Remaking and Living with Resource Frontiers: Insights from Myanmar and Beyond

ABSTRACT

Myanmar, a nation situated between India, China and Southeast Asia, has long histories of colonialism, violence, and resource extraction. This special issue introduction, written in the midst of Myanmar’s 2021 military coup and the COVID-19 pandemic, offers two critical and feminist interventions – ‘remaking’ and ‘living with’ – to understand the contested and embodied political geographies of extractive resource frontiers in Myanmar. ‘Remaking’ focuses on the long roots of resource frontiers, underscoring the historical and spatial processes through which Myanmar’s plural authorities have restructured diverse territories for accumulation and extraction from the pre-colonial period to the recent ‘democratic transition’. ‘Living with’ resource frontiers bring attention to people’s everyday lives, and why and how they adapt, resist, comply, suffer and profit from resource frontiers. In bringing together a diverse set of literatures with original empirical research, the articles in this collection offer analyses of Myanmar’s pre-coup period that inform contemporary post-coup politics. Together, they demonstrate the material, affective, and embodied nature of resource frontiers as they are (re)made and lived with – in and beyond militarised spaces like Myanmar.

Introduction: Myanmar’s Resource Frontiers

We are trapped here between the Burmese military, the KIO (Kachin Independence Organisation), and China. They play politics on the clouds, we get wet on the ground. We have to fight in our own ways. Otherwise everyone plays with us, our forests, our land, and leaves local people with what? A football field? Gold and amber mining is happening. All the teak is gone. I hate this jade trade. But imagine: say I could get my hands on just one valuable stone. It can change my life. I would chase it too, wouldn’t I?

- Kachin Development Worker, Mai Ja Yang, August 2018. Sarma field notes.¹

Between the Chinese-financed farmlands and internally displaced person (IDP) camps that lie at the foot of Mount Kara, one of the authors, Jasnea Sarma listened to a Kachin development worker recount the ways that multiple resources and state-like powers had shaped local lives and extraction landscapes. This conversation happened in Mai Ja Yang in northern Myanmar, a traditional stronghold of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA). This city lies just 90 km away from the Chinese border cities of Ruili and Jiegao, both recently framed as a gateway for China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In 2011, a fragile ceasefire between the KIA and the Myanmar military² broke down, leading to violent conflict that refashioned the border town’s abandoned casinos into schools and offices run by humanitarian groups and local civil society organisations. These words encapsulated ways in which transnational conflict, production, and extraction reshape place, work, hope, profit, desire and suffering on one of Myanmar’s most lucrative resource frontiers.

A year later, Hilary Faxon stood in a renovated room in Yangon’s Secretariat, Myanmar’s colonial seat of government, examining a series of photo essays by Myanmar researchers, activists and journalists on the theme of ‘border lives’. The images featured the Chinese-owned banana plantations that surrounded Sarma’s interview site, poppy production in the territories that stretch from Northwest Myanmar into Northeast India, human trafficking in Shan State, and labour migration in the border town of Mae Sot, Thailand. One photo essay on the Rohingya ‘Lives in the Border’, was a particularly courageous depiction; the images and text described daily struggles for securing livelihoods and avoiding state violence for one of Myanmar’s most persecuted minorities. In the weeks that followed, thousands would march in the streets surrounding the Secretariat in support of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi as she attempted to defend Myanmar from genocide charges in the International Court of Justice.

On February 1, 2021, a military coup deposed Myanmar’s elected leaders. Any semblance of the democratisation and demilitarisation within the country since the purported 2010 transition came to a halt. Months of violent crackdowns against a large civil disobedience movement (CDM) followed. The coup has left Myanmar’s citizens reeling under the physical, emotional and psychological impacts of not just the COVID-19 pandemic, but also possible civil war and guerrilla warfare extending across urban centres and rural peripheries. A year after the coup, the military and the military government had arrested, charged or sentenced an estimated 8,835 and killed 1503 people³ and an estimated 320,000 had been displaced.⁴

While the CDM protests and military violence have, justifiably, garnered much attention internationally, the coup has also had direct impacts on the broad patterns and intimate experiences of resource extraction across the country. Before the coup, resource extraction projects had bloomed as the country appeared to open. For example, K.B. Roberts’ field site of the Tigyit Coal Mine in Shan State faced public pressure to adhere to social and environmental impact standards (Roberts and Mai 2021). Yet, amidst the diversion of nationwide protest, in March of 2021 an unlicensed expansion of Tigyit’s open pit coal mine – already the largest in Myanmar – began (Shan Herald 2021). The threat of increased and unregulated resource extraction from the coup has reshaped the resource frontier, even as it exacerbates the everyday violence communities face. As one activist shared with Roberts in response to earlier unregulated extraction: “Why do they test the local people like this? We are people, not animals” (personal communication, 14 January 2018.)

