The authors argue that the depletion of the open land frontier in Thailand has not led to the development of a strong central state, even though it has led to demands for innovations in the formal-legal order governing access to land. Institutional factors preventing the state from providing formal rule enforcement for the population combined with the lack of a landed aristocracy have maintained the discrepancy between legal rules and customary practices that prevailed when an open land frontier allowed people to avoid conflict by moving away. Since the mid-1980s, when the Royal Forestry Department drafted a new policy to promote commercial tree plantations, conflicts over forest reserves have increased, centering on the commercial tree plantations, on squatters who refuse to leave the reserves, and on the preservation and management of so-called community forests.

Farmers in the Hmong village of Pa Kluai have replaced outlawed opium production with production of cabbages for urban markets. But because cabbage, unlike opium, requires the use of irrigation and pesticides, Thai farmers living downstream from Pa Kluai blame the Hmong for deforesting hills and polluting streams. Unsuccessful attempts to resolve the conflict between Hmong villagers and their lowland neighbors illustrate conflicts over what it means to be Thai, pointing to problems with the so-called three pillars of modern Thai society: race, religion, and king. Not only do the Hmong have different customs from Thai villagers but as swidden farmers who fell and farm upland forests, they come into conflict with Royal Forestry Department plans to preserve forests in watersheds. A Buddhist monk, dismayed by deforestation, has joined Thai villagers in protesting the cabbage-growing Hmong. And the king, who has tried to win the loyalty of highland groups, proposed that opium fields not be destroyed until viable replacement crops were available. So far, efforts to resolve the conflict by relocating the Hmong has failed, due to lack of a suitable alternative site.

Thai government policies for highland development are creating serious problems for ethnic hill tribes, among them environmental pollution, prostitution, AIDS, increasing opium addiction, and social disruption. Three questionable assumptions underlie government policies. Concern for opium eradication not only directs attention and funds away from groups who do not produce opium but has also failed, thus far, to find substitute crops that do not require extensive use of polluting chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The flawed assumption that shifting cultivators, rather than logging concerns, are major destroyers of the forests has led to fruitless efforts to relocate hill peoples. And the questionable theory that ethnic peoples pose a threat to national security has led to educational efforts that undermine traditional forms of village authority.

Indigenous people in the Philippine Cordillera Region maintain legal pluralism by invoking several legal orders—customary laws, conflicting national laws, international law, and principles of human rights—to assert claims to ancestral lands. Although the U.S. Supreme Court in 1909 held that Philippine lands that had been occupied from time immemorial are presumed never to have been public, the Spanish colonial Regalian doctrine, derived from the explorer Magellan's claim of all lands in the Archipelago for the Spanish crown, remains the theoretical bedrock on which Philippine national land laws rest. Land not covered by official documentation, such as the highland areas occupied by indigenous groups who have not acquired legal titles, is considered part of the public domain. Recently, dam-building projects, logging concessions, and commercial farming in highland areas have spurred renewed efforts by indigenous groups to assert rights to ancestral lands threatened with flooding, deforestation, and dispossession.