The Poor's 'Self-harm'? The Environmental Slow Violence Against the Forgotten Stateless Ethnic Vietnamese on Tonlé Sap Lake in Cambodia

Environmental justice issues of citizens and indigenous peoples is an established field of research. However, environmental injustice and its impacts on the lives and livelihoods of stateless people have to date been largely overlooked. In a context where the number of stateless people worldwide is estimated to exceed 10 million (UNHCR, 2023), with increasing scholars stressing that environmental injustice exacerbates the conditions of the stateless (Connell, 2015), this lacuna in the research is significant.

It is noteworthy that the harms of environmental hazards on people may not often occur in a fast, direct, and catastrophic way as many traditionally understand, but in a slow, accretive, and imperceivable way, which is regarded as slow violence (Nixon, 2011). By leveraging slow violence as an analytical lens, we can thus better understand stateless people's environmental injustice over a long time and gradual pattern.

This project will investigate the relationship between environmental slow violence and the condition of statelessness through in-depth qualitative research with stateless ethnic Vietnamese living on Tonlé Sap Lake in Cambodia, the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia, where deforestation, ecotourism, infrastructure development, and climate crisis are impacting significantly on the ecosystem. In this way, it offers a theoretically-informed, empirical contribution that uniquely seeks to uncover interrelations between environmental (in)justice and statelessness to address the existing lacuna in research within this area.