We use these moments to frame our introduction to this special section in order to highlight the stakes of Myanmar’s multiple, dynamic resource frontiers. Together, recent events and ethnographic encounters remind us that the resource frontier is not merely an academic exercise, but rather an urgent and intimate concern. As a historical formation, the resource frontier is intertwined with racialised state violence and capitalist extraction. As an unfolding phenomenon, it deeply affects everyday lives. These observations shape our two key analytics: what we call remaking and living with resource frontiers.

Building on Tsing’s (2003, 2005) foundational insight that the frontier is a travelling project, one that emerges where and when extraction of a new commodity becomes possible, as well as recent scholarship that demonstrates how ongoing processes of accumulation, territorialisation, and imagination repeatedly rework particular frontier landscapes (Cons and Eilenberg 2019; Peluso 2017; Peluso and Lund 2011; Rasmussen and Lund 2018), remaking provides a historical perspective on how particular frontier formations are produced and transformed over time.

Inspired by anthropologist Dolly Kikon’s (2019) work on living with oil and coal across the border in Northeast India, as well as recent studies of everyday life from Myanmar (Chambers, Galloway, and Liljeblad 2020), we offer living with to highlight the ways in which people embody and negotiate resource frontiers. In doing so, we bring to bear a foundational insight from feminist geopolitics – that politics does not occur merely in the domain of the state and economics, but rather it manifests in gendered and racialised ways at multiple scales, starting from the intimate, the mundane and the everyday (Dowler and Sharp 2001; Hyndman 2004, 2019; Koopman 2011; Massaro and Williams 2013; Mollett and Faria 2018; Williams and Massaro 2013).

Together, these interventions demand situated attention to particular frontier formations. They serve as a reminder for critical scholars of geopolitics to pay attention to the long roots and everyday practices that shape extraction, dispossession, enrichment and violence in the places where resources and territory are (re)made.

Myanmar’s particular array of resources, strategic territorial location, and fragmented sovereignties provide a powerful case – with added urgency post-coup – of entangled nation- and frontier-making. Some of Myanmar’s resource frontiers have been around for generations: jade, timber, gold, rubies, tin and opium. Others, such as palm oil and tissue banana plantations, hydropower projects, SEZs, gas pipelines and cross border infrastructure projects, are more recent arrivals. New and old resource frontiers often layer atop each other, shaping cumulative landscapes of dispossession. These sites of extraction and accumulation are woven across international borders and tied to new diplomatic initiatives such as India’s ‘Act East Policy’ and China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which aim to take advantage of Myanmar’s geography at the crossroads of South, Southeast, and East Asia, as well as its long coastline (Sarma 2021). Myanmar’s upland border areas have long been sites of armed conflict, illicit trade, and capital accumulation among a dizzying array of state and state-like actors (Callahan 2007; Fiskesjö 2010; Ong 2020; Walker 1999). Multiple empires, colonial powers, state and non-state military groups aggrandise themselves through resource extraction and control (Dean 2020; Mark 2016b; Meehan 2011; Xiaobo 2018). Today, neighbouring states, private corporations, militaries, domestic elites, and development agencies are transforming both urban and border spaces into new resource frontiers. The diverse materialities, temporalities and circulations of Myanmar’s resources, long histories of racialised violence at the crossroads of empires, and the contradictory recent spikes in investment and violence provide a particularly rich case to consider both frontier (re)making and living with them.

While the articles in this collection were written before COVID and the 2021 coup, together they shed light on the long duration and intimate negotiations of Myanmar’s resource frontiers, which remain critical to Myanmar’s people and politics today.

In the next section, we provide a brief historization of how Myanmar’s frontiers have been (re)made simultaneously and repeatedly across time and space. This process has both created and destroyed territorial control, as well as new forms of authority and commodity circulations in their wake. The following section turns to the ways in which people have lived with resource frontiers, highlighting a selection of recent scholarship from Myanmar that attends to everyday survival and embodied violence. We next introduce the articles in this special issue before concluding with a reflection on remaking and living with resource frontiers amidst COVID and after the coup.

