A Radical Journal

of Geography

Writing Political Forests

Nancy Lee Peluso

Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California,
Berkeley, CA, USA;
npeluso@berkeley.edu

Peter Vandergeest
Department of Geography, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada;
pvander@yorku.ca

Abstract: In this essay, we highlight the intellectual context that shaped our initial
conceptualisation of political forests as dynamic spaces and political ecologies, and how
our fieldwork and comparative approach shaped our subsequent elaboration of the con-
cept and its empirical manifestations. Of particular significance was our emphasis on
incorporated/relational comparison and our multiscale analysis. These approaches
allowed us to locate subjects and processes in specific field sites within an emergent glo-
bal forestry network produced through multiscale interactions and movements within
and among colonial and FAO forestry empires. We revisit the key processes through
which we learned to see common and contrasting mechanisms that have made forests
inherently political in our six research sites in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, linking
these “classic” mechanisms to concepts in wide use today. These concepts include
understanding political forests as co-produced, the significance of expertise in their
reproduction, and the interactions between politics and the lively materialities of politi-
cal forests. Among other conclusions, we suggest that the political forest is being
replaced by what could be called “political conservation”, which has its own knowledge
networks and expertise that displace but also build on political forestry. Finally, we
reflect on how these ideas are being further developed by the authors in this sympo-
sium, whom we gratefully acknowledge for demonstrating that the politicisation of for-
ests continues to be significant today.

Keywords: political forests, co-production, knowledge and expertise, materiality, politi-

cal conservation

The contributors to this symposium have elaborated, developed, and brought our
ideas and themes on political forests into the present and laid out some contrast-
ing and parallel histories. We appreciate how the authors extend and confirm our
concepts for explaining how political forests are being made today, connecting
grounded events and transformations with regional, historical, and global pro-
cesses. While most of the research that led to our ideas on political forests was
conducted in the 1990s and 2000s, the time periods we address go back much
further in time. The contributors here show that the project of revisiting and
remaking this concept can be productive for generating new insights about con-
temporary political forest-making processes.

Antipode Vol. 52 No. 4 2020 ISSN 0066-4812, pp. 1–21 doi: 10.1111/anti.12636
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2 Antipode

In this essay,1 we return to some of our own themes and those elaborated by
the other authors in this symposium. We highlight how they emerged in our
thinking, how they oriented our analyses, and how they continue to be significant
today.

Early Influences in Conceptualising Political Forests

We start with comments on the academic milieu in which we initiated our
research on political forests. We began to collaborate a few years after finishing
our doctoral studies, when Peter Vandergeest spent a year at Yale University as a
fellow in the Program in Agrarian Studies and Nancy Peluso was a new faculty
member in the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and jointly
teaching Agrarian Studies. At the time, our interests on property and forests were
converging, in part from our time as graduate students in Cornell University’s
Development Sociology program a few years earlier. Interest in the social dimen-
sions of forests and forestry was high at that time, while the political and cultural
violence, often forest-based, in Southeast Asia had not yet subsided in many
places, and the violence of Southeast Asian nation-states toward their peoples
had become structurally embedded in other places. We each had been deeply
immersed in long-term fieldwork related to agrarian change in the region prior to
our collaboration.
At Cornell, we were part of a group of graduate students that contributed in
various ways to the nascent field of political ecology and some of its classic con-
cerns around agrarian-environmental change, including conflicts and social move-
ments over forests, land, dams, and other environments in Southeast Asia.
Development Sociology during the 1980s provided strong training in political
economy, agrarian studies, environmental sociology, and an emphasis on
grounded research that drew from some professors’ engagements in applied
anthropology and cultural ecology. Both Development Sociology at Cornell and
Agrarian Studies at Yale immersed us in work in other regions of the world, shap-
ing our embrace of theories and methods including comparative and historical
sociological analysis, analysis of contemporary cultural politics, and a concern for
the broader politics of ecology and environment.2
During the same time, Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program was at its most “thick”
with critical area studies faculty.3 The critical approaches then circulating through
Cornell University were driven in part by the violent events around the Indochina
wars and other related state violence (particularly in Indonesia and the Philip-
pines), the rise of US-supported post-colonial authoritarian governments (includ-
ing Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand), concerns about “jungle wars” and
rainforest politics, authoritarian governments’ heavy-handed claims on land and
resources, and a surge of research on upland peoples of Southeast Asia, often
(and wrongly) accused of destroying forests. These events radicalised many of our
teachers and colleagues at both Yale and Cornell, many of whom had conducted
their own deeply engaged field and historical research from 1950 to the 1970s.
Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program faculty also shared a pedagogical belief in train-
ing that encompassed language capability, a sensibility for comparative research

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Writing Political Forests 3

that valued expertise in more than one country, historical perspectives, and
engaged fieldwork.
At Yale, we had the good fortune to be influenced by James Scott, Harold Con-
klin, William Burch, and the scholarly visitors, post-doctoral resident scholars, and
other faculty contributors to the Agrarian Studies program. Those common expe-
riences shaped our sensibilities about the field of agrarian-environmental research
that came to be called Political Ecology. Our first articles together (including
“Social aspects of forestry in Southeast Asia” in the Journal of Southeast Asian Stud-
ies in 1995, co-authored with Leslie Potter, and “Territorialization and state
power” in Theory and Society in 1995 [Peluso et al. 1995; Vandergeest and Peluso
1995]), as well as our successful NSF proposal for comparative research on prop-
erty and borderlands forests, were initiated during the year at Yale University.
These were pre-cursors to our elaboration of the concept of Political Forests and
Customary Rights in our 2001 Journal of Asian Studies article (Peluso and Van-
dergeest 2001).
After 1996, colleagues and graduate students associated with our new institu-
tions (UC Berkeley and York University) also became influential on our work.4 Not
least, the establishment of the Berkeley Workshop in Environmental Politics at
UCB, a collaborative effort of Michael Watts, Louise Fortmann, Donald Moore,
and Nancy Peluso, became a forum for political ecological scholars. Our intellec-
tual influences were not only in North America, however. Our program of
research and collaboration included the formation of what we called the Resource
Tenure Network of Southeast Asia.5 This network was composed largely of aca-
demics working in Southeast Asian institutions, and we organised small workshops
around the region to discuss theoretical and practical issues around conflicts and
politics of forest access and control, and how resident peoples had contributed to
the making of political forests.6
In the following section we discuss why a comparative methodology that was
also grounded in field research was key to the way we formulated different ele-
ments of the concept of political forests. We then review some of our key argu-
ments and terms related to political forests, relating them to theories and
approaches influential when we wrote the papers. We trace some of these con-
cepts through to how the symposium’s contributors pick up and develop them in
relation to the making of contemporary political forests.

