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"Borderlands Southeast Asia."
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Border Capitalism, Disrupted
Border Capitalism, Disruptedpresents an insightful ethnography of migrant labor regulation at the Mae Sot Special Border Economic Zone on the Myanmar border in northwest Thailand. By bringing a new deployment of workerist and autonomist theory to bear on his fieldwork, Stephen Campbell highlights the ways in which workers' struggles have catalyzed transformations in labor regulation at the frontiers of capital in the global south.
Looking outwards from Mae Sot, Campbell engages extant scholarship on flexibilization and precarious labor, which, typically, is based on the development experiences of the global north. Campbell emphasizes the everyday practices of migrants, the police, employers, NGOs, and private passport brokers to understand the \"politics of precarity\" and the new forms of worker organization and resistance that are emerging in Asian industrial zones.
Focusing, in particular, on the uses and effects of borders as technologies of rule, Campbell argues that geographies of labor regulation can be read as the contested and fragile outcomes of prior and ongoing working-class struggles.Border Capitalism, Disruptedconcludes that with the weakened influence of formal unions, understanding the role of these alternative forms of working-class organizations in labor-capital relations becomes critical.
With a broad data set gleaned from almost two years of fieldwork,Border Capitalism, Disruptedwill appeal directly to those in anthropology, labor studies, political economy, and geography, as well as Southeast Asian studies.
eBook
Unsettled Frontiers
Unsettled Frontiers provides a
fresh view of how resource frontiers evolve over time.
Since the French colonial era, the Cambodia-Vietnam borderlands
have witnessed successive waves of market integration, migration,
and disruption. The region has been reinvented and depleted as new
commodities are exploited and transplanted: from vast French rubber
plantations to the enforced collectivization of the Khmer Rouge;
from intensive timber extraction to contemporary crop booms. The
volatility that follows these changes has often proved challenging
to govern.
Sango Mahanty explores the role of migration, land claiming, and
expansive social and material networks in these transitions, which
result in an unsettled frontier, always in flux, where communities
continually strive for security within ruptured landscapes.
eBook
Fruit booms and investor mobility along the China-Myanmar and China-Laos borders
Investment in fruit cultivation is currently transforming agricultural production and rural landscapes in the mountainous region of mainland Southeast Asia, especially in the borderlands and lowlands of this region. Unlike large-scale land acquisitions and investment in previously reported boom crops, e.g., rubber trees and oil palms, investment in fruit cultivation is generally short-term, small-scale, and often informal. Additionally, different from previous crop booms, investors in fruit booms often relocate geographically or spatially to seize opportunities. Research has yet to investigate this aspect of today’s investment boom in fruit cultivation. Beyond discussing a certain fruit type in a specific area, this study documents the geographic mobility of investment as the distinguishing characteristic of investment in fruit cultivation in Dehong, Xishuangbanna, Mandalay, and Luang Namtha, all of which are located along the China-Myanmar (Burma) and China-Laos borders. This is achieved through grounded methodological approaches. These sites have become a hot spot of booms in the production of fresh fruit, e.g., banana and watermelon. This investment mobility can be generally divided into the following two types: domestic investors relocating within one country, and foreign investors relocating across borders, thus, (re)locating investment. Comparison and synthesis are employed to show that ecological and social-political constraints drive investor mobility in fruit booms along liberalized agri-trade and regional comparative advantages. This study advances the understanding of associated issues by characterizing and excavating the geographic mobility of investors in the current era of small-scale land acquisitions and investment in fruit booms in a broader scope. These findings expand the theoretical literature on land grabbing and crop booms and help to (re)consider related environmental consequences and well-being of the affected population.
Journal Article
Unresolved border, land and maritime disputes in Southeast Asia : bi- and multilateral conflict resolution approaches and ASEAN's centrality
In Unresolved Border, Land and Maritime Disputes in Southeast Asia the authors shed light on unresolved and lingering territorial disputes in Southeast Asia and their reflection in current inter-state relations in the region, applying a wider regional and comparative perspective.
eBook
A Place of Belonging in Myths and Memories: The Origin and Early History of the Imagined Tai Khuen Nation (Chiang Tung/Kyaingtong, Myanmar)
This study is about a borderland between three dominant cultures: the Burmese, the Chinese, and the Siamese/Thai, i.e., the former Shan State of Chiang Tung. The region of Chiang Tung (also transcribed Keng Tung, Kyaingtong) lies in the Eastern Shan State of Myanmar/Burma in Upper Southeast Asia and borders on Thailand, China, and Laos. The majority of the people living in Chiang Tung are called Tai Khuen. This paper explores the origin and early history of the imagined Tai Khuen nation in Chiang Tung through myths and memories recorded in the Chiang Tung Chronicle (CTC). Myths and memories may be used to tell us something of what a people has held and holds to be of lasting value. Important for a common imagined community is a myth of common ancestry. The CTC narrates the way in which the Khuen people understand the origin and early history of the place where they live—the “imagined Khuen nation.” The myths and memories recorded in the CTC express a sense of place and belonging for the Tai Khuen people.
