Political memories of conflict, economic land concessions, and political landscapes in the Lao People's Democratic Republic

Political memories-which are crucial for establishing and maintaining 'political capital', based on individual and group positioning during past conflict and wars, but also in relation to presentday politics-are important when considering varied outcomes from negotiations and other interactions that occur in the Lao People's Democratic Republic in relation to large-scale economic land concessions. This paper continues to expand on the idea of political memories of past conflicts and wars by considering the concept in relation to the theoretical framework proposed by Hall et al. (2011) in their book Powers of Exclusion, which stresses the importance of interactions between regulation, force, the market and legitimation for understanding different types of exclusionary processes, especially those linked to land access. I argue that political memories are particularly relevant when it comes to legitimation, but that expanding the concept so as to include political memories is important. In relation to large-scale plantation, mining and hydropower dam concessions, I also stress the importance of political memories in (re)shaping understandings of landscapes, thus creating particular varieties of memory laden political landscapes, which too are constituted by the past but are also politically mobilized in the present.