The Techo Funan Canal and the (geo-)politics of anticipatory anxieties in Cambodia

The 180‑kilometre, USD 1.2 billion China‑supported Techo‑Funan Canal (FTC) was inaugurated on 5 August 2024 with an unusually grand state ceremony. Celebratory posters appeared across the whole country while detailed information on key facts remain strikingly scarce and the excavation machinery silent. This talk will examine this combination of spectacle, opacity and uncertainty to show how the project has already set in motion a series of (geo-)political and (geo-)economic effects. To advance existing debates on infrastructure and anticipation, I develop a relational approach for analysing the consequential anticipatory hopes and anxieties tracing how they are formed through (dis)connections between geopolitical, sovereign, and grounded project-adjacent power dynamics. In the FTC case, I show how support from globalising China has emboldened Cambodia’s state elite to both spur and remedy ‘sovereign anxiety’ (Mostafanezhad et al. 2023) vis-à-vis Vietnam, effectively constraining how residents adjacent to the planned canal can act upon potential future evictions, the triggered land speculation and related concerns. Meanwhile, the U.S. and Vietnamese anxieties over China’s expanding influence have overshadowed the more situated anticipatory processes and their effects.

Speaker biography: Mira Käkönen is a scholar of political ecology and an ARC DECRA Fellow at ANU’s Crawford School. Over the past 15 years, her research has examined the politics of environment and development, with a particular focus on the Mekong Region, Southeast Asia. Her DECRA project, Volatile Rivers and the Infrastructure Politics in the Mekong Region, explores entanglements of rivers, infrastructure, and power relations, and how these are increasingly shaped by a globalizing China and changing climate.