Updated: 6 May 2020

International Conference

BORDERLAND FUTURES TECHNOLOGIES, ZONES, CO-EXISTENCES

7th Conference of the Asian Borderlands Research Network

24-26 June 20211 Reconciliation & Coexistence in Contact Zone (RCCZ)

Research Center, Chung-Ang University Seoul, South Korea

1 The conference has been postponed due to the COVID-19 outbreak. The conference was originally scheduled from 25-27 June 2020 in Seoul, South Korea

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KEYNOTE SPEECHES

Archipelagoes, Enclaves, and Other Cartographic Monsters Franck Billé – UC Berkeley, United States A decade ago, Wendy Brown (2010) saw the global proliferation of border walls as a symptom of waning sovereignty, the very physical presence of a wall betraying a longing for clarity in a world that is increasingly complex and scattered (Shaw 2016). As separation devices, border walls also speak to the enduring visual power of the shape of the state—what Ben Anderson has called the logomap—which despite (or perhaps precisely because) of its simplicity, has lost none of its affective force. In this lecture Billé will look at territorial entities that depart from the standard state model such as colonial dominions, enclaves, and other atomized and fractured national spaces. He suggests that the emergence of the logomap, free from all geographical shackles and dislocated from its neighbors, was made possible through the active suppression of similarities, connections, and overlaps. The visually unambiguous logomap, however, is paralleled by the uncanny shadowy figure of the monstrous and the concorporate, which threatens to disrupt the idealized portrayal of the nation-state as autonomous and independent—a terror (cf. Elden 2009) we can trace in fragmented territorial forms. Franck Billé is a cultural anthropologist/geographer based at UC Berkeley where he is Program Director for the Tang Center for Silk Road Studies. His research focuses on borders, space, and sovereignty in northeast Asia. His most recent book, Voluminous States: Sovereignty, Materiality, and the Territorial Imagination, is forthcoming (Fall 2020) with Duke University Press. He is currently finalizing two other books, Somatic States: On Cartography, Geobodies, Bodily Integrity (Duke University Press), and On the Russia-China Border, co-authored with Caroline Humphrey, (Harvard University Press). More information about his current research is available on his website www.franckbille.com

Title to be announced Kwang Cho - National Institute of Korean History (NIKH), South Korea Prof. Kwang Cho is president of the National Institute of Korean History (NIKH). He has done extensive research into the influence of late 18th century Korean Christians on the society of the time. He has published extensively in Korean. His latest papers include Using Research and Data on the History of Joseon Dynasty and Martyrdoms after French Campaign against Korea and General Sherman incident.

Special Sessions – 70th Korean War Anniversary Commemoration……………………………. 2

Panels………………………………….………………………………………………………..7 Individual Papers………………………………………………………………………….86 Roundtables…………………………………………………………………………………97

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Special Sessions – 70th Korean War Anniversary Commemoration Humanities and Technologies for the Sustainable Peace and Co-existence in Contact Zone The 7th ABRN conference also marks the historic occasion of the 70th Korean War commemoration, which offers a unique opportunity in time for scholars to discuss a future of peaceful co-existence across the Korean Peninsula and beyond. ABRN and RCCZ will host two special sessions on the Korean War commemoration to encourage cross-disciplinary dialogues and scholarly discussions on sustainable peace and co-existence in contact zones in and beyond the Korean context.

SESSION 1 - DIVISION AND THE WAR 25 June (morning, time to be confirmed)