Research Methodologies: Comparison and Fieldwork

Comparative Research
We considered but never wrote an article on our methodology of comparison
across macro and micro research perspectives or on the benefits and challenges
of comparative and historical sociological research. We cannot emphasise enough
the significance of comparison—relational, incorporated, or simply as an applied
method—in how we developed our ideas of political forests. Comparison is what
justified our collaboration intellectually; it was productive in how we repeatedly
questioned our generalisations—most often, each other’s tendencies to generalise
—based on what we observed in a single site or from cases we knew well.

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Generalisations for Indonesia did not automatically work for Thailand or Malaysia,
nor did intra-national comparisons always hold true in northern and southern
Thailand, Java and Kalimantan, or peninsular Malaya and Sarawak. Differences in
the forests’ materialities (ecologies and species mixes), histories (of exploitation,
contestation, and occupation), and political economies (coloniality, commodity
valuation, and nascent forms of environmental security) also thwarted the terms
of comparison. We wanted to generalise or theorise based on empirical specifics
of practice, political economy, and culture, and this led us to new concepts that
focused as much on variations across space, time, and ecologies as on what they
had in common.
It is important to note that we did not assume we were comparing indepen-
dent cases. While we were trained in and motivated by historical comparative
work in sociology that advocated for methodological rigour in using a compara-
tive method in qualitative research, exemplified by scholars such as Theda Skoc-
pol, Barrington Moore, and Charles Ragin, we were also influenced by the
World System approaches pioneered by Immanuel Wallerstein, and inspired by
world historical scholarship being produced by anthropologists and historians,
especially Eric Wolf, Sidney Mintz, and Eric Hobsbawm. Our comparative
method was partially based on what Philip McMichael (1990) called “incorpo-
rated comparison”, described by McMichael as a grounded theory that explored
global connections, and “used comparison in reconstructing historical configura-
tions” composed of multiple trajectories rather than what he called “self-forming
whole[s]” (1990:387). This approach helps capture how we traced political for-
ests as a historical configuration of multiple and complex trajectories, an
approach that Devine and Baca (2020) describe in more contemporary terms as
“relational comparison”, drawing on Gill Hart’s (2001, 2018) work. We were
also concerned with gaining a multi-scalar understanding of colonial and post-
colonial forestry, one which positioned the making of political forests not only
as a state-making process, but also as a maker of global networks that included
colonial scientists and administrators, the FAO, and both connected and
grounded insurgencies and counter-insurgencies. We thus sought to understand
how forestry practices that were developed in particular sites percolated through
such networks. In this we were influenced both by science studies (Latour 1986;
see also Braun 2000; Goldman et al. 2011), and by Ben Anderson’s (1991)
attention to how the circulation of government officials was one way of produc-
ing “imagined communities”.
Our comparative methodology was across specific sites, nations, colonies/non-
colonies, time periods, and within all of these. Except for the field research in Java
and northern Thailand, we were engaged in village and forest-level fieldwork on
both sides of contiguous territorial international borders: between Sarawak,
Malaysia and West Kalimantan, Indonesia, and between southern Thailand and
the northern states of peninsular Malaysia. Java and West Kalimantan in Indonesia
also shared oceanic borders with Malaysian states on the peninsula and Borneo,
while northern Thailand was bordered by non-capitalist regimes in Burma and
Laos during the periods about which we were writing. Our interest in national
and colonial differences in the production of forest landscapes was also provoked

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Writing Political Forests 5

by field encounters and on the ground observations of these landscapes. We were

especially taken, and inspired by, the dramatic differences apparent when crossing
those borders—from Thailand to West Malaysia, from East Malaysia to Indonesian
Borneo. Our first article on “Genealogies of the political forest and customary
rights ...” (Peluso and Vandergeest 2001) thus presents the puzzle we set out to
address through a relational comparison of three countries, six “borderlands”,
and at least three forms of colonial-era rule: how did national and colonial policies
and historical practices shape forest use, control, and management? Drawing on
this scholarship we developed a program of research that investigated how forests
and forestry were produced, materially and politically.
Finally, we also need to emphasise the difficulty of the conceptual and empirical
work of historical and comparative research. We came to see everything as part
of non-linear trajectories that were best understood comparatively—which is also
the method and goal of Hart’s (2018) concept of relational comparison. But as
anyone who has tried this would know, the approach requires time. Not only
years of conducting research in libraries, archives, and on the ground in often
remote spaces with diverse groups of rural people in Southeast Asia, but also
many years to write, edit, and compare. Our articles thus tended to stretch out
over time as well. Each article had to deal with new complexities that emerged
from our grounded approach, taking years to complete given other professional
and personal responsibilities. Nevertheless, there was never a moment that we
thought we should compare only in the present.
Graduate students today are generally discouraged from doing research in more
than one site—as we were when we were graduate students—but today it is even
less common that researchers take up comparative or truly multi-sited research
even at later points in their careers. Research in single sites can still lead to a ten-
dency to generalise from these sites while losing sight of variation across sites or
space, though this can be counteracted, sometimes, through comparisons with
other historical periods in the same site. The potentialities and the limits of under-
standing conservation through the lens of green neoliberalism, mentioned below,
is an example. Yet as comparative area studies wanes in the face of global studies,
comparisons of a single site within a globalised system or network have become
more common than relational comparison of the kind we undertook.

