SEEING LIKE A BORDER: RESOURCE FRONTIERS, VOICES AND VISIONS ON MYANMAR'S BORDERLANDS WITH INDIA AND CHINA

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (FASS

Can borders speak to each other? The India–Bangladesh and Spain–Morocco borders in dialogue

By juxtaposing local narratives of border experiences in two volatile regions, the Spain–Morocco border in Melilla and the India–Bangladesh border in Assam, this paper argues for the value of understanding borders as infrastructures. The paper conceptualizes border infrastructures in their broad material and discursive forms by foregrounding local narratives garnered out of a dialogue between the two sites. Through this conversation, the paper explores how state designed infrastructures are lived, experienced, patrolled, naturalized and subverted across scales and locations, becoming part of a global story of violence. The paper argues that, by letting borders ‘speak to each other’ as an analytical and methodological intervention, scholars can potentially bridge gaps between bordering practices worldwide and people’s everyday strategies locally. Such dialogues can also enhance our understanding of the convergent histories of proliferating border infrastructures and movements around and across them

Securing urban frontiers: A view from Yangon, Myanmar

This article examines how variegated local and transnational interactions are reconfiguring Myanmar's largest city of Yangon. We do this through an analytical focus on frontiers and an empirical focus on how these are secured, drawing on interviews at two Security Expos and street-level observations in Yangon conducted over three years. Yangon thereby becomes a site for critical reflections about complex and multiple imbrications of frontiers, security and the urban with implications for how these may be conceptualized elsewhere

Infrastructures and b/ordering: how Chinese projects are ordering China–Myanmar border spaces

Border regions worldwide have gained prominence for how nation-states order, divide and understand the world. This is increasingly made explicit in the selective management of global commercial and human flows, leading to a paradoxical development and a major dilemma for the contemporary bordering practices in border regions: that of concurrently facilitating differentiated mobility while ensuring territorial integrity, securing both territories and flows. This paper argues that large-scale transnational infrastructures, by controlling, facilitating and channelizing cross-border mobilities, have emerged as a major instrument of b/ordering space in borderlands. This is especially relevant in Asia, where transnational, cross-border connectivity infrastructure projects have mushroomed, supported by political rhetoric, big budgets and diplomatic vigour. Grounded in long-term ethnographic research, the paper scrutinizes variegated infrastructure spaces in the seemingly remote and conflict-riddled borderlands between China’s Yunnan province and northern Myanmar’s Kachin state, subject to intensive Chinese infrastructure developments since the mid-1990s, further accelerated by the launch of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2015. The paper argues that infrastructures such as roads, plantations and special economic zones have started to regulate these volatile and contested borderlands more effectively than the official boundaries that delimit complex territorialities in the border region

We don't eat those bananas': Chinese plantation expansions and bordering on Northern Myanmar's Kachin borderlands

10.1080/15387216.2023.2215802Eurasian Geography and Economics647-8842-86