Chair: Byungki Kim - Korea University, South Korea The Korean Question at the Moscow Conference in 1945 Kyoung-Hyun Min - Korea University, South Korea Ekaterina Nacharova - Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia The section concerning Korea at the Moscow Conference was almost entirely based on the project of the Soviet delegation. The great powers, after the problem during the London session of the Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs, when a constructive dialogue could not be established, demonstrated their ability to reach an agreement in Moscow. The Soviet government regarded the outcome of the Moscow meeting as an undeniable success exclusively in the order of bilateral relations. Soviet Espionage, Sino-Soviet Relations, and the Outbreak of the Korean War Mark Kramer - Harvard University, United States After World War II, the Soviet Union initially dissuaded the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung from launching an attack against South Korea, but events in 1949 and early 1950 induced Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to shift in favor of a North Korean invasion. In January 1950, Stalin suddenly offered to meet with Kim in Moscow to discuss how “such an important matter as what [Kim] wishes to undertake in South Korea” could be “carefully prepared . . . and organized so that the risk would not be so great.” Soon thereafter, the Soviet Union began secretly providing large quantities of heavy weapons, support equipment, and planning advice to North Korea. Stalin invited Kim to come to Moscow in April 1950 to discuss what could be done on the Korean peninsula. In the weeks leading up to Kim’s visit in April, Stalin sought additional assurance that there would not be “too great a risk” of U.S. intervention on behalf of South Korea. When Stalin met with Kim, he warned him that “if you get kicked in the teeth [by the United States], I will not lift a finger to help you.” Kim reassured the Soviet leader that the United States would not respond with force. Kim argued that if the Communist takeover in China had not been enough to provoke U.S. intervention, there was no chance that events in a much smaller country like Korea would spur the United States to act: “America lost a giant, China, but still did not intervene. America will not take part in such a small matter as a war on the Korean peninsula.” Kim also stressed that the North Korean army could seize the whole of South Korea within a few days, well before any U.S. military action would be feasible; and he claimed that 200,000 Communist Party members in South Korea were ready to start an uprising in support of the North Korean troops, creating a fait accompli. These assurances gave Stalin greater confidence that a U.S. military response would be highly unlikely. As a further precaution, Stalin did his best to ensure that Chinese troops would intervene if things somehow went awry. (Stalin had no intention of dispatching Soviet ground forces to fight on the Korean peninsula, though he did later secretly permit the use of Soviet pilots and air defense personnel.) Initially, Stalin surmised that Mao would be unwilling to commit China to North Korea’s defense. This suspicion proved well-founded. Mao’s overriding priority was to regain Taiwan by

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force, and he did not want to divert Chinese troops elsewhere or run the risk of U.S. military intervention in Korea until the Taiwan issue had been settled and “the Chinese revolution is complete.” Stalin therefore had to force Mao’s hand. In May 1950, shortly after Kim visited Moscow, the North Korean leader went to Beijing at Stalin’s behest and informed Mao that Stalin had consented to the proposed incursion. This revelation caught Mao by surprise, and he asked for clarification from Stalin himself, who promptly confirmed that “in light of the changed international circumstances, [we in Moscow] now agree with the Koreans’ proposal to move toward reunification.” Stalin’s and Kim’s maneuvers left Mao with little choice but to approve of the operation. With all these safeguards in place, Stalin made a final decision to press ahead. He sharply stepped up the supplies of Soviet weaponry to North Korea and dispatched a high-level Soviet military delegation to Pyongyang to complete the operational plans for an invasion, which were implemented on 25 June 1950. Documents that have recently come to light from the former Soviet Union and from China indicate that Soviet espionage played an important part in Stalin’s decisions leading up to the outbreak of the Korean War. The nature of Soviet relations with the new Communist regime in China also had an important effect. My presentation for the special session on 25 June 2020 will explore both of these elements in detail. Moscow’s Fear of Japan and the Improvised Division of Korea, 1945-1946 Kathryn Weathersby - Georgetown University, United States Based on Russian and American archival records this paper examines Moscow’s approach to the Korean question from the Potsdam Conference in July/August 1945 to the opening of the Joint Soviet/American Commission in March 1946. It argues that Moscow initially subordinated the Korean issue to its top priority of establishing as large a role as possible in setting occupation policy for Japan. Consequently, while the allies agreed at Potsdam that the Soviet Army would be responsible for defeating Japanese forces in Korea, Stalin accepted without comment the sudden American proposal to divide the peninsula into two occupation zones. Soviet diplomats moreover declined to raise the Korea issue at the London Conference of Foreign Ministers in September 1945. However, when American intransigence on Japan at the London Conference raised the specter that Japan would in the future attack the Soviet Union, perhaps together with the United States, Moscow resolved to transform its zone in Korea into a reliable security buffer. Stalin turned his attention to Korea in December, at the Moscow Conference of Allied Foreign Ministers, as he had given up hope for a favorable resolution on Japan. The Soviets regarded it as politically inexpedient to oppose creation of a unified government for Korea, so they solved their dilemma by agreeing to establish a unified government through consultations with “democratic parties and social organizations,” the definition of which the Soviets could control. Thus, as Koreans in the South expressed strong opposition to the trusteeship agreement in January 1946, Soviet officials in the North instructed Korean Communists to support the agreement. When the Joint Commission met in March 1946, the Soviet representatives insisted that the Commission could only groups that supported the Moscow conference decision. Since the Americans would clearly not accept such a limitation, Moscow prevented the establishment of a non-friendly government in Seoul, kept its security buffer in the north, while maintaining the face-saving posture of adherence to the allied decision of December 1945. Two Korean Divisions – The DMZ and Memory Michael Devine - Wyoming University, United States Overlooking Incheon Harbor stands a huge monumental statue of General Douglas MacArthur watching over the site of the great, victorious landing of United States led forces in September of 1950 that turned the tide of the Korean War. At the base of the statue is an inscription that includes the general’s words that in war “there is no substitute for victory.” This memorial was erected in