Remaking Resource Frontiers

We use the term remaking to conceptualise the many ways in which frontiers have appeared, disappeared and coalesced both temporally and spatially. From the colonial period through socialist military dictatorship and transitional phases of partial democracy, Myanmar’s frontiers have been perpetually remade. This process is not only one of producing and controlling territory, but also one that depends on and reshapes the materiality of resources and land, as well as the shifting relations of global and regional capitalism. Seminal scholarship on Myanmar has highlighted the role of military institutions (Callahan 2007) and formal ethnic categories (Cheesman 2017) in shaping the state. Our collection deepens this analysis by focusing on the ways in which production and extraction have been historically central to the emergence of territory and authority, including by underpinning militarisation and racialisation.

While the frontiers of Myanmar have pre-colonial precedents (Aung-Thwin and Aung-Thwin 2012; Furnivall 2014), British victories and annexations in three 19^th century Anglo-Burmese Wars brought a new fervour to the linked processes of commodity trading and territorial demarcation. Spatial patterns of resource extraction shaped the new colony’s political geography. On the coasts, port cities like Sittwe and Rangoon linked inland commodities to expanding networks of global maritime trade (Seekins 2011). South of Rangoon in the Ayeyarwaddy Delta, the British transformed a sparsely populated malarial wetland into the world’s rice frontier (Adas 1974). In the highlands and hilly regions of what is now Northeast India and Northwestern Myanmar, the British established large tea plantations and oil wells (Karlsson 2021; Kikon 2019; Sharma 2011; Zou and Satish Kumar 2011) The colonial administration imposed new forms of property and separated the hills from the rice-growing plains, a territorial pattern that continues to shape Myanmar ethnic politics today (Faxon, 2021; Sadan 2016). At the same time, the British were insistent on mapping and delineating international borders, mostly in service of opening trade with Qing China in the aftermath of the Panthay War and keeping the French at bay (see O’Morchoe 2020; Ong 2020). Local people were often not given a share in the emerging resource frontiers and were in fact divided further by internal boundaries (Sadan 2016). With the haphazard division of Burma from India in 1937, maps, made for resource control and administrative expediency, became the foundations of future states. The result was a patchwork of artificial boundaries that stretched across India, Myanmar, China and Thailand and split peoples like the Nagas, the Kachins, Dais and the Chins into separate nation states. This was a process that kept the borderlands ‘fixed but fluid’ (Cederlöf 2009; Guyot-Réchard 2020). Even at the time, colonial officials recognised the problems of this separation. The lasting damage continues today in racialised identity battles culminating in violent citizenship determination and expulsion projects that still revolve around questions of access to land and resources (Baruah 2020; Cheesman 2017; Farzana 2017; Krichker and Sarma 2019; Pachuau 2014; Rhoads 2020).

World War II, the Japanese occupation, and Burma’s independence in 1948 led to new actors and patterns of infrastructure, extraction and governance. War prompted the construction of the Burma and Ledo roads to China and the Siam-Burma railway by the Japanese, routes that would fall into disrepair, while also facilitating future logging, armed conflict and escape (Sarma 2020). Myanmar briefly returned to British colonisation after the war before gaining permanent independence on January 4, 1948. After fourteen years of tenuous democracy, General Ne Win’s 1962 military coup inaugurated decades of successive socialist and authoritarian dictatorships. During the military regime years of 1962–2010, resource extraction fuelled and funded conflict between armed actors within the country and across its borders. The Communist Party of Burma as well as later ethnic, regional and communist alliances, prominently between 1962–87, helped sustain insurgencies, ethnonationalism and resource extractions in the highland borderlands of Northern Myanmar China and Thailand (Han 2019.)

