The mangrove forests of Southeast Asia are highly biodiverse and provide multiple ecosystem services upon which millions of people depend. Mangroves enhance fisheries and coastal protection, and store among the highest densities of carbon of any ecosystem globally. Mangrove forests have experienced extensive deforestation owing to global demand for commodities, and previous studies have identified the expansion of aquaculture as largely responsible. The proportional conversion of mangroves to different land use types has not been systematically quantified across Southeast Asia, however, particularly in recent years. In this study we apply a combined geographic information system and remote sensing method to quantify the key proximate drivers (i.e., replacement land uses) of mangrove deforestation in Southeast Asia between 2000 and 2012. Mangrove forests were lost at an average rate of 0.18% per year, which is lower than previously published estimates. In total, more than 100,000 ha of mangroves were removed during the study period, with aquaculture accounting for 30% of this total forest change. The rapid expansion of rice agriculture in Myanmar, and the sustained conversion of mangroves to oil palm plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia, are identified as additional increasing and under-recognized threats to mangrove ecosystems. Our study highlights frontiers of mangrove deforestation in the border states of Myanmar, on Borneo, and in Indonesian Papua. To implement policies that conserve mangrove forests across Southeast Asia, it is essential to consider the national and subnational variation in the land uses that follow deforestation.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/113/2/344.full.pdf

Rates and drivers of mangrove deforestation in Southeast Asia, 2000–2012

Authoritarian environmentalism is a non-participatory approach to public policy-making and implementation in the face of severe environmental challenges. Using the case of China's climate change policy, the meaning, causes, and consequences of authoritarian environmentalism are explored. A key finding is that authoritarian environmentalism is more effective in producing policy outputs than outcomes. Theoretical and policy implications follow.

https://people.uwec.edu/jamelsem/papers/CC_Literature_Web_Share/Policy/CC_Authoritarian_Environmentalism_China_Gilley_2012.pdf

Authoritarian environmentalism and China's response to climate change

While matters of security have appeared as paramount themes in a post-9/11 world, anthropology has not developed a critical comparative ethnography of security and its contemporary problematics. In this article I call for the emergence of a critical “security anthropology,” one that recognizes the significance of security discourses and practices to the global and local contexts in which cultural anthropology operates. Many issues that have historically preoccupied anthropology are today inextricably linked to security themes, and anthropology expresses a characteristic approach to topics that today must be considered within a security rubric. A focus on security is particularly important to an understanding of human rights in contemporary neoliberal society. Drawing on examples from Latin America and my own work in Bolivia, I track the decline of neoliberalism and the rise of the security paradigm as a framework for organizing contemporary social life. I suggest that security, rather than a reaction to a terrorist attack that “changed everything,” is characteristic of a neoliberalism that predates the events of 9/11, affecting the subjects of anthropological work and shaping the contexts within which that work is conducted.

/pdf/toward-a-critical-anthropology-of-security-2y2v50nqcz.pdf

Toward a Critical Anthropology of Security

Anthropologists’ selections of topics and field sites have often been shaped by militarism, but they have been slow to make militarism, especially American militarism, an object of study. In the high Cold War years concerns about human survival were refracted into debates about innate human proclivities for violence or peace. As “new wars” with high civilian casualty rates emerged in Africa, Central America, the former Eastern bloc, and South Asia, beginning in the 1980s anthropologists increasingly wrote about terror, torture, death squads, ethnic cleansing, guerilla movements, and the memory work inherent in making war and peace. Anthropologists have also begun to write about nuclear weapons and American militarism. The “war on terror” has disturbed settled norms that anthropologists should not assist counterinsurgency campaigns, and for the first time since Vietnam, anthropologists are debating the merits of military anthropology versus critical ethnography of the military.

Anthropology and Militarism

This article describes the temporality of eviction in a rubble-strewn site of urban demolition in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), where over 14,000 households are being evicted to create an ambitious “new urban zone.” Eviction thrusts many residents into an alternative time-world of enforced waiting, marked by an oppressive sense of being suspended in time. For some residents, however, an alternative temporality marked by indifference and disinterested detachment disrupts the project's timeline and thwarts the temporal designs of planners. Attention to the play of time reveals important social dynamics of everyday urban development and shows that acts of land clearance and reactions to them are more complex than simple battles over land and money. Most significantly, the difference between oppressive, alienating “waiting” and empowering, socially productive “hanging out” (chơi) is conditioned by the different ways social actors understand productive activity as an expression of agency played out in time.

EVICTION TIME IN THE NEW SAIGON: Temporalities of Displacement in the Rubble of Development

Monique Skidmore, Karaoke Fascism: Burma and the Politics of Fear, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004,264 pages.Skidmore did difficult fieldwork in Burma during 1996, a period of increasing turmoil as students and others openly demonstrated against the current regime. Her research was, ostensibly, to "understand the idioms of emotional and psychological distress used by various Burmese communities, and to explore the role of religion and medicine in conceptualizing and mediating such distress and as pathways for action" (p. 8). Rather than focussing directly on these topics, Skidmore directs our attention to the all encompassing fear that Burmese have to deal with on a day to day basis and the consequences this has for individual Burmese as well as for Burmese society. Researching fear is not easy, as Skidmore asks, "How does one research fear when doing so produces the very emotion in question, both in the research and the informants?" (p. x), something she explores most completely in her third chapter.To get to this exploration, Skidmore first provides a brief introduction to Burmese history and a sketch of the resistance activities in Rangoon in September 1996. These activities are juxtaposed with places of refuge that Burmese Buddhism provides, both physically and spiritually. The third chapter then explores the fear that Skidmore faced and the Burmese continue to face. Here Skidmore argues that her experience of fear and her understanding and analysis of her embodied fear allows her to "intuit the experience of Burmese people whom I have come to know. In so doing, I argue that emotional knowledge arising from similar (never identical) circumstances can be important, in this case, necessary, for an analysis of fear in everyday lif e" (p. 35). These three chapters are compelling but difficult reading. After finishing part of a chapter I would have to put the book down because of the overwhelming awfulness of the situation that I was reading about.In the next four chapters, the focus shifts to the contexts that the Burmese must interact in and the role of the government and its military in defining these contexts. Skidmore discusses the way the military define spaces and the thin veneers of modernity and conformity as well as the tensions created by the juxtaposition of modernity, fascism and terror. These chapters also include accounts of how people deal with the situations created by propaganda and the continuing inability to trust people because of informers and the consequent self-censorship that this entails. For her analysis, Skidmore draws on scholars of modernity and fascism, particularly Benjamin and the Frankfurt School (p. 84). I found these chapters equally difficult to read but more because of the analyses than the content. In the end, I was not convinced that drawing parallels between the situation in Burma and high modernity in Paris and Nazi Germany provided any enlightenment about the Burmese generals and their behaviour or the situation that the Burmese people face. A more meaningful comparison would have been to place the Burmese situation in its Southeast Asian context of political violence with discussions of similarities and differences with Cambodia under Pol Pot and Indonesia in the aftermath of Sukarno's defeat in 1965, the annexation of East Timor, or, more recently, the end of the Suharto period. …

Karaoke Fascism: Burma and the Politics of Fear

The Burmese military State constructs fear and vulnerability among its citizenry through the strategic use of political violence. Fear is inherently temporal and, unlike despair, requires that one have the ability to envisage alternatives to a future of complete domination. Burmese people strive not to express fear, and the anthropologist's articulation of fear contrasts with the silence that fear engenders among them. In this article I reflect on strategies for the ethical collection of experiences of fear in situations where suppressing or denying fear is the most common survival strategy. [Burma, Myanmar, violence, fear, state construction of affect, vulnerability, time]

Darker than midnight: Fear, vulnerability, and terror making in urban Burma (Myanmar)

Dictatorship, Disorder and Decline in Myanmar

Myanmar: The State, Community and the Environment

November 2010 sees the first elections in Myanmar/Burma since 1990, to be held as the culmination of the military regime's 'Road Map for Democracy' The conditions under which the elections are being held are far from favourable, although the laws and procedures under which they will be conducted have been in place for seven months and quite widely publicized. Political controls remain repressive, freedom of expression and assembly does not exist, and international access is restricted by government controls as well as sanctions. While the elections represent a turning point for Myanmar/Burma, the lead-up period has not been marked by many notable improvements in the way the country is governed or in the reforming impact of international assistance programmes. Presenters at the Australian National University 2009 Myanmar/Burma Update conference examined these questions and more. Leading experts from the United States, Japan, France, and Australia as well as from Myanmar/Burma have conributed to this collection of papers from the Conference.

Monique Skidmore

Papers

Karaoke Fascism: Burma and the Politics of Fear

Darker than midnight: Fear, vulnerability, and terror making in urban Burma (Myanmar)

Dictatorship, Disorder and Decline in Myanmar

Myanmar: The State, Community and the Environment

Ruling Myanmar: From Cyclone Nargis to National Elections