Infrastructures and b/ordering

How Chinese projects are ordering China–Myanmar border spaces

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8104027
AutoresKarin Dean (0000-0003-1280-2783, Tallinn University, autor de correspondencia), Jasnea Sarma (0000-0001-5758-9205, University of Zurich), A Rippa (0000-0002-9533-3988, Tallinn University)
Año2022
Volumen12
Número8
Páginas1177-1198
Fecha de publicación2022-10-05
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaTerritory Politics Governance (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2162-2671 • E-ISSN: 2162-268X
EditorialTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/21622671.2022.2108892
OpenAlexW4301606078
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas25
Referencias citadas67

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

China · Dilemma · Economic geography · Economics · Economy · Geography · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Sociology · State (computer science · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Law · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies