The book examines the wording politics, and powers of borders, bordering and (resource) frontiers in the violently divided and increasingly surveilled borderworlds between Myanmar, India and China. I build on three years of ethnographic fieldwork before 2019 across two trans-Asian borderlands – the Myanmar–China border (Kachin–Shan–Yunnan) and the India–Myanmar border (Mizoram–Chin–Arakan), as well as follow up fieldwork in 2023. In three parts and six ethnographic chapters, the book describes and analyses the mobilities, clandestine crossings, resistance movements, labour practices, and enactments of territory and space by communities who make up, cross, mobilize, and make homes and worlds on this borderworld on an everyday basis. I deploy the dualities and tensions in borderworlds/homeworlds and spectacles/anti-spectacles as conceptual and narrative strategies to examine how borderworlds are (re)made and (dis)connected through imaginaries, flows and resource frontiers. Part 1 builds on archival research to investigate geographical imaginaries – of states, development actors, ethnic/Indigenous movements, and common people’s memories to explore dichotomies that imagines. In part 2, I study flows – building on oral histories of how people, finances, ideologies, and commodities flow in and out of unlikely but interconnected and circuitous routes and in the diverse spatialities of the border world. Part 3 explores resource frontiers – building on ethnographic case studies of roads, infrastructures, plantations, checkpoints, and hydropower projects to show how Myanmar’s borders are more than spaces of cross border conflict and resistance. They are also spaces of extractive flows. By examining how, when, why, and for whom extractive resource frontiers emerge at specific ‘border times’ and ‘border spaces,’ the book advances theoretical links between resource frontiers, political ecology and border studies, as well as complicates geography and area studies boundaries, contributing to critical ‘Zomia’ studies.

In this project, I build on my previous work on borders and mobilities to develop a new Inter-Asia demand-supply and route ethnographic project that traces illicit demand and supply routes of illegal wildlife products primarily from Northeast India (rhino horn and ivory)  to China and Vietnam through Myanmar.

Northeast India, and Assam - a colonial (tea and oil) frontier and (highly militarized) post-colonial border state in Northeast India - and one of the most lucrative places from which to supply endangered wildlife products. In my own (short) lifetime (of  30+ years), large portions of these Himalayan foothills, once green and rich in biodiversity have turned into black, ash, rat-hole coal, and oil wells - and the populations have tripled. Wildlife forced out of these same hills is caught and tranquilized in human habitation areas, or worse, found as dead animal products in pan Asian demand and supply markets, rotating, along with other goods, from little known borders (like Tamuh, Baho, Mongla, Zokathar, Muse) to well-known metropolitan cities. Growing up in the Kaziranga national park in Assam and having spent formative years in a wildlife sanctuary, I find it sickening to find ivory and horn powder from poached wildlife from my homelands - in the markets of Asia. 

This project thus is a multi-bordered, multi-routed, multi-sited inter-Asian dilemma that requires inter-Asian approaches in locating political geographies of wildlife and smuggling. The project will combine mobile ethnographies/ GIS mapping of wildlife products (particularly between India-Burma-Bangladesh-Bhutan-China-Singapore and Vietnam) The project - while empirical, practical and, applied in its primary focus - will contribute to complicated lopsided understandings of anti-poaching policy across Asia, as lend critical insights into human-animal, political ecology, conservation and border studies.

The research problem emerges from my understanding that one can regulate, conserve and even incarcerate/ kill poachers on the ground, but as long as the demand psychologies and (desperate) supply economies exist (despite many efforts to educate), no policy can contain successfully contain the trade if it rooted in one location. It must then be captured and understood in movement, as empathetically (towards those in it) as possible. 

A set of my ongoing papers traces the footprints of Chinese-funded projects in China’s southeast Asian backyards, particularly the borders of Myanmar. This research is based on ethnographic fieldwork in border trading zones, agri-business plantations, connectivity project sites (under the BRI), SEZs, and militia/EAO (ethnic armed groups) controlled areas. They offer insights into how Chinese infrastructures are met by local populations on the ground. As a comparative, I have also published ethnographic work on Indian-funded infrastructure and connectivity projects in Myanmar’s borderlands where new roads, although looked upon as aspirational promises by local ethnic populations, have nonetheless displaced refugees out of their safe-spaces. 

In an effort to combine the critical potential for visual GIS cartography with ethnographic research,  I have been working with PolGeoNow's brilliant cartographer Evan Centanni to develop a set of interactive GIS mapping project of Myanmar and its borders with northeast India, Bangladesh, Thailand, and China. We combine Evan's GIS skills with my ethnographic research to demonstrate such issues as:

• the relationships between resource extractive sites, deforestation loss sites, refugees living and labour spaces, escape routes versus humanitarian reach, and the 200 or more so ethnic territorial control alliances in the making and un-making of resource/human mobilities in the region.

• the workings of the resource frontiers in a visual forum. 

We have made maps covering my field sites and we plan to publish them all online as an open-source website, with a set of short-form explainer articles for these as well. 

Please contact us for more information on this project or collaborate with us.