Fieldwork
This brings us to another key element in how we formulated our program of
research on the genealogies of political forests. Both of us were committed to field-
work in rural areas (which is partly what distinguished our work from that of the big
world historical studies—but linked it to that of anthropologists like Eric Wolf and
Sidney Mintz mentioned above). Our articles were based in part on spending huge
amounts of time in libraries (Bangkok, Cornell, Yale, University of Toronto, Berkeley,
and, with research assistance, London) and archives (Bangkok, Kedah, Kuching,
Jakarta)—but also in spending considerable time in rural areas talking with forest
residents—and in setting aside working time that coordinated with professional
meetings: of the Association of Asian Studies, the International Association of

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6 Antipode

Common Property, the Rural Sociological Association, the American Sociological

Association, and, eventually, the American Association of Geographers. Most impor-
tant, however, was our commitment to as much focused fieldwork time as possible
when we were no longer both at Yale but on opposite sides of the North American
continent with family commitments. In general, this meant returning to the same
research sites over and over and being multi-sited historically and through research
on the contexts within which our specific case studies were set.
Fieldwork continually provided inspiration, not least starting with the often stark
contrasts in the forested landscape across the land borders of Southern Thailand
with West Malaysia, or that between West Kalimantan, Indonesia and Sarawak,
Malaysia on the island of Borneo. These contrasts constantly reminded us how
forests were produced not just discursively, but also materially, and that these
contrasts were produced in part through differences in territorial scales. Both of
us spent time observing, living, and talking with forest farmers, forest product col-
lectors, forest labourers, and state officials in border zones—the subdistrict of
Tungnuay in Satun province in Southern Thailand near the Malaysian border, dis-
tricts in the state of Kedah in Malaysia bordering Thailand; and either side of the
Sarawak-West Kalimantan border with durian and rubber agro-foresters, as well as
the teak and non-teak forest of Java, surrounded by the South China Sea and the
Indian Ocean. We then linked, where possible, what we heard from rural people
and their experiences with the on-going making of political forests with other his-
torical data we collected from archival and library sources.
What emerged from this commitment to fieldwork was the understanding from
our own experiences that political forests and state territorialisations were only
partially hegemonic, again a Gramscian sort of idea that numerous scholars were
grappling with at the time (and not only in Southeast Asia). Moreover, practice
was usually not the same as what might be understood by just a study of models
and policies for doing forestry. Thus, we eschewed the diffusionist understandings
(critical as well as mainstream) which depicted scientific forestry models, such as
the “German” plantation model, spreading from Europe to the colonies or from
temperate zones to tropical zones. What we found both in the field and by inter-
pretation of forestry documents, was that these models could not be imple-
mented in practice, because of the presence of a panoply of forest residents who
had manipulated and produced some of those forests, and because in many sites,
complex and diverse tropical forest ecologies were recalcitrant to the sort of forest
simplifications we analysed (see also Scott 1999).

Key Arguments and Concepts

The arguments we address here concern: (1) the (co)-production of forests
through territorialisation, the production of certain species as forest or agricultural
species, and the production of racialised territories, bodies, and animals through
selective institutionalisation of various customary rights and practices; (2) the
importance of knowledge and expertise—specifically in scientific forestry—for
legitimating political forest management; (3) the materialities of forests or what
we called the “nature” of nature (forest ecologies and biophysical properties of

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Writing Political Forests 7

forest species) that shape and influence the political economies of production and
the cultural politics of learning to see forests in particular ways; (4) the growing
importance and attention to organised forest conservation and tree crop planta-
tions, contrasting with the more hegemonic forms of extraction and production
forestry during the time periods we studied; and (5) the forms and moments of
violence involved in the production of political forests.

Production and Co-Production

The central argument inherent in the concept of political forests is that forests are
never entirely natural: political forests are created and always in the process of
being created through politics and cultural ways of seeing, as well as through
“nature’s agency” or biological, ecological, and socio-natural processes. Devine
and Baca (2020), in their Introduction to this symposium, call this our effort to
“denaturalize forests and refigure them as political-ecological entities”: products of
political-economic change, cultural politics, and their materialities. Terms such as
“socio-nature” or anthropology’s “natureculture” were not yet in circulation when
we wrote our key articles on political forests; today a political forest conceived as
either a socio-nature or a natureculture is an obvious fit. As mentioned in several
of this symposium’s articles, the idea of the political forest or a particular manifes-
tation of it is never static nor stand-alone—it is relational. This is true whether we
use theoretical perspectives that see multiple historical processes coming together
to “overdetermine” the formation of a political forest, or one that conceives of
forests as emergent from a confluence of social and ecological processes bringing
a political forest into being. Political forests are dynamic and differentiated by the
specific local, regional, national, and international forces and contexts articulating
at particular moments.
Moreover, political forests are constantly produced, reproduced, and trans-
formed in large part through challenges and struggles that come about through
competition over land or the territorial management strategies devised by diverse
government and non-government entities, including forest residents, transna-
tional organisations, and corporations. Each of our articles addressed different
complex processes that constitute and influence political forest formations.
Although we did not use the term “co-production” in our earlier articles, we can
also understand political forests as co-produced by “nature and society” through
the production of expert knowledge about forests. In the early periods of the cre-
ation of political forests, expert forest knowledge was created primarily by profes-
sional foresters through interactions with forest residents, forest ecologies, other
state agencies, and so on, and then codified and circulated through empire-based
forestry research networks. Later, forest knowledge was also increasingly produced
and circulated by non-government, non-forester, and other land management
“experts”, especially knowledge concerning new “scientific” terms such as “biodi-
versity” and “carbon sequestration”.
In our first comparative article, “Genealogies of the political forest and custom-
ary rights ...” (Peluso and Vandergeest 2001), we examined the political, cultural,
discursive, and material practices through which these two relational categories

