doi:10.1111/sjtg.12284 BOOK REVIEWS Myanmar Transformed? People, Places and Politics Justine Chambers, Gerard McCarthy, Nicholas Farrelly and Chit Win (eds) ISEAS Publishing, Singapore, 2018, xiii + 333 (ISBN 978-9-8148-1853-7). Prior to Myanmar’s nominally democratic transition in 2011, the task of keeping abreast of the English language social science literature on Myanmar, relative to other countries in the region, was relatively straightforward due to a notable dearth of material. In the years since liberalization unfolded, this task has become agreeably more difficult, with a proliferation of important scholarly literature emerging. This volume, in the Myanmar Update publication series, is a particularly welcomed addition not least because, uniquely, over half of the contributions are produced by—or in collaboration with—Myanmar scholars, practitioners and researchers. This collaborative effort, unimaginable to such an extent prior to 2011, helps redress a general absence of collaborative research into contemporary Myanmar involving such a wide range of actors and hints at the plurality of voices underpinning Myanmar’s ongoing transformations. Such an intervention is necessary now more than ever, as the heady optimism that characterized the 2011−2015 period gives way to disillusionment. Rather than subscribing to one singular vision of democratic transition, this volume views the sociopolitical and economic transformations from multiple registers. It is organized thematically into three sections: People, Places and Politics. The People section adds critical nuance to debates about legitimacy in Myanmar. The relationship between rural citizens and the state has undergone a gradual reconfiguration towards increasingly empowered villagers, but technological mediation of this relationship is often overlooked. Eschewing conceptualizations of ‘the social’ as a purified realm divorced of technology, Pursch et al. analyze a rich body of empirical material to demonstrate the role of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in raising public expectations of state officials, while simultaneously building trust in the state itself. Chapter 3 carries forth this theme of mediation; Yaw Bawm Mangshang and Mike Griffiths convincingly show how the establishment of legitimacy through consent is deeply connected to the trust building potential associated with the provision of social protection and welfare. They urge greater recognition and cooperation between state-led mechanisms of protection and the ubiquitous informal provisions of redistribution across Burmese society. Si Thura and Tim Schroeder’s chapter complements this perspective. A community-based approach to health service delivery in Karen State affords a unique vantage point from which to understand peacebuilding as a site of hybrid, collaborative governance and political recognition, contoured by entrenched relationships between civil society providers and the ethnic armed groups whose de facto territories these operate across. The Places section explores how negotiating the uncertainty of Myanmar’s ongoing transformation is a structural reality across different geographical scales. Myat Thida Win et al. show that the rural poor contend with evolving forms of risk and uneven development brought about by new technologies and credit arrangements in the context of massive rural to urban migration. Giuseppe Gabusi’s chapter highlights similar structural contradictions in the seemingly unending conflict over resources in Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 40 (2019) 334–341 © 2019 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd Book Reviews 335 Myanmar’s ‘ethnic’ states, in particular Kachin State. Exploitative extractive industries and their associated impacts continue to fuel community resentment, political grievances, and public health crises. Dynamics of authoritarianism continue under a different civilian guise. There are complementarities with Chapter 7, which discusses the residue of authoritarianism and political contestation forming around special economic zones (SEZs). Pyae Phyo Maung and Tamas Wells usefully stage their discussion with cases of successful public advocacy. Nicholas Farrelly concludes Part III by shifting scales to the urban and to Myanmar’s capital Naypyidaw. Farrelly demonstrates the intractability of space in the operation of power. He eschews the language of exceptionalism in order to take Naypyidaw seriously; not as some urban aberration or symbol of paranoid rule, but rather as the physical embodiment of a much older vintage of governance that derives from Myanmar’s dynastic pre-modern rulers. Maung Aung Myoe opens the Politics section with an analysis of the remarkably stable quasi-civilian structures of governance underpinning transition. He shows that authoritarian legacy and the National League of Democracy’s (NLD) fidelity to tired narratives of national ‘unity’ have yet to be confined to the barracks; the NLD is walking in ideological lock-step with the military on national defence issues. Lwin Cho Latt et al. are also interested in the continued hegemony of national ‘unity’ in political discourse. In the context of the decades-old brutal counterinsurgency campaigns undertaken by the Burma Army, they suggest that the fragility of relations between the government and ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) is connected to the very terms of ‘all-inclusiveness’ proffered by the peace process. Issues of political community and difference, and the policing of these boundaries, are no more starkly apparent than in the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Rakhine State. ‘Clearance operations’ bearing ‘all the hallmarks of genocide’ (UNOHCHR, 2018), have contributed to tens of thousands of deaths and the displacement of three quarters of a million. As Kyaw Zeyar Win’s chapter shows, this must be contextualized within the legacy of authoritarian rule, which consistently securitized the Rohingya as a threat to the geo-body of the Burmese nation-state. Through the Mon peoples’ experience of belonging, Cecile Medail’s chapter insightfully conveys the racist underpinnings of such violence and their differential manifestations in the majoritarian, Burmanization politics of national identity debates. These chapters are nicely tied together by several common threads: Discourses of community and difference; the idea of mediation; and the looming legacy of authoritarianism. Despite their different approaches, the authors all highlight degrees of continuity with the past and agree that the hangover of military rule will not be shaken in Myanmar as easily as some might have hoped. There is an underlying notion that if the democratic promise of 2011 is to be realized—and the tide of post-2016 disillusionment stemmed—then the challenges posed by Myanmar’s myriad social, economic and political transformations must not be left solely in the hands of the state. As Matthew Walton’s Epilogue drives home, the country’s activists and community-based organizations play a crucial role in governance and by extension the peace process. Acknowledging the energy and expertise that already exists beyond the corridors of Naypyidaw is necessary for those seeking to steer Myanmar from the legacy of military rule and the trajectory of ethnic and religious conflict. This volume offers visions of how such collaborations might fruitfully unfold, and its greatest strength is in its incorporation of alternative vantage points. The liberalization process looks different depending upon who is viewing it, and where they are viewing it from. 336 Book Reviews Robert A. Farnan Chiang Mai University Accepted: 4 April 2019 Reference UNOHCHR (2018) Myanmar: UN Expert calls for Accountability over Violence in Rakhine State. United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 12 March. Available at: https:// www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=22793&LangID=E (accessed 22 February 2019). De-centring Land Grabbing: Southeast Asia Perspectives on AgrarianEnvironmental Transformations Peter Vandergeest and Laura Schoenberger (eds.) Routledge, Abingdon, UK, 2018, pp. xi + 280 (ISBN 978-0-815-35387-4) hbk. De-centring Land Grabbing is an edited volume with insightful perspectives on the ways in which debates and narratives of global land grabbing play out in Southeast Asia. Emerging from a 2015 conference in Chiang Mai, Thailand, the book is a republication of a 2017 special issue in the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS). It provides a welcome and valuable contribution to the field of agrarian studies by nuancing and regionalising discussions of land grabbing in ways that contextualize the prevailing analysis, moving beyond the meta-narrative of the global land grab that plagued initial conceptualizations of the phenomenon. The introduction to the book, written by Schoenberger, Hall, and Vandergeest, smartly uses the tools of science and technology studies to examine ‘the emergence of “land grab studies” as a field of inquiry’ which is often presented as a ‘standardized package’ (p. 3), including the narrative of the ‘global land grab’ as a universalizing phenomenon, individual land grabs as empirical evidence of its materialization, and land grabbing as the political-economic process by which control over land changes hands. They show how this package emerged as an object that could be portable across contexts and endowed with legitimacy and meaning, but could also be contested in particular locales and regions. This allows them to discuss the degree to which scholars of agrarian change in Southeast Asia either centre this standardized land grabbing package in their analysis or de-centre it by problematising its application to the places they study. For example, contributors to the volume show that oil palm plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia generally fit the global land grab narrative except that they emerged as early as the 1980s rather than the mid- or early-2000s. In contrast, those studying Cambodia and Laos demonstrate that large-scale land concessions followed the timeline of the global land grab narrative, but the local dynamics differ significantly, in which historical and local contexts are more important than global political-economic forces. The chapters comprising the special issue each approach the relationship between land grabbing and agrarian-environmental transformations in different ways. They vary in the degree to which they centre versus de-centre land grabbing narratives, but they all contextualize such processes in the places that they study. Due to space limitations, I can only point out some common themes rather than review each chapter. First, they highlight the importance of local or regional political-economic and institutional dynamics in shaping how land grabbing occurs on the ground (especially