Journal Article
Seaways and Gatekeepers
The eastern archipelagos of Southeast Asia stretch from Mindanao and Sulu in the north to Bali in the southwest and New Guinea in the southeast. Many of their inhabitants are regarded as “people without history\", while colonial borders cut across shared underlying patterns of relations. Yet many of these societies were linked to trans-oceanic trading systems for millennia. Indeed, some of the world’s most prized commodities once came from territories which were either “stateless\" or under the tenuous control of loosely structured polities in this region. Trade provides the integrating framework for local and regional histories that cover more than 300 years, from the late 16th century to the beginning of the 20th, when new technologies and changing markets signaled Western dominance. The Seaways introduction considers theories from the social sciences and economics which can help liberate writers from dependence on states as narrative frameworks. This book will also appeal to those working on wider themes such as global history, state formation, the evolution of markets and anthropology.
eBook
The organisational structure of transnational narcotics trafficking groups in Southeast Asia: a case study of Vietnam’s border with Laos
The Golden Triangle—the area where the borders of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar converge—is considered one of the most complicated narcotics-trafficking hotspots in the world. More research is needed, however, to understand the supply and demand resources as well as the overall structure of transnational narcotics trafficking (TransNT) in this area and neighboring regions. The present paper provides an in-depth examination of the organisational structure of TransNT in the borderland between Vietnam and Laos, using multiple qualitative approaches to identify four key aspects of trafficking groups in this area: namely, group size, the relative centrality of lead actors in the trafficking networks, the flexibility and adaptability of network operations, and the personal attributes of traffickers. Depending on the number of drug traffickers involved, TransNT in Vietnam can be separated into small, medium, and large-scale groups; however, drug markets in Vietnam are not controlled by monopolistic groups or ‘cartels’. Notably, cross-border networks tend to have a fluid structure characterised by a sophisticated modus operandi from the preparation stages to the later stages of trafficking activity, enabling the criminal networks to achieve their goals.
Journal Article
Triangulating the borderless world: geographies of power in the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle
This paper argues that the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle makes manifest the complex geographies of power that subvert efforts to read cross-border regionalization as a straightforward geographical corollary of 'globalization'. As such, the region needs to be examined not simply as a complementary transborder assemblage of land, labour and capital, but rather as a palimpsest in which the imagined geographies of cross-border development and the economic geographies of their uneven spatial fixing on the ground are mediated by complex cultural and political geographies. We seek to unpack these by triangulating how the geographies of capital (including its uneven development and its links to the geo-economics of intra-regional competition), land (including post-colonial relations across the region, the geopolitics of land reclamation and the enclaved landscapes of tourism) and labour (including the divergent itineraries of migrant workers) overlay and complicate one another in the region. By charting these complex triangulations of space and place, we seek to problematize narratives of the Growth Triangle as an exemplary embodiment of the 'borderless world'.
Journal Article
Drugs, insurgency and state-building in Burma: Why the drugs trade is central to Burma's changing political order
The mainstream discourse on the political economy of drugs has emphasised the negative correlation between drug production and state capacity, with the presence of a thriving drugs trade seen as both a sign and a cause of weak states. Through an analysis of the drugs trade in Burma this study argues that such an approach is deeply flawed. Focusing on the period since the 1988 protests it argues that the illicit nature of the drugs trade has provided the state with an array of incentives (legal impunity, protection, money laundering) and threats (of prosecution) with which to co-opt and coerce insurgent groups over which it has otherwise commanded little authority. Although the state's involvement in the drugs trade was initially driven by an expedient desire to co-opt insurgent groups following the 1988 protests, this study also argues that over time it has provided an arena in which more immanent and largely unanticipated processes of state formation, namely the centralisation of the means of violence and extraction, have gradually been built. Rather than being a sign of corruption-induced state incapacity, the state's involvement in the drugs trade has thus become a central arena through which state power has been constructed and reproduced.
Journal Article