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came to be used in 19th and early 20th century regimes of rule. The making of
political forests often included a kind of invention and codification of tradition,
namely, the creation of customary rights and practices that colonial-era states
defined as allowable uses of forests by resident peoples, in spaces those people
had already occupied that state actors blithely construed as “empty” forest space.
The critique of such constructs of “empty” forest space is repeatedly brought up
in new analyses of state forest or land grabbing, yet the construct has been
around for some time. Various scholars’ socio-spatial concepts influenced the ways
we worked through these ideas, including the spatialisation of authority in Siam
(Thailand) (Winichakul 1997), mechanisms for identifying “empty space” in the
state–society relationships (ibid.; see also Anderson 1991), productions of space
and territory (Lefebvre 1991), and colonial and contemporary conservation’s
impacts on resident people in forests (Neumann 2002). Both “the invention of
tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) and early ideas on the production of
“race” and racialised populations through colonial ethnic census categories in
Malaya (Hirschman 1986, 1987) were ideas that contributed to our constructs of
the Political Forest and Customary Rights (see also Vandergeest 2003).
In all of our articles and in the three countries we addressed—Indonesia, Thai-
land, and Malaysia—we held the various categories related to or constitutive of
“Political Forests” and “Customary Rights” in tension. We presented these two
concepts relationally in our first article (Peluso and Vandergeest 2001) because we
felt that their concurrent production had not been adequately recognised by acti-
vists, scholars, or government authorities. Where forest planners recognised the
presence and forest-based activities of a local ethnic minority, indigenous, or
peasant group, access to whole spaces or particular species in a particular place
could be rendered “Customary” and occasionally written into forest law. The
most notorious exception was the refusal of any forestry institution to formally
recognise claims deriving from swidden (shifting) agriculture. Insofar as these Cus-
tomary Rights specified racialised or ethnic groups, the forest laws also con-
tributed to producing racialised categories and marked certain forests as racialised
spaces. This was not just recognition that blanketly valorised local practices as
Customary, but a practice that enabled foresters and forestry departments to
assume superior territorial authority, significantly limiting the scope of authorised
local uses to only those practices these foresters specified as “Customary Rights”.7
Our interest in how agrarian and forest landscapes, as well as Customary Rights,
were produced was also influenced by the British cultural Marxists writing on agri-
culture, forests, rural place-making, commons, and the workings of power. The
writings of E.P. Thompson (Whigs and Hunters, 1975; Customs in Common, 1993),
Hobsbawm and Ranger (Invention of Tradition, 1983), and Raymond Williams (The
Country and the City, 1975) explicitly engaged grounded research questions, often
challenging other Marxists’ obsessions with Grand Theory. The ideas of early Fou-
cault (Discipline and Punish, 1975) and other post-structural and what were then
called post-modern theorists such as Jameson (1991), Lyotard (1984), and Soja
(1989) were also on our radar, as were critical geographers writing on territory
and territoriality (e.g. Agnew 1994; Sack 1986) and mapping (Harley 1989;
Rocheleau 1995). These broadly situated interests also led to the volume that

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Writing Political Forests 9

Vandergeest co-edited with Melanie DuPuis during the year at Yale, Creating the
Countryside (DuPuis and Vandergeest 1996). This book included chapters by Van-
dergeest about the production of “the village” in Thailand, and by Peluso on the
ways that international conservation organisations supported states in their violent
displacements of rural people in Indonesia and Kenya. In addition, Peluso’s book,
Rich Forests, Poor People, came out in 1992; it brought agrarian studies into
upland forests by analysing how teak forests were produced through contesta-
tions that were in part shaped by the biophysical properties and values of the
trees and the hunger of colonial and contemporary forest departments for terri-
tory. Our focus at the time was on explaining the production of political forests
through the articulations of materialities and dynamics of place-based forest
ecologies, the practices of forest-based people, and the political/politicised ideolo-
gies and practices of state foresters and other land management agencies
charged with governing people, land, and resources. In this symposium, this
approach is elaborated through the concept of co-production. Most of the con-
tributors here, and many others, have elaborated on co-productions of forests
elsewhere, the details of which can be seen in the articles’ bibliographies and
texts.
While our attention eventually settled on political forests, our archival and field
research led us to treat “the state” as a set of often competing agencies and govern-
ing practices, that participated in empire and international networks (for forestry,
agriculture, etc.) and helped organise state practices in particular colonies and new
nations (Vandergeest and Peluso 2006a, 2006b). We thus outlined how political for-
ests were constructed in relation to other forms of state land designations, especially
agricultural land, and to their access and governance. In addition, we pointed out the
territorialised organisation of colonial-era and post-colonial civil administrations, such
as formally bounded villages and districts, which were precluded at the time from
overlapping with political forests because these were defined as empty of people. The
land and territory themselves became sites in and through which the politics of gov-
ernance played out; agriculture and forestry land uses were also sources of adminis-
trative differentiation and competition and we identified real differences in style and
effects of national or centralised forms of land governance. We thus pursued the
relationalities inherent in the production of a countryside, rural places, and environ-
ments more broadly, not just forests.
In the 1995 article “Territorialization and state power in Thailand” (Vandergeest
and Peluso 1995), we introduced the concept of “internal territorialization”. Our
discussion of internal differences among Thailand’s land, forest, and civil adminis-
tration agencies was not about one-sided, top-down state impositions of territory.
Rather, we showed that managers and other officials in each of the three different
state agencies were engaged in territorial struggles with each other as well as with
subjects on the ground. Our subsequent publications emphasised that political
forests as territorialising projects are also always incomplete. Thus, in our later
“political forest” publications, we elaborated on struggles among state and non-
state agencies and other forest subjects, exploring how forest residents (often
constituted as “communities” by activists, planners, practitioners, and scholars)
resisted and thereby re-shaped the making of political forests.

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During the post-war era, in what we called the “second moment” of political for-
estry (Vandergeest and Peluso 2006b, 2015), the Food and Agriculture Organization
of the United Nations (FAO) replaced colonial empires as the key international net-
work for political forestry. On the ground, private logging companies became domi-
nant actors in many forest spaces across the region, often ignoring logging
regulations set out by forestry departments with FAO expert advice. In the “third
moment” of political forestry, political violence in the form of communist and Islamist
insurgencies, and counter insurgencies among state militaries, police, and village
militias as well as state sanctioned rural development agencies (both public and pri-
vate) were primary drivers of the violent maelstroms co-producing political forests
(Peluso and Vandergeest 2011; Vandergeest and Peluso 2015).
What strikes us about the collection of papers in this symposium is that they
show that both state and non-state (conservation-oriented) projects aiming to
control what happens in a Political Forest are just as incomplete today as they
were during the periods we studied—although in the interim, the number of
organisations competing with forestry agencies for governing through territorial
projects have proliferated. State and non-state authorities and constituents with
varied interests in forests continue to struggle with powerful land users who
undermine the maintenance of political forests as zones of state sovereignty, nota-
bly drug trafficking organisations (Devine et al. 2018); international conservation
groups and aid agencies (Corson 2018), Afro-Colombian groups (Asher 2018), or
coalitions of land reformers and social forestry constituents seeking to enable local
forest users to control forest understories (Lukas and Peluso 2019).
At the same time, new actors have emerged, claiming the ability to produce
expert knowledge that helps produce political forests, such as the anti-dam com-
munities in Thailand who authorise complicit discourses around forests and
hydrology (Forsyth 2019). Another example are the “supra-national” organisa-
tions and networks whose authority in the ongoing formation of Congolese politi-
cal forests is more influential than that of state actors (Marijnen and Verweijen
2018). When new forest “problems” and “crises” emerge, such as the global con-
cern with forest fires, new coalitions and competitions also descend on the politi-
cal forest in order to transform existing ways of seeing these forests (Goldstein
2019). And even though a comprehensive examination of the “carbon-ness” of
forests is not really addressed by the authors in this symposium, forests repre-
sented as carbon sinks when planted and growing, or as carbon emitters when
they burn or are harvested are bringing new ways of seeing the forests and terri-
tories of which they are productive (see also, e.g., Osborne 2011). Not surpris-
ingly, the global scientific concern with climate change and forests has captured
the attention of FAO and CIFOR scientists and policy advisors who are deeply
engaged in adding this vision of the nature of forests to the global forest policy
repertoire.

Production of Knowledge and Expertise

The production of political forests occurs through a number of pathways, but we
found that a key one was the creation of scientific forestry as a field, a profession,

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Writing Political Forests 11

and a particular ideology of what, even then, was called “sustainable manage-
ment”. Similar to a more recent focus on the production of expertise—whether
scientific or indigenous, applied or philosophical—scholars were also concerned
about the challenges of practicing scientific forestry in tropical colonies, giving
rise to a forestry literature in South and Southeast Asia. Scientific forestry was a
typical Kuhnian (Kuhn 1962) paradigm: it had its own tropical forestry journals
(Tectona, The Malayan Forester, The Indian Forester, and others), its corps of gov-
ernment-sponsored and scientifically trained experts on sustained yield, wildlife
science, botany and forest protection. In our “Empires” articles (Vandergeest and
Peluso 2006a, 2006b), we developed an analysis of how colonial-style scientific
forestry re-made local institutions, access to forests, and ways of seeing forests
as separate from agriculture in six specific sites in Indonesia, Malaya, and Siam/
Thailand.
One way that scientific forestry developed was through the circulation of fores-
ters, trained in key institutions for the production of scientific forestry knowledge
and management models at several sites in Germany, Oxford (England),
Wageningen (Holland), Nancy (France), Dehra Dun in India, Kepong in Malaya,
Bogor and Madiun in Indonesia, and Phrae in Thailand. Foresters had their own
professional schools in the colonial centres (Oxford, Wageningen) where Euro-
peans acquired the degrees that qualified them for employment at the top of the
colonial forestry hierarchy. In the colonies, mostly “native” foresters were trained
in colonial forestry practices for employment in the lower ranks of the forestry
bureaucracies. These centres were important not only for training, but also
research, as colonial foresters assessed models for practicing forestry against field
practices, re-made these approaches, and then sent them back into colonial for-
estry networks through the circulation of forestry publications and foresters (Van-
dergeest and Peluso 2011). In Latourian language (Latour 1986; see also Braun
2000), we could identify these as “centres of calculation”, that is, sites where
information about forestry was assembled to produce forest classifications and sci-
entific models for practicing forestry. Thus, one dimension of our comparison
involved identifying different historical moments and different colonial and
national institutions that were set up to create scientific knowledge and scientific
forestry practices.
It is important to keep in mind that European forestry had to be valorised in
the Asian colonies. Through practice, foresters discovered that the highly diverse
tropical forests in Sarawak, Dutch Borneo, and Peninsular Malaya were not neces-
sarily amenable to (or profitable enough for) the creation of mono-cultural forest
plantations. Java is the exception where political forestry and plantation forestry
went hand in hand even for long-maturing species such as teak and rosewood
(rubber was considered an agricultural species). The huge biodiversity of tropical
rainforests, the distances involved in the extraction and monitoring of timbers,
and the shortage of locally available and controllable labour operated against the
German model in many colonial-era sites.
Scientific forestry in its birthplaces in Germany and France was based on the
creation of same-age parcels of single tree species—essentially a forest plantation
with different age-classes of trees. In this model, sustainable forestry actually

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12 Antipode

meant “sustainable yields” over the life-cycles of the main tree species. As we see
in the final subsection below, the materialities—the nature of natures—of South-
east Asian forests outside of Java negotiated against this model for many decades.
Though Dutch foresters in Java transformed literally all Java’s (production) forests
to plantations of teak, mahogany, rosewood, shorea, and pine, most of the tropi-
cal and sub-tropical forests of Southeast Asia were qualitatively, quantitatively,
and ecologically different from the temperate forests where German and French
forestry practices were developed. As a result, foresters in colonial Malaya created
new models for producing forests through selective cutting and subsequent man-
agement that aimed to increase the number of valuable tree species after a cut-
ting, a model that they carried through to the FAO period. This model drew on
American-derived ecological models that sought to predict plant successions after
a forest disturbance, based on the influential ecological theories developed by
Frederic Clements in the early 20th century. The approach basically signalled a
switch in forestry expertise from that needed for producing simplified forest plan-
tations, to that needed for understanding and managing complexity in mixed
tropical forests.
In the two “Empires” articles (Vandergeest and Peluso 2006a, 2006b), we also
took up the making of state forestry agencies in the new nation-states that
emerged after the period of colonial rule. We followed the careers of both agen-
cies and the officials that staffed these agencies as forest managers and con-
trollers. It was these colonial and post-colonial state forestry agencies and officials
that in the pre- and post-world war periods were the primary actors in creating
political forests, creating the ideas of “empty forests” as well as “waste lands” and
“customary lands” as separate and separable spaces from political forests. In some
cases, foresters acknowledged the presence of people in these great spaces but
either wanted to displace them out of forests—often glossing them as forest
destroyers, communists, Islamists, or terrorists, while sometimes still keeping them
nearby to mobilise their labour to produce forest plantations. At the heart of such
actions was the idea that only scientists—in this case forest scientists, economists,
ecologists, botanists, and expert managers—could manage a nation’s (or a col-
ony’s) valuable forests “for the greatest good and the greatest number of peo-
ple”. This could be done primarily through the reservation of the appropriate
forest species and territories, with forest access for resident peoples circumscribed
through creation of (forester-limited) Customary Rights, and with the manage-
ment left to “experts”—professional land, forest, and habitat managers who had
been formally trained (predominantly) to apply scientific management tech-
niques.
Territorial control through the creation of state property was the policy or legal
instrument of choice: an inherent strategic and essential political part of this
endeavour. From the colonial era’s creation of the term “forest” as an administra-
tive category connected to particular agencies, continuing after independence
from the British and Dutch colonial rulers to national authorities, and later when
the nature of national authority was challenged through years of communist and
Islamic insurgencies, political forests came to be “recognized” as forests, politi-
cised as “jungles”, and symbols of staunchly capitalist nations. These struggles

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Writing Political Forests 13

over expertise continue today, within states and state forestry agencies, and
between state and non-state experts—whether these are customary or local lead-
ers seeking to legitimise forest management by resident peoples (e.g. Forsyth
2019), locally based conservation organisations, or the transnational conservation
organisations discussed by Corson (2018) and other authors in this symposium.
Corson (2018) shows how certain forms of organised, international conservation
expertise has superseded the critiques and focus on scientific forestry and makes
its way into the tropical forests of Madagascar through pathways carved by
USAID. Her article also illustrates how conservation takes place in political forests;
that is, how conservation zones were often created in political forests, political for-
estry having laid the groundwork for curtailing or eliminating forest uses (espe-
cially forest farming) by resident peoples.
As we wrote in Vandergeest and Peluso (2015), and as discussed in Corson
(2018) and Devine and Baca (2020), conservation forests are Political Forests. Fur-
ther, the broad displacement of scholarly and practitioner attention from “scien-
tific forestry” to forest conservation has been enabled by the invention of new
terms and fields such as “conservation science”. Both terms have been used to
justify certain types of organised forest practice as scientifically based. Asher’s
(2018) work with Afro-Colombian groups shows their outright rejection of any
kind of claims to scientific forestry expertise. Goldstein’s (2019) work on the
remote sensors and atmospheric and peat soil experts bring what she calls “volu-
metric” dimensions to the understanding of how volatile political forests are con-
tested transnationally. She shows how state, extra-state and non-state actors,
notably, the government of Singapore, used remote sensing to determine culpa-
bility for haze in Singapore’s airspace produced by forest fires in Indonesia.

Materialities in the Political Forest

Social questions dealing with environments, natures, ecologies, or geologies are
necessarily also engaging with the materialities of resources, natures, and their
environments—the “natures” in “socio-natures” (Swyngedouw 1999). Materialities
can be broadly understood as the emergent bio-physical or geo-physical properties
of the “objects” of our studies and how these come into being through socio-nat-
ural processes: a combination of human and non-human agency or activities. We
are interested in materialities because they influence how Political Forests are
made, maintained, and transformed—as illustrated by the way that foresters in
colonial Malaya responded to the complexity and dynamism of tropical forests by
producing models for managing complexity. Materialities take a number of forms
that we take up here very briefly, including plantations, conservation, and vio-
lence. Contributors have addressed these and other materialities in their articles;
here we make some brief interventions with respect to a few of those ideas.

Plantations
One of the most obvious trends shaping the making of political forests since the
historical moments covered by the “Counterinsurgencies ...” paper in the Annals

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14 Antipode

of the Association of American Geographers (Peluso and Vandergeest 2011) has

been the large-scale expansion of tree plantations on previous (excised) or current
forest land (Vandergeest and Schoenberger 2019). As discussed in the “Genealo-
gies...” (Peluso and Vandergeest 2001) and “Empires” papers (Vandergeest and
Peluso 2006a, 2006b), the pattern in Southeast Asia has been that plantations for
timber, resins (copal and pine pitch), and tree pulp were classified as forest, under
the jurisdiction of state forest agencies, while plantations for tree-based food
crops and some smallholder tree plantations, such as rubber, have been classified
as agriculture under the jurisdiction of state agriculture agencies. Such classifica-
tions are not inevitable nor are they the same in every country. Rubber (Hevea
brasiliensis), for example, is a forest tree in China, as well as, of course, in its native
Brazil. Competition is over species as well as territorial classifications. For example,
Indonesian foresters famously tried to have oil palm trees recognised as forest spe-
cies by the FAO and CIFOR—but failed.
Species classifications are, in turn, the basis of shifts in territorial jurisdiction and
control, as the spatial expansion of plantations either follows or prompts reclassifica-
tions of land. However, reclassification of the political forest is not inevitable as for-
estry and/or conservation agencies formulate strategies for retaining territorial
control even on land partially under species classified as agricultural. Important for-
est trees in plantations on forest land include eucalyptus, Agathis, Shorea, teak, rose-
wood, mahogany, pine, and fast-growing hardwood and softwood pulp species.
The most important plantation tree species administered by agricultural agencies in
Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand today include oil palm (Asher 2018; Goldstein
2019; see also Cramb and McCarthy 2016; Potter 2015; Pye and Bhattacharya
2012), rubber, cacao, coffee, and fruits. However, through social and community
forestry institutions, and other mechanisms such as surreptitious planting by farm-
ers, these agricultural trees are becoming more common on land classified as forest
—though rarely as the main tree species (Lukas and Peluso 2019; Peluso et al.
2011). Plantations in their contemporary “shareholder” models are often also on
non-forest lands whether private, customary, or village land held by smallholders or
state lands slated for conversion to industrial tree crop production.
The Indonesian experience demonstrates the case for a historical understanding
of the politics of changing forest materialities. Territorial colonialism in Java slowly
led to government control over the land that would become national forest after
the establishment of the Republic of Indonesia. During two different regimes of
colonial legal controls and colonial era land use, privately capitalised rubber and
coffee plantations competed with foresters for land in the mountains of Java8
(Goss 2011; Hefner 1990). Today, in Kalimantan and Sulawesi, plantations (often
foreign-based) are once again competing with forestry for land and territory to
grow trees. Moreover, by the time political forests were framed as national (i.e.
not regional or local), a move enabled by the Basic Forest Law (No. 5/1967),
almost all Java’s “production forests” were plantations. Plantation forestry in other
parts of Indonesia’s vast political forest estate began after 1967 following several
years of state and mass violence—much of which was based in forests (Peluso
and Vandergeest 2011; Vandergeest and Peluso 2006b). The power of the for-
estry administration increased in 1981 when it was taken out of the Ministry of

