These Interventions in walking methods in political geography recognise that it is timely to enrich political geography by attending to our methods. We suggest in this introduction that consideration of walking as method, its possibilities, limitations and attention to the theorizations and practises of walking under the label of ‘psychogeography’ offer productive ways to address broader questions in political geography surrounding power, scale, mobility, embodiment, and knowledge production. 

To cite: 

Mason, O., Sarma, J., Sidaway, J. D., Bonnett, A., Hubbard, P., Jamil, G., … Rose, M. (2023). Interventions in walking methods in political geography. Political Geography, 102937. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.102937

Over the past two decades, the Yunnan-Myanmar borderlands in Kachin State have become a major investment frontier for large-scale agribusiness. Chinese private capital, supported by state-led opium substitution programmes, has turned thousands of hectares of forests and smallholder farms into plantations. As in many such cases across Southeast Asia and beyond, this rapid development has come at the expense of local communities relying on these lands for their livelihoods. In Kachin State, such transformations are not merely economic, they are political: cutting through the local struggles for political autonomy, the (trans-)national performance of statehood(s), and the global geoeconomics. Caught between Chinese market expansion, and an ongoing war between the Myanmar Army and the Kachin Independence Army/Organization (KIA/KIO), plantations have become sites of often overlooked confrontations, compromise, and conflict operating behind the shadows of grand infrastructural Belt and Road (BRI) politics. This paper addresses this nexus drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on both sides of the Kachin-Yunnan borderlands conducted before the Covid-19 pandemic. Moving across banana plantations, armed bases, and border markets; and building on interviews with Chinese entrepreneurs, Kachin leaders, and local farmers and refugees, the paper traces transformations on land and life-worlds, where plantations, we argue, now perform b/ordering functions --- ordering not only national spaces but also the environmental, social and ethnic lifeworlds in Kachin State in ways that are more difficult to reverse than previous (and ongoing) forms of military territorialization. 

To cite: Sarma, J., Rippa, A., & Dean, K. (2023). ‘ We don‘t eat those bananas ’: Chinese plantation expansions and bordering on Northern Myanmar‘s Kachin borderlands. Eurasian Geography and Economics, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/15387216.2023.2215802

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 vigor. 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 the Belt and Road initiative (BRI) in 2015. The paper ultimately argues that infrastructures such as roads, plantations and special economic zones (SEZs) have started to regulate these volatile and contested borderlands more effectively than the official boundaries that delimit complex territorialities in the border region.

Citation: Karin Dean, Jasnea Sarma and Allesandro Rippa (2022): Infrastructures and B/ordering: How Chinese Projects are Ordering China-Myanmar Border Spaces. Territory, Politics, Governance. Forthcoming. 

Myanmar, a nation situated between India, China and Southeast Asia, has long histories of colonialism, militarisation, conflict and resource extraction. This special issue introduction, written in the midst of Myanmar’s 2021 military coup and 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 and its environs in the larger context of South, East and Southeast Asia. By ‘remaking’ of resource frontiers, we trace how Myanmar’s ecologies, political geography and plural authorities have remade resource frontiers both spatially and historically from pre-colonial and post-coup ‘transitions.’ By ‘living with’ resource frontiers, we collectively argue for the need to focus on people’s everyday lives, and delve into the complicated nuance of why and how they adapt, resist, comply, profit and ultimately strive to ‘live with’ resource frontiers. The articles in this collection, although finalised prior to the 2021 coup, still hold relevance as they navigate a varied set of literatures and represent new empirical and historical research. They pay attention to the everyday, affective, situated, emplaced and embodied nature of resource frontiers as they are remade and lived with - in and beyond Myanmar.

Citation: Jasnea Sarma, Hilary Oliva Faxon & K.B. Roberts (2022): Remaking and Living with Resource Frontiers: Insights from Myanmar and Beyond, Geopolitics, DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2022.2041220

Using the case of India’s mega infrastructure build up, the ‘Kaladan Multimodal Transport Project’ (KMMTP) in the ‘remote’ and ethnically contentious borderlands between India and Myanmar, this paper takes an ethnographic approach to understand the meaning of spectacular connectivity and infrastructure on remote borderlands. 

Based on months of fieldwork, the paper explores the voices, visions, spatial and ethnic worlds of border residents who subsequently have to position themselves and their remoteness to absorb the Indian state's spectacular new connective infrastructure. The paper narratively traverses along this newly constructed road, to the very edge of a hitherto informal and flexible border with Myanmar. In doing so, it highlights the need to investigate the banal, unspectacular and inter-ethnic lived realities of the borderland. The paper argues that spectacular infrastructures such as the KMMTP are harnessed in the pursuit of territorial control, making the remote legible and extracting profits. The chapter introduces the analytic of the ‘spectacle’ to demonstrate how powerful states and ethnic communities rely on grand infrastructural spectacles and cross border projects often at the expense, erasure and displacement of those at the edge of borderlands, who have the least stake in shaping such spectacular infrastructures.

To cite: Sarma, Jasnea. 2021. ‘The Edge of Kaladan: A “Spectacular” Road through “Nowhere” on the India-Myanmar Borderlands’. In Highways and Hierarchies, edited by Luke Heslop and Galen Murton, 1st ed., 125–54. Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9789048552511.006.

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. 

To cite:  

Sarma, Jasnea, and James D. Sidaway. 2019. ‘Securing Urban Frontiers: A View from Yangon, Myanmar’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, December, 1468-2427.12831. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12831.

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. 

Citation: 

Krichker, Dina, and Jasnea Sarma. 2019. ‘Can Borders Speak to Each Other? The India–Bangladesh and Spain–Morocco Borders in Dialogue’. Journal of Borderlands Studies, October, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/08865655.2019.1676813.