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1957 during the regime of the Republic of Korea President Rhee Syngman to honor the famous American military leader and to express the view of Rhee and his followers that Korea would have been re-united under South Korean leadership if only the general had been left in command and not removed by United States president, Harry S. Truman. Indeed, Truman had caused the division of the Korean peninsula--- twice. First, at the Potsdam Conference in July of 1945 when he had negotiated an administrative division of Korea at the 38th parallel to temporarily manage the withdrawal of Japanese forces from Korea once the Second World War came to an end. This dividing line became permanent and resulted in two competing regimes and open warfare when the North attacked the South on June 25, 1950. Truman again allowed a Korean division when his administration entered negotiations with the Chinese and North Koreans that he knew would set in place the status quo ante bellum. While the DMZ presents a physical barrier to a unified Korea, sharply divided memories of the war on both sides of the DMZ also obstruct any effort toward unification and reconciliation. To many South Koreans, General MacArthur is not a hero; rather, he symbolizes American interference in Korean civil strife, a devastating war that took the lives of 2.5 million Koreans, and U.S. support for a series of cruel dictatorial regimes that were allowed to perpetuate horrible atrocities on tens of thousands of Korean civilians. In North Korea, where only one official narrative of the Korean War is permitted, the war is remembered as a heroic defense of the Fatherland against an American-led invasion initiated in October of 1950. The conflicting and contested memories of the Korean War will be as difficult to erase as the physical border at the DMZ. Soviet Occupation Policies in North Korea and East Germany, 1945-1948/1949 : A Comparative Analysis Balazs Szalontai - Korea University, South Korea Early Soviet occupation policies in North Korea and East Germany were considerably similar in the respect that in these divided countries, there was no internationally recognized national governments over the local administrative organs until 1948/1949, whereas in Soviet-occupied Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Austria, the first national governments were set up as early as 1944–1945. Consequently, the North Korean and East German police forces were initially directly subordinated to the Soviet military administration, rather than to the local Ministries of the Interior, while their armies gradually evolved from their police. Similarly, both countries experienced an enforced merging of leftist parties as early as 1946, while the other East European countries reached this stage only in 1948. Still, there were also substantial differences between the two countries. Anxious to weaken the German elites, in 1945 the Soviets implemented far more radical administrative and economic changes in East Germany than in North Korea, but in early 1946, Korean opposition to the trusteeship plan (which was much stronger than the opposition they faced in East Germany) induced them to change tack. Thus, North Korea’s March 1946 economic reforms and the Soviet decision to delegate more authority to the northern Communist leaders were aimed at breaking this resistance.

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SESSION 2 - THE LONG ECHO OF THE FROZEN CONFLICT: DIVERGENT VIEWPOINTS ON THE KOREAN WAR 27 June (afternoon, time to be confirmed)

Chair: Kyung-Hwa Lim - Chung-Ang University, South Korea The Korean War and Stalin's Calculus: Soviet Strategies before, during and after the War Vladimir Tikhonov - University of Oslo, Norway While participating only peripherally on the battlefield - mostly in the form of aviation support and the dispatch of military advisors - Soviet Union was just as important player in the Korean War as both Koreas, People's Republic of China or the United States. It was the Soviet acquiescence to Kim Il Sung's initiative on 'liberating' South Korea in January 1950 that made the war possible in the first place. Stalin was also keenly involved throughout all the two tumultuous years of armistice negotiations, despite having ostensibly ceded the operational control over the truce diplomacy to his Chinese and North Korean allies. This presentation, based on Soviet diplomatic documentation, will deal with the subtle negotiating process between the 'anti-imperialist' allies. It will focus on the ways in which both Soviet Union and its East Asian partners were articulating their needs and ascertaining their (diverging) interests while subscribing on the surface to the rhetoric of the 'anti-imperialist unity.' It will also outline war's influences on the atmosphere in the USSR of Stalin's last years when the war in Korea overlapped with the climax of early Cold War strictures resulting in severe cuts on popular consumption and large-scale revival of certain Imperial Russian ideologies and practices, state anti-Semitism included. The US Psychological Warfare vis-a-vis the POWs during the Korean War: an Analysis of Radio Broadcasting and Study Materials from the POW Camps* Jeon Gapsaeng - Seoul National University, South Korea Since August 195, the Civil Information and Education (CI&E) department of the United Nations Command (UNC) was implementing a broadcasting-based ‘re-education program’ for the North Korean and People’s Republic of China POWs (prisoners of war), mobilizing US military and civic personal and even South Korean civilians for this purpose. This research aims at analysing the development of the US-led psychological warfare vis-a-vis the POW, via the exploration of the ‘re-educational’ materials, literary works containing POWs’ ‘confessions’ and reflections as well as camp newspapers. It will also look at how these‘re-education’ programs were linked to the post-war anti-Communist propaganda. North Korean Historians’ Perceptions of Soviet and Chinese Historiographies* Hong Jong-Wook - Seoul National University, South Korea In the beginning, North Korean historiography was shaped by the preceding traditions of the colonial-period Marxist historical research, as well as the influences by Soviet Korean intellectuals dispatched to North Korea by the Soviet occupation authorities after 1945. It underwent great changes during the Korean War period, however. A number of Left-leaning historians moved North during the war, and important historical materials, such as The Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty, were secured by the Northerners. North Korean historiography’s institutionalization was progressing too. In 1952, Academy of Science was established, and in 1955, the Institute of History was founded under its auspices. The Institute started publishing its academic journal, The Science of History (Ryeoksa Gwahak). This and other North Korean historical journals were actively familiarizing their readers with the news of the Soviet and Chinese historiographies. This presentation aims at analyzing of how North Koreans understood the new trends of Soviet and Chinese historical research and what sort of influence these trends might have exerted. .This exploration will hopefully