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Writing Political Forests 15

Agriculture and established as a ministry in its own right. Yet in addition to

expanding the political forest in the wake of major civil violence and increasing
Forestry Ministry influence on national policy and practice, ideas for reducing the
political forest’s extent were also in place: approximately one third of the forest
territory was to be converted and classified as “conversion forest”, with industrial
agriculture as the main target land use, administered by the Ministry of Agricul-
ture (Departemen Kehutanan 1986).
During the historical periods considered in our research, rubber played a
major role in limiting the range of political forests in all three of the countries
on which we focused (Brookfield et al. 1995). In West Malaysia, the post-
World War II government promoted smallholder “Malay” rubber in the low-
lands while moving residents out of the communist-controlled upland forests,
forcing the Forest Department to accept land re-classifications from reserve or
state forest to agriculture. The preference given to subjects classified as Malay
re-racialised smallholder rubber production (Brookfield et al. 1995). In Southern
Thailand, villagers first started planting rubber in swiddens during the 1920s
(Stifel 1973), but rapid expansion commenced after World War II as villagers
converted swiddens into permanent smallholder rubber holdings. The Thai gov-
ernment also encouraged the movement of farmers into forested uplands par-
tially controlled by the Communist Party. Similarly, rubber became an
important swidden fallow tree in Sarawak and Kalimantan since its introduction
in the early 20th century (Dove 1996; Peluso 2009). The mobilities of swidden
cultivators led to ongoing struggles around recognition of land rights for small-
holders at the expense of forestry department control of territory in these areas
(Potter 1988). Today, the struggle between rubber and forestry has shifted to
southern China, the former “Indochina” (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia), and
Northeast Thailand, while expanding oil palm plantations have become the
main competitor with forests in Indonesia and Malaysia (Cramb and McCarthy
2016).
Struggles around the classification, reclassification, and access to land associ-
ated with the expansion of plantations are a theme in this symposium in the arti-
cles by Asher (2018), Goldstein (2019) and Lukas and Peluso (2019). Asher
describes how oil palm plantations are understood in Columbia as one of the
“monsters” that are violently wresting control of land from Afro-Columbian com-
munities in the Pacific Region of Columbia, by converting land used by forest
communities to industrial land uses. Goldstein discusses how expanding palm oil
plantations in Kalimantan are blamed for the peat fires that are causing the haze
in Singapore; the smoky politics turn around whether the fires can be identified
with specific plantation companies in Indonesian places in order to hold them
financially responsible. Lukas and Peluso describe how struggles around control of
land are waged through extending agricultural species onto forest land in the
understory: farmers have been allowed to plant tree species classified as agricul-
ture—including nut, coffee, and fruit trees—filling the “empty” spaces with their
tree crops as well as extensively planting fodder and food species between the
forest agency’s (SFC) primary economic species.

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16 Antipode

Conservation
Political ecologists are tracing the shift to a new hegemony of conservation for-
estry, focusing critical attention on conservation practices such as biodiversity
conservation, green grabbing, and increased violence used in the name of conser-
vation (in this symposium, see Asher 2018; Corson 2018; Devine et al. 2018; For-
syth 2019; elsewhere, see Brockington et al. 2008; Cribb 2007; Lunstrum 2015,
2018; Peluso 1993; Woods 2011). Forest conservation works through global net-
works through which conservationists, conservation models, knowledge about
ecologies and endangered species move, in a manner that parallels but displaces
the global networks of political forestry described above.
Much of the critical scholarship on forest conservation has focused on exploring
elements of what we called “green neoliberalism” in our 2015 essay in Raymond
Bryant’s book, The International Handbook of Political Ecology (Vandergeest and
Peluso 2015), as noted by Devine and Baca (2020) in their Introduction to this
symposium. Green neoliberalism in conservation involves a package of policies
and practices including the imposition of market logics and an increasing gover-
nance role for non-state agencies, especially transnational conservation organisa-
tions. While this concept has considerable explanatory power, a comparative
approach could demonstrate variation and limits on how this conceptual package
explains current processes in the making and unmaking of political forests. For
example, transnational conservation organisations exert considerable power in
imposing their visions of conservation in some sites, as Corson (2018) shows in
Madagascar. Yet, in parts of Thailand and Malaysia, many elements of the green
neoliberal package have seen only limited uptake—variation that begs explana-
tion.
Current patterns in the countries where we conducted political forest research
are an example: In Indonesia, transnational conservation organisations are fre-
quently brought into government conversations about which lands to preserve
and which to develop outside of Java. At the same time, in Java, one of our “clas-
sic” political forest sites, the State Forestry Corporation (SFC), continues to fight
for its long-held monopoly on decision-making authority on forest lands, even
though the laws have changed (Lukas and Peluso 2019). The SFC is now outside
the Forestry Ministry, and is under the Ministry of State Enterprises (BUMN). In
Thailand, meanwhile, transnational conservation NGOs have relatively little influ-
ence, and state agencies remain dominant in the production of political forests,
which are now almost entirely conservation forests. However, Thailand’s new
Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation (which assumed
jurisdiction over conservation areas in 2002), local NGOs, and other government
agencies have been experimenting with some elements of the neoliberal package,
such as Payment for Ecosystem Services, and REDD+ pilot projects. Elsewhere, we
wonder if the growing role of drug cartels and other non-state and para-state vio-
lent actors can be explained adequately in terms of the “new actors” of neoliber-
alism (see Peluso and Lund 2011). Many new actors are not necessarily “green”
nor particularly neo-liberal.