Territorial disputes built off the legacies of colonial ethnic divisions of Burma, fed violence, and produced fragmented sovereigns and multiple governance actors throughout the country (Callahan 2009; Jones 2014; Meehan 2015). These fragmented sovereigns include the Myanmar government (also known as the Union Government), the military state-backed militia, Special Administrative Zones (SAZs), as well as dozens of ethnic armed organisations (EAOs). The Myanmar military and EAOs vied for resources and political subjects, especially in the border areas of the mountainous Chin, Kachin, Shan, Karen, Kayah States, Tanintharyi division and Rakhine State along the coast (Callahan 2007; Scott 1985, 2009; Walker 1999). Starting in the 1960s, the Myanmar military’s four-cuts strategy forcibly displaced people from these ethnic border states. This violent policy of displacement occurred to accomplish the military objective of separating ethnic armed forces from potential food, funds, recruits, and intelligence (Grundy‐Warr et al. 1997). As with sites across the region, Cold War rivalries, funnelled through postcolonial antagonists, produced land grabs and displacement across Myanmar.

A new military government (junta) took the reins in 1988, sweeping away socialist rhetoric and initiating agreements with many EAOs. Their ascendance ushered in an era of accelerated resource extraction that Kevin Woods (2011) calls ‘ceasefire capitalism’, in which former enemies from the battlefield became business partners, accelerating resource extraction. Opium production (Meehan 2021), teak extraction (Sandar Aye and Khin Htay 2019), jade mining, gold mining, and agri-business expansion expanded during these years, often through partnerships between military state and non-state actors (Roberts 2016; Woods 2019b). Meanwhile, some armed groups, such as the Pa’O National Organization (PNO) disbanded in favour of having a SAZ, while others formed state-aligned militia and border forces (Buchanan 2016; Dean 2020). However, many of the ceasefire attempts remained non-inclusive of a majority of the ethnic players, and were thus unsuccessful, such as the aforementioned Kachin ceasefire (Tønnesson, Min Zaw, and Lynn Aung 2021). These renegotiations of Burmese armed group military-private partnerships resulted in the leasing of state sovereignty over natural resources (Meehan 2015; Woods 2011), as well as millions of acres of land ceded to agribusinesses, many with military ties (San Thein et.al, 2018).

Democratic reforms gave rise to new frontier processes, many fuelled by international investments on Asia’s last frontier. Myanmar scholar Thant Myint-U (2021) describes how the military government’s leader, General Than Shwe, put in place an accelerating project of liberalisation and ‘discipline-flourishing democracy’ that culminated in his retirement and the Thein Sein presidency (2011–2016) and continued with the National League for Democracy’s (NLD) 2015 electoral victory, spurring the optimism of international investors, media, and development donors without adequately addressing the twin challenges of ethnic strife and economic inequality. This insight complements research that shows that the democratic transition was embedded in cyclical histories of property transformation (Rhoads and Wittekind 2018) and the political economy of state-mediated and border capitalism (Jones 2014). Land and environmental policies demonstrated troubling continuities with old patterns of exclusion, as well as limited opportunities to harness democratic reforms for ethnic autonomy and gender equality (Bächtold, Bastide, and Lundsgaard-Hansen 2020; Faxon 2017; Mark 2016a; Mark and Belton 2020; Suhardiman, Rutherford, and John Bright 2017).

Despite their developmental and diplomatic varnish, democracy-era resource frontiers continued to rely on the appropriation of land and labour, often through the same violent modes and with the same unequal benefits as during the military era. International development and humanitarian agencies, often funded by extractive processes and founded on relationships that echo colonial and imperial pasts, rushed to Myanmar, partnering with a burgeoning number of civil society organisations with a complicated web of incentives (Julian, Charles, and Walton 2017; Lamb et al. 2019; Lebel et al. 2019; Pepper 2018; Prasse-Freeman 2014; YeophantYeophantong 2020; Ho 2018). Thus, new resource frontiers were often tied to the business of peace. Examples include when the state opened new areas for tourism (Mostafanezhad 2020), used biodiversity conservation to extend and legitimate control of territory in conflict zones (Woods 2019b), or ceded oil palm concessions to companies that merely used the land for harvesting the virgin timber (Keiko et al. 2019). The forced expulsion of almost one million Rohingya people from Myanmar’s Rakhine State, as well as ongoing conflicts in Kachin, Shan, Kokang and Karen regions, shattered democratic optimism even as they provided new opportunities for accumulation on Myanmar’s borders (Zhiding and Konrad 2018; Bennett & Faxon 2021; Ho 2017). As commodity values change and new sites of resource extraction open, the value of land shifts – from productive to reproductive (Faxon 2021). In Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, national economic development arrived hand in hand with the rise of resettlement projects (Astolfo and Boano 2020; Rhoads 2018) and the displacement of urban poor (Sarma and Sidaway 2019; Matelski and Sabrié 2019). In these processes, old profiteers gained new capitalist identities, land was re-territorialised and new resources were inaugurated. The resource frontier was again remade.