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contribute to the deeper understanding of the process through which the ‘chuch’e historiography’ of the 1960s was being formed. Beyond the Boundaries of National Division and Separation: the Exchanges between the Toronto-based Overseas Koreans’ Society for Facilitating Separated Families’ Meetings and North Korean Overseas Koreans Assistance Commission* Han Seonghun - Yonsei University, South Korea The aim of this presentations to shed light on the process through which the North America-based Korean migrants of North Korean refugee origins managed to arrange their visits to Pyongyang, and the broader meaning of these visitations. Korea’s post-Liberation national division was cemented by Korean War. In this process, a number of Northerners went South. Afterwards, some of these Northern migrants to South Korea moved further to North America. Among them, Jeon Chungnim and Jeon Sunyeong, born to a Protestant family from Longjing (Northeastern China), reached South Korean via Tumen (Jilin Province, China) and North Korea, and then migrated to Toronto, Canada, in the early 1960s. Jeon Chungnim was a founding member of the Joint Korean Church there, and since 1973 published The New Korea Times, criticizing Park Chung Hee’s rule and advocating democratization. After organizing the Overseas Koreans’ Society for Facilitating Separated Families’ Meetings on the basis of his newspaper, Jeon Chungnim started negotiating with Pyongyang about the possibility of arranging meetings for the divided families’ members. North Korean Workers Party’s policies on overseas Koreans originated in its work with the Japan-based Zainichi Koreans, and then were applied to the overseas Koreans from other areas. Their visitations to North Korea were arranged by United Front Department’s Overseas Koreans Assistance Commission. These visitations and meetings, which took place in the times when the movement for peaceful unification and South-North exchanges were tabooed in South Korea and the world in general was still divided by the Cold War international order, helped to destroy the walls of national division and family separations. * Simultaneous interpretation

