The emotional life of rupture at Cambodia's Lower Sesan 2 hydropower dam

Bibliographic Data

ID4464876
AuthorsSango Mahanty (0000-0003-0382-5879, Australian National University, corresponding author), Sopheak Chann (0000-0002-6004-7260, Royal University of Phnom Penh), Soksophea Suong (Royal University of Phnom Penh)
Year2024
Volume7
Issue1
Pages330-352
Publication date2024-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning E Nature and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2514-8486 • E-ISSN: 2514-8494
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/25148486231162087
OpenAlexW4324148850
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited79

This article aims to extend and deepen our understanding of how emotions figure in experiences of major nature-society disruptions or "rupture." Cambodia's Lower Sesan 2 hydropower dam is an example of rupture, which refers to dramatic, adverse, and disruptive episodes that ripple across scale. Against a historical backdrop of land enclosures and dispossession, the dam sparked significant community and civil society resistance. This emotionally charged campaign emphasized that the dam and associated resettlement would erase the impacted communities' deep customary relationships to the area. Although some community members ultimately refused the resettlement package and moved to customary lands near their flooded village, the majority accepted resettlement. We explore the emotional dimensions of these communities' experiences, finding that rupture is an inherently emotional process, within layered historical processes of change and violence. The intense emotions that such processes evoke can spark action within the "open moment" (Lund, 2016) that episodes of rupture create; yet the outcomes are highly unpredictable within the asymmetrical political and economic settings that underpin nature-society rupture

Hydropower · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Cambodian History and Society · Engineering · History · Law · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access