Living with Resource Frontiers

Resource frontiers are shaped by political and economic histories and structured by resource materialities. Yet, ultimately, it is people who create, are expelled from, cope with, resist, profit from and survive them. In her recent work on coal and oil extractive spaces in the Naga hills and Assam in the Myanmar – Northeast India borderlands, anthropologist Dolly Kikon (2019) provides a thick description of everyday existence alongside oil and coal, narrating these complex processes using the simple, but important, conceptual intervention – of ‘living with’. In Kikon’s rendering, to live with an extractive frontier reveals the myriad embodiments and entanglements in the dangerous spaces where land, development, home, travel, health, welfare and death revolve around access to and dispossession via continuously re-made, concentrated and layered resource frontiers. Such an intervention enables a feminist geopolitical lens into frontier studies, one that centres intimate geopolitics and intersectional praxis while attending to ethnic, gender and regional identities. As a complement and corrective to critical Marxist analyses that focus on macro patterns of enclosure and accumulation, living with centres the ways in which multiple embodied actors – human and non-human – navigate and know the contradictions and connections between survival and profit, dispossession and desire, disposability and surplus, and life and death that animate resource frontiers. In the context of Myanmar, living with highlights the complex and contested processes through which people from all walks of life navigate profound political and social change, and its consequences (Chambers, Galloway, and Liljeblad 2020).

The conditions of living with resource frontiers are shaped by broad patterns and everyday practices. In the 2010s, relative openness enabled new scholarship that provided agentive understandings of people’s everyday struggles within the structures of military rule and frontier capitalism. These works are important to mention here because they have generated nuanced and sympathetic understanding of the localised hardships and strategies that define how and why people engage in political civic life, as well as how and why they become entangled in, thus also profit and partake in, small and large frontier economies, while being concomitantly exploited by them.

This new scholarship also provided important insights on how frontier space determines frontier experiences. From the northern borderlands to the maritime coast to urban settlements, scholars have shown that justice and legality shape what it means to live with resource frontiers (Chambers 2019; Chang, Tagliacozzo, and Sadan 2014; Faxon 2021; Hedström and Olivius 2020; Hong 2017; Oh and Institute 2016; Sarma 2020, 2021). Living with frontiers can manifest through localised tactics of coping, whether through practices of everyday economic survival (Thawnghmung 2019) or the social conventions of agreement and understanding captured in the concept of ‘nalehmu’ (Roberts and Rhoads 2021). Living with resource frontiers is also intertwined with the congealing of identities. Scholars show how historic patterns of everyday discrimination at multiple scales enact a border between many people in Myanmar and the Rohingya as racialised others (Yoni 2021), a theme also explored by Tharaphi Than and Htoo May (2022 in press) in their work on everyday identity and belonging among young Sittwe Muslims. On water frontiers, a recent special issue shows how fisheries have changed in the Salween Delta and how that has impacted the everyday lives of fishermen in the area (C. Aung 2019); how resource extraction along the Salween River in Northern Shan State has impacted the ability for people to practice herbal medicine (Mar Aye and Swe Win 2019); and about the everyday experience for women living next to the Mong ton Dam hydropower sites (Hnin 2016.)

Living with resource frontiers implicate not only people, but also entire ecologies (Ballvé 2020; Barney 2009; Cons and Eilenberg 2019; Enns and Sneyd 2021; Tsing 2005). Resource frontier activities change landscapes and increase vulnerability to climate change related weather events. Within the last few decades, Myanmar has already been considered one of the most-vulnerable countries in the world to extreme weather events (Eckstein, Hutfils, and Winges 2018; Eckstein, Künzel, and Schäfer 2017; Kreft, Eckstein, and Melchior 2016), with natural disasters like the 2008 Cyclone Nargis, 2010 extreme heat waves, and 2015 flooding significantly devastating humans and non-human (Horton et al. 2017). Some of the world’s greatest expanses of natural forest exist in the Greater Mekong Sub-region (Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and South China). Yet, as a WWF report suggests, this sub-region is one of 11 deforestation fronts that will contribute to over 80% of the worlds forest loss (127–170 million hectare) by 2030 (EIA 2015; WWF 2015). A Landsat satellite imagery study found that in 2014, Myanmar had about 63% forest cover, with just 38% of those forests considered intact (meaning having greater than 80% canopy cover) (Bhagwat et al. 2017). Specifically, in Myanmar, the last decade has seen a 12% deforestation of intact forests, with a two percent reduction each year with a total loss of 1.7 million hectares of forest cover between 2001 to 2013. (EIA 2015). Extractive frontier activities, such as agri-business, logging, hydro-electric development projects and unregulated infrastructure development are the primary cause of this deforestation and ecological alternation (Middleton, Scott, and Lamb 2019; Suhardiman and Middleton 2020; Suhardiman, Rutherford, and John Bright 2017; Saw John Bright 2019; Roberts 2019; Simpson 2013; Sarma 2020; Wittekind 2018; Sandar Aye and Khin Htay 2019.) These high rates of deforestation and displacement from resource frontier activities and extreme weather events, in addition to the impacts on ecologies, directly impacts the ability of local farmers and civilians to support themselves, and increases rates of displacement and migrations.