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PANELS

AFFECTS AND ETHICS OF COEXISTENCE Convenor and Chair: Clara Han - Johns Hopkins University, United States Discussant: Sean Dowdy - University of Chicago, United States In this panel, we attempt to understand how social difference, separation and violence reverberate through everyday life in four Asian borderlands — Korea, Kashmir, Myanmar, and Bodoland (India) — with the lenses of the anthropology of affect and ethics. In each of these contexts, social difference is marked by states and militarized regimes, national borders, ethnic boundaries, and religious difference. Furthermore, cracks and divisions in the social are registered in the everyday through memories and anticipations of violence, literary imaginations, and intimate kin relations. We take into account diverse approaches to affect from anthropological literature on “mana” (Mazzarella 2017), “collective effervescence” (Durkheim 2008 ), expressive sentiments critiquing hierarchy (Abu Lughod 2016), and affect as method “caught up” in the intensities of social life (Favret-Saada 2015). Concomitantly, our approaches think through ordinary ethics (Lambek 2010), the recovery of everyday life (Das 2007), and ethics as a social and historical process (Keane 2016). Through ethnographic engagement with our respective contexts, we explore how anthropological approaches to affect and ethics may shed light on realities and fantasies of coexistence as it is imagined, negotiated and even challenged in everyday life. Thakur sketches how his interlocutors in Bodoland strive to bring into play ambivalent modes of relating to one-another against the backdrop of starkly ethnicised modes of framing and relating prevalent in times of ethnic violence. Schissler considers literary efforts to promote inter-religious coexistence in Myanmar and asks how one interpretation of Saba Mahmood’s (2015) “ethical thematization” of religious differences might unfold in this context and, in turn, reveal particular risks and possibilities for Buddhist/Muslim cohabitation. By attending to North Korean migrant women’s voices—and their mixed senses of loss, resentment, and sacrifice— Kim explores how coexistence of the two Koreas comes to be enmeshed with the engagements and entanglements of kinship relations. Falaris considers the affects produced by militarized infrastructures and affixed to memories of violence in Kashmir and how these come to be refracted through intimate kin relations and ethics of care. Each presentation sketches emerging modulations and formulations of coexistence in the four Asian borderlands marked by conflicts. Through anthropology of affect and ethics, the panel seeks to ask how might emotions be admitted into the study of ethics and everyday life? How such an attention to ethics and affect may allow for scholars to be empirically attuned to and theorize the possibilities of coexistence in borderland spaces? Recovering the Everyday after Gondogul: Culpability, Ethical life and Violence in Bodoland, India Rishav Kumar Thakur - Columbia University, United States The Bodoland Autonomous Territorial Districts (BTAD) is a tribal autonomous region bordering Bhutan, the boundaries of which were carved in 2003 in response to the movement of political autonomy by the Bodo tribe in Assam (India). While the movement for full separation from Assam continues, non-Bodo communities—comprising a demographic majority in BTAD—remain unsure of their place in the Bodo homeland have engaged in counter mobilizations. In such a context, particular incidents of singular violence have led to episodes of widespread mob-based violence. These are remembered as gondogul, which when literally translated, means “that which is not right or normal.” These episodes were constitutively identified with overwhelming suspicion, fear, or mistrust of someone simply because they belonged to a different ethnic group. Based on fieldwork in Kokrajhar and Chirang districts, this essay analyses deliberations around who to blame for gondogul. These deliberations complicate both the sense of place produced in the clash and the friction between bounded, reified ethnic groups in gondogul. For example, village insiders or known persons from the

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‘other’ ethnic group suspected of collaborating with militants to enable mob violence in the village are held in ambivalence. People argue how such times may compel people to act out-of-character. Similarly, we start seeing in such deliberations the contours of “categories” (Brubaker 2002) such as the common man, the militant or the politician. This paper argues that such discursive investments represent a striving for an eventual everyday – “an adjacent self” (Das 2010, 377) – that is different from gondogul and which highlights the contours of modes of being-together alternate to those that achieve a pinnacle during gondogul. These raise the question of how alternate sensibilities emerge or are sustained (Povinelli 2001, 320) in the face of dominant imaginaries produced by divisive politics. Thematizing Interfaith Life: Secularism, Socialism, and Histories of Violence and Peace in Contemporary Myanmar Matthew Schissler - University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, United States Saba Mahmood’s Religious Difference in a Secular Age closes with a provocation: “Given this context, the ideal of interfaith equality might require not the bracketing of religious differences but their ethical thematization as a necessary risk when the conceptual and political resources of the state have proved inadequate to the challenge this ideal sets before us” (2015, 213). The context to which Mahmood refers is her argument, building on the work of Talal Asad and others, that inter-religious conflict is generated by contradictions inherent to secularism. From this premise neither Asad nor Mahmood argue that secularism is something to be rejected or opposed. What, then, might the ethical thematization that she suggests look like? This paper takes up such a question through two juxtapositions. The first examines some of the presuppositions about ethics embedded within Mahmood’s argument, by reading her ethnographic examples alongside accounts of the feminist consciousness-raising movement and the work of Zora Neale Hurston. Building on insights from these comparisons, the second half of the paper considers efforts to promote inter-religious coexistence in Myanmar, a majority Buddhist country where violence against Muslim minorities has garnered headlines worldwide. It does so by considering works of literary realism produced by a small group of writers prominent during Burma’s socialist and early post-socialist eras, and juxtaposing them against a more recent text that combines oral history, prose, and poetry. The paper aims to offer one interpretation of how the ethical thematization that Mahmood calls for can unfold, and reflect on both its risks and possibilities. Living in the Two Koreas: The Everyday Life of North Korean Migrant Women in South Korea Sojung Kim - Johns Hopkins University, United States “South Koreans do not know how the bundan [the North-South partition of Korea] is such a fearful thing. How sorrowful it is,” a North Korean migrant in her mid-forties told me when I met her four years ago in South Korea. Her voice, almost heard like a mere murmur, immediately captured my attention. The bundan, which is often construed as an effect of both Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945) and the Korean War (1950-1953), seeped into her life. “Perhaps such a mournful fate I was bound to, never able to see my family and my hometown [in North Korea] again, it deeply aches my heart,” she said. Based on eight months of ethnographic work with sixteen North Korean migrant women in the southern region of South Korea between 2015 and 2019, this paper explores how coexistence of the two Koreas comes to be enmeshed in North Korean migrant women’s engagement with kinship relations, by attending to the women’s voices often carried with mixed senses of loss, resentment, and sacrifice. Taking the ethical as a dimension of everyday life (Das 2015; Lambek 2010), rather than as a bounded domain or moral experience captured in moments of ruptures (Zigon and Throop 2014), I will probe the ways in which living in two Koreas is shaped within North Korean migrant women’s engagement with kinship and intimate relations in the context of the bundan armistice regime. Attending to the women’s affective responses to the circumstances they find themselves in, my project will delve into

