Presentation short abstract

This paper shows how climate-framed development projects generate anticipatory violence and social fractures long before implementation, as communities navigate anticipated gains, losses, and harms shaped by longstanding extractive histories and the evolving logics of capitalist expansion.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how longstanding extractive logics generate profound social disruption in customary communities well before development projects are fully implemented. Drawing on ethnographically informed case studies in three Southeast Asian sites, we show that the anticipation of intervention—especially when framed as a climate solution—produces anticipatory violence: the pre-emptive reorganisation of social and political relations around projected gains, losses, and anticipated dispossession. Extending scholarship on stalled or withdrawn land deals, we argue that these dynamics are not new but reflect a conjuncture in the ongoing mutation of capitalist expansion, shaped by earlier extractive histories and national development trajectories that condition how communities interpret contemporary proposals.

We conceptualise these latent processes through “the unseen,” referring to planned or partially initiated projects that signal future extraction, and “the Unseen,” capturing disruptions to customary-based, land, and social relations. Across our cases, anticipatory pressures take shape not only through preliminary on-the-ground activities but also through policy designations, corporate presence, and communities’ experiential knowledge of extractive harms in neighbouring regions. These dynamics fracture community life as pro- and anti-project factions emerge around promised compensation, projected opportunities, and feared harms—well before any extensive construction or land conversion occurs.

Our findings challenge development studies’ focus on implemented projects and measurable impacts. By attending to what is partial, proposed, or known through communities’ own interpretive frameworks, we show how extractive rationalities exert power through speculative futures, generating development violence in advance of complete project realisation.