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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1-22 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| Journal | Geopolitics |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2023 |
Funding
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.