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Writing Political Forests 17

Violence
The histories of Political Forests everywhere are violent; they are perhaps
quintessential violent environments (Peluso and Watts 2001). Forest violence takes
many forms, and involves diverse actors operating in different historical periods.
Such actors may include forestry and conservation departments, militaries, police,
paramilitaries, vigilante groups, drug lords, wildlife poachers, political parties, anti-
state insurgents, and conservation organisations, all seeking to control what hap-
pens in forests and deploying violence to that end. Violent actors, including for-
estry agencies themselves, seek control of forest territories in pursuit of their own
profits. There are also small-scale thugs and petty criminals, thieves, bandits, drug
cartels, and smugglers who use forests as cover, to escape. Forests and jungles,
we found, were often the sites from which “the countryside surrounded the city”
(Peluso and Vandergeest 2011).
The very term “political” in the concept of Political Forests points to how state
actors, plantations, conservation groups, insurgents, and forest people deploy vio-
lence in their efforts to monopolise, deflect, or attain forest control. This became
increasingly clear to us through our comparative research, leading us to elaborate on
the central role of political violence in forest-making through and in the wake of the
insurgencies, emergencies, and counter-insurgencies of the mid-20th century. Multi-
ple state institutions, including militaries, were involved in efforts to either clear for-
ests of potential supporters of insurgents or to draw “loyal subjects” into
circumscribed areas in forests (Peluso and Vandergeest 2011), helping define the
boundaries of forests without people that later became targets for conservationists.
The articles in this symposium show how Political Forest territories continue to
be spaces of physical, epistemic, and structural violence. What has changed over
the past 20 years are the identities of some of the violent actors, and the reasons
for deploying violence. Forest violence not only happens between foresters and
forest residents, for example, but also between multiple contenders for access to
land and forest resources including drug cartels, timber and wildlife poaching
mafias, plantation companies, conservationists, and insurgents. These actors par-
ticipate in violent struggles to control and use political forests or to replace these
forests with other land uses, often at the expense of small farmers. In this sympo-
sium, Devine et al.’s (2018) article is notable on this theme, as they highlight
ongoing violence in conservation areas invaded by drug cartels in Guatemala.
Lukas and Peluso (2019) examine longer term effects of forest violence in the
wake of the New Order’s decline in Indonesia, and Asher (2018) unravels new
forms of indigenous violence in forests of Colombia.

Final Comments
In conclusion, we very much appreciate the honour of this symposium’s conven-
ing, the efforts of the contributors in engaging with this part of our work, and
the organisation efforts by Jennifer Devine and Jennifer Baca. We thank them also
for organising the meetings with these contributors and others who wrote and
presented papers at the San Francisco AAG in 2016. The conference, the articles,
and our own “Afterword” have allowed us to elaborate on our process and

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18 Antipode

objectives in writing political forests. A glance at the reference lists in any of the
articles demonstrates the great diversity and quantity of scholars with whom our
forests and borderlands lenses brought us into contact. Perhaps this revisit will
lead to another collaboration between us or with Southeast Asian and North
American colleagues on that elusive fourth moment of political forests and for-
estry—“the present”—which keeps skipping away from us.

Acknowledgements
The authors have not forgotten all those who have assisted us in writing the previous polit-
ical forest papers and conducting research. Here, however, we are grateful for the immense
amount of work that went into compiling this symposium, and thank the editors at Anti-
pode and the symposium editors, Jennifer Devine and Jennifer Baca, as well as the contribu-
tors to the AAG meetings and this Antipode issue, for their labour and engagement with
our work.

Endnotes
1
Completed in Berkeley, Toronto, and East Java, January 2020.
2
Faculty members in the program during that time included Fred Buttel (chair of Peter’s
doctoral committee), Charles Geisler, Milton Barnett, E. Walter Coward, Philip McMichael,
Shelley Feldman, and Patricia Garrett.
3
The program was founded by Vietnam and Indonesia scholar, George Kahin, committed
to critical area studies in Southeast Asia. Faculty members besides Coward, Barnett, and
Kahin included Benedict Anderson, James Siegel, Oliver Wolters, Audrey Kahin, James Boon,
David Wyatt, Randy Barker, John Wolff, and Thomas Kirsch.
4
Including, besides the faculty involved with BWEP, Noer Fauzi Rachman (Oji), Suraya
Afiff, Jake Kosek, Shubhra Gururani, Atchara Rakyutidharm, Keith Barney, and Robin Roth.
5
With the support of the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation and program officer Peter Riggs.
6
Some of these participants later collaborated with one or both of us in research and
training programs, notably Chusak Withayapak (Chiangmai), Khamla Phanvilay (Vientiane),
Philip Hirsch (Sydney), Lu Xing (Yunnan), Wan Zawawi (UM), Simon Takdir (Singkawang),
and also included Lim Teck Ghee (UM), and Nattaya Tubtim (Chiangmai). Many other
scholars and activists contributed to our research and the formation of our ideas concern-
ing political forests, too numerous to mention (but notably, Christine Padoch, Michael
Leigh, and Peter Riggs).
7
Here as elsewhere in the paper, where capital letters are used for Political Forests and
Customary Rights, the capital letters indicate a “formalised” and “state regulated” version
of these (see Hart [2001] on her use of “big D” and “little d” development).
8
These were the “Cultivation System(s)” era, broadly1830–1860 officially but until 1865;
1890 in coffee-growing areas (Breman 2015; Elson 1994), and after the 1870 Agrarisch
Wet (Agrarian Policy) differentiating state and customary/peasant land and enabling com-
mercial leasing of government-claimed land for forest and agricultural plantations (Boom-
gaard 1994).

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