Neil Loughlin – författare

This book examines how states and corporations across the Global South acquire land, identifying distinct patterns of expropriation and resistance. Across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, economic growth in sectors such as mining, agribusiness, energy, infrastructure, and real estate is driving far-reaching land-use change. Yet the processes of dispossession that underpin these transformations vary considerably. It introduces a comparative framework to explain how legal mechanisms, coercion, and state–business alliances combine in different ways to shape land conflicts.Drawing on detailed case studies—including India's solar parks, Indonesia's palm oil plantations, Cambodia's real estate developments, East Timor's oil and gas projects, and Brazil's land mafias—the contributors highlight three distinct regimes of dispossession: state-led expropriation, curtailed land rights, and decentralised coercion. By comparing these patterns across contexts, the book deepens understanding of how dispossession is organised and resisted, while offering insight into the broader political economy of land-use change.This book is essential reading for scholars, researchers, and students in development studies, political economy, agrarian studies, geography, and sociology. It will also appeal to policymakers, civil society organizations, and activists engaged with land rights, resource governance, and social justice issues in the Global South.The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Globalizations.

In The Politics of Coercion, Neil Loughlin explains the persistence of Cambodia's authoritarian regime for more than four decades. It provides a historically grounded investigation of the country's ruling coalition: political elites, many drawn from within the state's coercive apparatus, who, in coordination with state-dependent tycoons, have come to control Cambodia's politics and its economy. Loughlin presents new empirical data foregrounding the coercive underpinnings of the modern Cambodian state and its party, the Cambodian People's Party (CPP).The focus on coercion reflects the regime's conflict and postconflict evolution and extractive political economy as the ruling coalition failed to channel popular interests through its political institutions, thus resorting either to low-intensity forms of coercion such as intimidation and surveillance or to high-intensity coercion such as violent crackdowns and extrajudicial killings.Through a critical reevaluation of the regime's origins and evolution in its relationship with citizens, The Politics of Coercion reconceptualizes the CPP to emphasize the obstacles—structural, institutional, and distributional—to building a mass-based clientelist or developmentally legitimate authoritarian party.