to people; of people to the land)–do not necessarily translate to socially just outcomes for rural working people.