As such, both the economic and ecological aftereffects of resource frontiers have ruptured the country into criss-crossing fields of surplus labour and floating populations in search of economically productive frontiers and zones of speculative wealth elsewhere. Therefore, living with resource frontiers, shows how mobility and migration undergirds the frontier, and is not always voluntary. Out-migration from violent frontiers (such as conflict, eviction or land-grabbed areas) have generated millions of precarious labourers, who, in turn, have gone on to fuel new forms of capital accumulation in other frontiers, such as in factories (Campbell 2019; Xiaobo and Cai 2019), fishing vessels (Belton and Filipski 2019) and borderlands along Thailand and China (Balčaitė 2019; Lertchavalitsakul 2015; Loong 2019; Wilkins 2017, Woods 2019a). A vibrant set of new literatures have traced such migration loops in the factories and informal migrant workers jobs sectors across Myanmar’s border and in illicit, shadow and trafficking economies (Than 2016); as well as in the domestic labour markets in richer Asian and middle eastern countries. Such scholarship, albeit diverse in topics and geographical focus, shares an interest in how Burmese lives are drawn across borders, forced away from and into multiple resource frontiers, and sometimes, become stuck. They also show how often these opportunities come at the cost of health, welfare, and arguably, even death (Prasse-Freeman 2021).

Living with resource frontiers means to resist them in both informal and organised politics. While prospects and investments into new frontiers invariably brings new actors – such as engineers, state officials, project managers – into the sites of new frontier projects, inside Myanmar there has been strong resistance to the economic and environmental exploitation of the land and its people in the hands of crony capitalists and a dictatorial, militaristic government (G. Aung 2018; Kiik 2020). Studies on youth groups, labour groups, political prisoners, ethnic-linked organisations, and local organisations have shown how individual and social movements come to play important parts in such resistance (Fink and Simpson 2018; Suhardiman, Kenney-Lazar, and Meinzen-Dick 2019) Nothing has been more starkly reminiscent of such resistance than the civil disobedience movement since the coup.

Introducing this special issue

This collection brings together early and mid-career scholars who conducted substantial research in, on, and around Myanmar during the country’s self-styled post-authoritarian transition. Some authors were involved in a panel organised at the 2018 Asian Borderlands Research Network conference in Kyrgyzstan; others joined later after conversations in Yangon, Myitkyina, and Northeast India. Drawing from archives, interviews, and ethnography, their rich empirical analyses interrogate the histories, imaginaries and lived realities of resource frontiers as they cut across urban, regional, and international boundaries. The papers highlight the array of actors involved in frontier-making as well as the specificity of the land, minerals, plants and infrastructures at stake. Together, they show that the resource frontier is repeatedly remade through cycles of violence and opportunity and consider the challenges and creative possibilities born of living with resource frontiers.

Frances O’Morchoe (2020) draws on a rich set of archival materials to explore the interlinked processes of border- and resource-making in her comparative history of the Wa and Lahu. Her article demonstrates how demand for natural resources drove lowland state efforts to territorialise the uplands in the 19th century, and how resource materiality shaped possibilities for resistance on the Siam- and China-Burma borders. O’Morchoe contrasts the lootability and knowability of Wa lead with that of Lahu teak, arguing that contemporary territorial formations were generated in part by the contrast between the mobile and weaponizable minerals in Wa country versus the static and measurable forests in Lahu homelands.