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how the ethical emerges, and how ethics and politics comes to be aligned and – misaligned – in everyday life. Affects of Disconnection Marios Falaris -Johns Hopkins University, United States The primary scholarly and media representations of Kashmir for the last 30 years have almost exclusively highlighted political conflict and the actions of armed actors – a perspective prised open by recent anthropological attention to Kashmiri experiences of the everyday. This work has taken various affective routes into sketching the effects of militarized occupation: through witnessing and gathering (Junaid 2013), the cultivation of mourning (Zia 2016), intoxication and reverie (Varma 2016), and circulating forms of azaadi (freedom) (Faheem 2018; Mahmood 2018). I extend this attention to affect by tracking the tangle of emotions produced through encounters with communications infrastructures: punctured cellphone connections, intermittent landlines, uncertain postage, and blanket bans on the internet. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with families spanning rural South Kashmir and India’s capital city, New Delhi, this presentation considers how intensifications of the military occupation are refracted through long-distance communications between family members, friends and lovers. Kashmiris from rural South Kashmir have migrated to New Delhi over the last 30 years with various aspirations and horizons – seeking refuge from the conflict, opportunity for education and work, and transformation of a family’s intergenerational possibilities. Making a life in New Delhi marked as Kashmiri, they have in turn been met with suspicion, anxiety, fatigue and exoticized desire. This presentation considers the traffic in emotions, expressed across long-distance communications, as well as their entwinement with the various blockages of the communications technologies themselves. Thus military occupation and migration come to be affectively braided with intimate relations: longing with anxiety; passion and fear; comfort and frustration. Rather than focus on spectacular moments of resistance when clear political articulations become necessary, this paper traces the register of overlapping affects in the everyday and the striated textures of sustaining distant lives together.

ANXIOUS ZONES: OPPORTUNITY AND ANXIETY IN ASIAN BORDERLANDS

Convenor and Chair: Mikel J.H. Venhovens - Aarhus University, Denmark Discussant: Mona Chettri - University of Western Australia, Australia Borderlands are often designated as a ‘special’ territory within the nation state due to their geographical location. As borderlands are the environment where the ‘state-effect becomes most visible often through the creation of specific zones with favourable circumstances such as the location of development zones, trade, mobility and zones of exception. This panel however, wants to focus on the notion that the geographical location also brings into being issues that are not necessarily productive or positive. Whether it is during times of prosperity or during times of hardship, anxieties regarding what the future holds after certain ruptures can have a significant effect on the border landscape, populations and projects. Anxiety, which can be defined as: a state of agitation, being troubled in mind, and uneasiness about a coming event (Tyrer, 1999, p. 3) is then a physically embodied state involving both mental and emotional distress, combined with a more diffuse sense of uneasiness about a coming event. The focus on temporality lies in looking at what the future holds and how current events will affect the future, both as us individuals, but also us as part of combined entities such as governments and (nation-) states. Mobility creates opportunity but also complications. Territorial vicinity to other states creates diplomatic opportunities but also tensions. Infrastructural / developmental projects can spring economic expansion or social and environmental degradation. Post conflict borderlands

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can bring different populations into contact with each other in order to start a reconciliation, but can also renew tensions leading up to renewed (structural) violence. So, how does anxiety materialize in borderlands specifically? How do the opportunities that come with development cope with setbacks or envisioned futures never met? What kind of role does technology play in this? How are these anxieties dealt with by the local affected populations and the authorities and how does this affect their co-existence? This panel focuses on different cases of anxieties across the Asian Borderlands in order to illustrate, analyze, understand different forms of anxieties and their impact created and developed by the dynamics that come with the aspects of borderlands. The papers in the panel analyze both direct as well as indirect impacts of borderland anxieties. The panel aims to discuss the creation of diverse forms of anxiety; the physical, symbolic and affective impacts of anxieties on populations; the processes that enables their proliferation; and the socio-political changes and politics that have emerged as result of these specific anxieties. Anxiously Awaiting Development: Collective Anticipation in an Indonesian Border Village Sindhunata Hargyono - Northwestern University, United States The election of Joko Widodo as Indonesian president in 2014 accelerated the repositioning of the Indonesian border area within the national political imaginary. In the language of the state’s development planner, the border, once considered the backyard of the nation, shall be considered its front yard, and thus deserve intensive and prioritized development planning and implementation. While such a developmentalist paradigm is not specific to Widodo’s administration, he has put this paradigm at the heart of both of his campaign and governance. The importance of accelerating the development of the border into the front yard of the nation has been rebranded through Widodo’s pledge to “develop Indonesia from the margin.” During the first five years of his administration, this pledge-turned-border-development policies have had rippling affective, temporal, and material effects on the sociopolitical life of the Indonesian border area. This presentation looks at how such a rippling effect materializes in a particular border village, Long Nawang, which the government has long designated as one of the National Strategic Regional Centers. While, ideally, such a designation should accelerate the village’s transition into a new regional urban center, in fact, the state’s promises have often fallen through, as infrastructural and administrative development has been characterized by delays. This paper looks at how delay in development has provoked anxiety among pro-development village inhabitants and how their collective affect has given birth to a specific mode of futural orientation: namely, anticipation. Understood in a utilitarian sense, anticipation emerges to alleviate the anxious present through providing a sense of knowing what to do in the present to alter the conditions of both the present and the future (Bryant and Knight 2019). This presentation relies on data from on-going dissertation research (September 2019-August 2020). Anxiety or Opportunity: Refugees in the Urbanizing Thailand-Burma Borderland Jiraporn Laocharoenwong - University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands This paper considers anxiety in the Thailand-Burma borderland, specifically as it relates to (mostly ethnic Karen) refugees in the Mae La camp, which has been in existence for over thirty years. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, it argues that the central focus of refugee anxiety in Mae La has not been related to staying in the camp, but rather to impending threats of having to leave. Counter to common notions of refugee camps being temporary and of refugees living a life in a suspended state, waiting to either resettle or return, Mae La reflects a quite different dynamic, in which I argue temporal anxiety has been rather manageable and has actually met with opportunity. In the rapidly urbanizing camp, refugees have built durable houses and infrastructure. They are widely connected to the borderland at large for work, religious, and other activities, essentially living a straddled life along the border. The camp even attracts a considerable flow of non-refugees coming to the camp from the wider borderland to seek opportunities, which they lack in rural areas.

