192 BEYOND VOICE AND REFLEXIVITY
Figure 8.2 Economic land concessions (outlined in bold) and areas targeted by
systematic land titling (shaded) since mid-2012. See text for caveats.
of “titling” to rural areas (fig. 8.2) is more in line with the model of state
land distribution described above.
In mid-2012, Prime Minister Hun Sen announced a new initiative
aimed at handing out titles in areas that were “once covered by forest, can-
celed economic land concessions, [and] existing land concessions being
disputed by local villagers” (Cambodia Daily 2013b). Conducted by widely
publicized “student volunteers” equipped with GPS units and camouflage
uniforms (Phnom Penh Post 2012b), the campaign is a key piece of what
the prime minister calls his “leopard skin strategy”—an effort to maintain
smallholder farming within the wider network of economic land conces-
sions (Müller 2012, 10; Phnom Penh Post 2012a). The precise geography of
the new initiative is thus far quite opaque—figure 8.2 was made by shad-
ing in areas that are either former forest concessions, current or previous
economic land concessions, or both, and was simply intended to illustrate
that the types of land being targeted by the new initiative exhibit a sig-
nificantly different national geography than the areas targeted previously.