Hilary Faxon considers the contemporary consequences of colonial resource valuation and bordering in her article on racial and spatial boundary-making after Kalay Valley’s rice frontier. Drawing on ethnographic, historical and cartographic data from Myanmar’s northwest, Faxon (2021) argues that Myanmar’s democratic turn saw a shift in land governance: from what she terms ‘cultivated ambiguity’ to a new regime of ‘negotiated delineation’. Faxon uses this analysis to argue for greater attention to ways in which the cyclical histories of smallholder agrarian frontiers shape the production of state and ethnic territory, in doing so linking historical processes of frontier creation and closure to contemporary border lives.

Laur Kiik provides an original view of the country’s most controversial resource extraction mega-project: the Chinese-led, multi-billion-dollar Myitsone hydropower project. While President Thein Sein’s 2011 decision to halt the project was heralded as a triumph of environmentalism and an insult to Beijing, Kiik examines the competing nationalisms that animate conspiracy theories surrounding the project. With ethnographic attention to Chinese, Burmese, Kachin and displaced village actors, Kiik highlights the role of ethno-nationalist speculation in shaping frontiers of resource extraction and resistance to dispossession.

Jelle Wouters (2020) takes us to Northeast India, where he examines the dialectic between neoliberal capitalism and state-sanctioned ethno-territory in the highlands near the Myanmar border. Wouters investigates the ways in which ethnic tribal elites defend autonomy and extract resources in response to large-scale infrastructural projects that attempt to connect and ‘open-up’ the transborder region. Rather than shunning development or offering inclusion, such responses enact a limited politics that reflects both capitalist desire and ethnic closure.

Elizabeth Rhoads (2020) brings us to Myanmar’s largest city, Yangon, to consider the processes of dispossession and territorialisation that impact Muslim residents. Drawing on archival and interview data, she traces the creation of and threats to waaf, or Muslim pious endowments. In doing so, Rhoads conceptualises urban property as a historical cycle of frontier- and territory-making that restructures urban space and is intimately linked to shifts in law, identity and belonging. Rhoads challenges traditional notions of frontiers as peripheral spaces by documenting the opacity, and erasure, of property rights in the heart of the city, demonstrating the long reach of the resource frontier.

Concluding remarks

As this is written, emergent resources – methamphetamines, gold, personal data – are being extracted and exchanged across Myanmar’s jungles, rivers and internet waves, even as these same landscapes erupt in violent conflict. At the same time, Myanmar faces the brunt of the global climate crisis. Myanmar’s military coup, along with COVID-19 and worsening climate crisis, underscore both the intimacy and urgency of resource frontiers.

The armed struggles and commodity circulations that have followed the 2021 military coup take place on former frontier landscapes and are steered by powerful and familiar frontier actors, often reproducing previous patterns of dispossession, violence and exclusion. While the coup led to massive mobilisation and intensifying violence, it has also reshaped the broad patterns and intimate experiences of resource extraction across the country. Moreover, these reformulations are now taking place amidst the economic and mobility disruptions of COVID-19, which has claimed the lives of thousands and further challenged the abilities of migrant workers to make a living (Borras et al. 2021).

As they are lived with and remade, resource frontiers implicate real lives and landscapes. In the early weeks after the coup, resource extraction sites became hotspots of resistance, as seen in CDM demonstrations in Mogok’s ruby mines and calls to bomb the transnational oil pipelines that enrich the Myanmar military government. In later months, COVID cases and a spike in armed conflict precipitated China’s repeated closure of border trade, leaving farmers few options to sell their produce and contributing to mounting debt in Myanmar’s agrarian communities. In the world’s largest jade mines at Hpakant, the military government ordered a suspension of operations and cut phone and internet networks amid escalating violence. Meanwhile, international ruby sales continue to fund the military (Global Witness 2021) and new talks began for the resumption of the halter Myitsone dam project.

