J. Whitington, Multiplicity as a Political Form UNDER REVIEW – DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION 1 Multiplicity as Political Form in Southeast Asia: Sustainability Enclaves and the Territorialisation of Transnational Regimes in Laos Jerome Whitington* *Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore ABSTRACT In a recent article, I suggest a broad characterization of “sustainability enclaves” as a form of spatial governance relevant for Lao hydropower projects (Whitington 2012). I identify sustainability enclaves as domains of environmental practice that have been actively problematized by transnational environmental activists, so that they become intensive sites of environmental activity with subsequent unpredictable outcomes. Consequently, these zones of environmental practice have come to be more explicitly spatially defined and to receive considerable attention in the form of techniques of producing sustainability (regardless of whether these techniques are effective). In this paper, I provide further characterization of sustainability enclaves in order to ask about their implications for Lao political form. I argue for an analysis of heterogeneous, overlapping regimes, akin to Ong’s (2000) concept of graduated sovereignty, that are flexible in practice, organized with respect to transnational investment and rule, and territorially extensive. It implies that Lao political form is organized through the centralizing single party state, but involving concessionary strategies for encapsulating multiplicity. Analysing concrete spatial assemblages in light of their operations and governing prerogatives can push researchers to ask more specific questions about how Laos sits within emerging regional governance constellations. KEY WORDS: Political form, Laos, sustainability, spatiality, territorialisation, transnational investment, Southeast Asia, sustainability enclave, multiplicity The entrenchment of new resource regimes across Southeast Asia has increasingly called attention to the rise of illiberal state forms in the midst of processes that bear many features of contemporary neoliberalism. The role of environment and sustainability practices in the region points toward divergence among state forms in a period of evident economic transformation and sometimes heavy-handed single party rule. Accounts describing globalization in Malaysia or Thailand do not do justice to the political ecologies of Cambodia, Myanmar or Laos. In particular, novel modes of association among multilateral, private commercial and nongovernmental groups have to be taken into consideration. On the other hand, explanations concerned too directly with capitalist resource extraction or centralized party politics may fail to demonstrate how novel articulations of production, forms of care, and stabilized understandings of political problems serve to recast emergent