Legacies in Land Governance: Colonialism, War, and Socialism

The end of the Cold War brought a flurry of integration efforts to a region long fractured along ideological lines. In the second half of the 1980s, socialist orthodoxies were relaxed as Vietnam and Laos followed China’s market-oriented reforms (1986), “the Burmese way to socialism” was abandoned (1988), and Cambodia’s peace accords were signed (1991). As these countries joined the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in the years that followed, Thai government officials’ calls to turn “battlefields into marketplaces” ushered in an era when private investment and free trade-oriented policies began to find their feet across the region. Investments