‘Dei Chea Chivit’ Land is Life – Access to Land Rights for Indigenous People in Cambodia

Indigenous communities, who live in natural resource-rich regions of Cambodia are some of the country’s poorest populations (AIPP, 2010). Land for indigenous people is ‘life’. They hold a special attachment to land because it is directly linked to their identity and way of life as indigenous people (Inman, 2015). Yet, the value of land for the Cambodian state and for it’s elite population has been reduced to a factor of production leading to the stripping of public assets (Global Witness, 2007). As a result, widespread land conflict in Cambodia has deeply affected the lives of indigenous communities across the country (Licadho, 2014). The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the dynamics of factors affecting indigenous people’s access to land rights in Cambodia. Using a legal framework approach, this study employs Tuori’s conceptual framework for the relationship between power and the law that support the manifestation of the powers of exclusion affecting indigenous people’s access to land rights (Tuori, Bankowski & Uusitalo,1997; Hall, Hirsch & Li, 2011). In order for indigenous communities to gain access to the legal protection of land rights, they must participate in power negotiation. Unfortunately, the broader geopolitical and macroeconomic structures that affect indigenous people’s access to land rights such as the ‘global land grab’ and the neoliberal world order determine the development pathway of a state with a weak commitment to respecting human rights. The convergence of all these factors undermines the capacity of indigenous communities to breach elitist structures of exclusion through power negotiation. Thus, indigenous communities become trapped in a rapacious cycle of exclusion leading to their displacement and dispossession