SEEING LIKE A BORDER: RESOURCE FRONTIERS, VOICES AND VISIONS ON MYANMAR'S BORDERLANDS WITH INDIA AND CHINA

Abstract

Building on multi-sited fieldwork across India and China’s borderlands with Myanmar, this thesis shows how borderlands emerge as extractable ‘resource frontiers’ for states, markets and local elites. The thesis contrasts the ‘spectacular’ nature of frontier-projects with the ‘un’- or ‘anti-spectacular’ practicalities of everyday borderland lives and mobilities. It offers five core ethnographies, spanning the Mizoram-Chin/Rakhine, and the Yunnan-Kachin/Shan borders, where frontier projects have unravelled under the shadows of the Chinese and Indian states. It juxtaposes the political, temporal and embodied dimensions of how resource frontiers are interposed, negotiated and resisted by centralising the voices, visions and oral histories of people who have encountered wars, violence, environmental destruction, resistance and counterinsurgency over their homelands. By comparatively engaging with the histories and contemporary politics of border-making, ethnicity and land-resource access in India, China and Myanmar, this thesis offers new empirical and conceptual insights on the political geographies of borderlands in modern ‘Zomia’.