Liberated areas within the country and exile communities across the borders with Thailand and Northeast India have become sites of escape for revolutionaries, the displaced, and military defectors. The coup has also spurred calls for changes in the resource landscape, particularly through pressure on international companies and governments to divest from Myanmar’s military-linked resource economy. For example, since the coup, Hong Kong based VPower group have declined to renew contracts for power stations (Myanmar Now 2021a) and an Australian company has divested from a lead, silver, and zinc mine in northern Shan State (Myanmar Now 2021b). While new sanctions from countries including the US and the UK have pressured some companies to cut or loosen economic ties with the Myanmar military (Myanmar Now 2021c), ASEAN has been notably timid, and many commentators have argued that even targeted Western sanctions hurt Myanmar’s majority while failing to inhibit the military’s lucrative trade in arms, drugs and resources, particularly to nations such as Russia and China. Journalists have reported on growing concerns over an increase in environmental degradation as a result of the coup (Cowan 2021a; Nachemson 2021), including an increase in logging and illegal timber trade practices and rare earth extractions (Cowan 2021b, 2021c; The Irrawaddy 2021). These ongoing events reiterate how, through a complicated array of territorial networks and power sharing with ceasefire groups, militias and para-military organisations, the military-state has been able to maintain control of Myanmar’s resource frontiers.

This special issue helps to make sense of these recent developments by framing them within longer patterns and lived experiences of resource frontiers in Myanmar and beyond. Our two key analytics – remaking and living with – highlight the resource frontier as both a historical and embodied phenomenon, one inextricably tied to past colonialisms, territorialisations and continued military violence that shapes everyday realities and future possibilities in and beyond Myanmar. The impetus to trace how frontiers are both remade and lived with starts from an epistemological and political commitment to historicised, situated knowledge and grounded geopolitics.

Yet in writing from safe and privileged places far beyond Myanmar’s borders, we are conscious that our collection itself exemplifies a knowledge-production frontier (Gururani and Vandergeest 2014; Roberts 2019), one that can, if inadvertently, replicate coloniality. We are painfully aware of the absence of Myanmar authors from this special section and gratefully acknowledge our Myanmar friends and collaborators for their valuable contributions to our understanding of these issues. Starting this introduction with local articulations of resource rushes and border lives was one small step to uplift and align ourselves with emic critique and collective action.

Particularly in the wake of the military coup, we call for foreign scholars to leverage their positions to support emancipatory action within the country and the work and well-being of Myanmar scholars and activists, as well as to communicate their findings broadly in order to maintain international pressure on Myanmar’s military. It is our hope that the collection provides a partial, academic perspective on resource frontiers that contributes to emergent and vibrant work by local researchers, activists, journalists and development workers to enable more equitable forms of resource and territorial governance.

Acknowledgments

We first thank our many colleagues, collaborators and friends in Myanmar whose contributions have guided this collection. We are grateful to SiuSue Mark, Shae Frydenlund, Mads Barbesgaard, Robert Anderson, Sarah Allen, Jamie Gillen and John Buchanan who provided feedback and support early in the project. Many thanks to Nancy Peluso, the UC Berkeley Land Lab, Tharaphi Than, Elizabeth Rhoads and Scarlett Cornellisan for indispensable editorial comments on this introduction. We thank our organisers, panel participants, and discussants, Jason Cons and Michael Eilenberg at the ABRN (Asian Borderlands Research Network) conference in Bishkek 2018, where lively conversations on this special issue started.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Quoted in Sarma 2020 ‘Seeing Like a Border – Resource Frontiers, Voices and Visions on Myanmar’s borderlands with India and China’’, Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, National University of Singapore.

2. In this introduction, we use ‘Myanmar military’ to refer to both the Myanmar military as an armed institution and as a government regime which currently refers to itself as the ‘SAC’ (State Administrative Council. They are also commonly referred to as the ‘Junta’. Unless used in quotes or in the bibliography, we have not used the oft-invoked term, ‘Tatmadaw’ to refer to the military, which is the institution’s self-titled honorific term, meaning the Royal/Great ‘Tat’ (the army.) After the Feb 2021 coup, many Myanmar citizens prefer to use other terms, such as ‘Sit-tat’ (the ‘War army’), instead of the ‘Tatmadaw.’ This is a citizen-led effort to refuse to refer to the military with its honorific title. In this special issue introduction, we use ‘Myanmar military’ for consistency with recognition and respect for the citizens plural terms for their military and government. (We thank Tharapi Than and Elizabeth Rhoads for insights for his footnote.)

3. Assistance Association of Political Prisoners (Burma) https://aappb.org/ accessed January 31 2022.

4. UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Myanmar Humanitarian Update No. 14. 17 January 2022. https://reliefweb.int/report/myanmar/myanmar-humanitarian-update-no-14-17-january-2022 accessed January 31 2022.