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The refugee camp, albeit still under control of the Thai state, has managed to carve out its own space as a hub of connection, co-existing with the borderland, the status quo of which is accepted by all actors involved. With new mega-developments from China across the border in Burma potentially shifting the borderland's economic balance and upsetting the status quo, new opportunities are reasons for optimism, but at the same time anxieties regarding the refugees' straddled life arise. Anxious State(s), Enchantments and Effects: Techno-Infrastructures of Global War, Corridors and Closure Across China-Burma-India in the Mid-20th Century Aditya Kiran Kakati - IIAS, the Netherlands/The Kohima Institute, India This paper views technological experiments with governance and subsequent ‘closures’ that occurred after WWII across India and Myanmar borders and questions the paradoxes of mobility and closure engendered by wartime technologies and infrastructure. Distance-demolishing technologies (Scott 2009) like aerial technology, railways and motorable road infrastructure were assumed to have peculiar impact in the so-called ‘non-state’ spaces, especially after a ‘globalising’ (Barkawi 2006) event such as WWII. Mobility of subjects across borders has historically been a source of anxiety as well as cause of competitive state-making through development (Guyot-Réchard 2019). WWII had intensified militarised infrastructure and dramatically re-structured mobilities and connectivity of this region on a trans-Asian scale, in contrast to the previous periods of perceived ‘isolation’ (Charney 2019). It was a key historical moment when technological means to make anxiety causing ’spaces’ such as frontiers ‘knowable’ were mobilised, which in turn fuelled ‘technological triumphalism’ (Macekura and Manela 2018). However, the enchantment (Harvey and Knox 2012) of technology and infrastructure, and the contingency underneath aspirations of connectivity sit uncomfortably with the contradictory outcomes and the vested interests that produced closure. The paper will examine the vulnerabilities that drove the Allied wartime state in these borderlands which had temporarily become a trans-regional supra-state entity by forging infrastructures of connectivity. Yet, this quickly fell into decline resulting in closure of the Indo-Burma borderlands – a process driven by anxieties about rival competitors for sovereignty, which resulted in selective policies of creating isolation as this paper will argue. This reveals certain modes of governance, or performing or withdrawing 'state effects' (Krupa and Nugent 2015), and how these borderlands became 'remote' after WWII, despite being at the heart-centre of techno-political connectivity. The broader implications suggest that the rhetoric or perception of anxiety reinforces the exceptionality of these spaces as being ‘ungovernable’. De Facto-ness: Tangible Uncertainty in the Semi-Recognized Borderlands of Abkhazia Mikel J.H. Venhovens - Aarhus University, Denmark This papers focuses on how ‘de facto-ness’ becomes tangible in the borderlands of the de-facto state of Abkhazia. The identification of these de-facto political anomalies as being labeled and conceptualized as ‘de-facto’, by definition indicates their frail and anxious position within the international community and broader geo-political environment. De-facto by definition meaning ‘in fact’, refers to the notion that although not being recognized by the international community (de-jure) it in practice acts and works as a sovereign nation state. The political and societal situation of Abkhazia is significantly marked, influenced and formed by their de facto status. While ‘de facto’ is mostly used in order to describe the political situation and status of the Abkhazian Republic within the international community, with this paper I would like to broaden the concept of de facto by arguing that the de facto status of Abkhazia creates a certain ‘unique’ environment with certain facets that are tainted with anxiety and uncertainty. With this paper I argue that the ‘de facto-ness’ does therefore seeps from the (geo-) political into the societal and everyday life of the people living in these entities. These dynamics become especially visible and tangible the Abkhazian borderlands of the Gal(i) region. These borderlands are the landscape where

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the post-war Georgian minority are situated, which according to the Abkhaz authorities are deemed to be the tangible threat to Abkhazian state-ness as they are conceived to be diffusing the uncertain Abkhazian statehood. So, how does ‘de facto-ness’ look? How is it made tangible in a post-conflict environment where co-existence is deemed to be undesirable? And how do people navigate these forms of de facto-ness and its accompanying uncertainty? What can we learn from these de-facto borderlands when we look at the broader scope of Asian borderlands?

BETWEEN ZONE AND CONTACT ZONE: INSTITUTIONAL INTERFACE OF THE HIMALAYAS AND BEYOND

Convenor: Swargajyoti Gohain - Ashoka University, India Co-convenor and Chair: Swatahsiddha Sarkar - University of North Bengal, India In this panel, we explore how institutions act as agents of zone creation. By zone we mean both a location and social space, where particular structures, ideas, and networks prevail. Rather than limiting our understanding of zones to divided areas discrete from other neighbouring zones, we use an expanded concept of zone to include both zoning and divisions, as well as shared spaces (similar to Mary Louise Pratt’s idea of the contact zone) that result from alliances, solidarities and virtual communities. This panel proposes to study the role of institutions in creating different kinds of zones and contact zones across time and space. Several scholars have talked about how discourse deriving from orientalist texts and disciplines such as area studies create straitjacketed ideas of entire continents, geographical regions and world areas. In addition to how disciplinary discourse can shape, facilitate, or restrict imaginations of areas, we explore how zoning often happens through institutional agency. We further ask: as a contact zone in itself do we need to conceive the Himalayas beyond the gaze of zones? Is it not that the analytical probing of the contact zone demands a methodological dezoning at the same time? How then to examine the relevance of institutional agency in this regard, much of which is engaged in a zone creating exercise? Do we then need a differential conceptualisation of the institution itself – one that can do justice to both Himalaya and contact zone and their complementarities at the same time? How can we think of institutional spaces, arrangements, and networks that prioritise dezoning in place of zoning in our commonplace ideas about the Himalayas? How to conceive of agentiality within such an institutional arrangement whose rudimentary foundation rests on a critique of existing institutional attempts of zoning the Himalaya? This panel directs critical attention on the power inherent in zoning practices. The creating of zones and divisions indicates the asymmetrical relations in the production of space through institutions. How does the very attempt of producing institutions through the various spatial divisions of the Himalayas lead us to the inter-linkages of culture, power, and place. Is there a possibility of connecting the different zone creating attempts made by various institutions on and of the Himalaya, thereby, helping us trace the histories, processes, and meanings of the power relations that give rise to zoning. This panel further focuses on networks forged through institutional connections. Going beyond zoning towards the notion of Himalayas as contact zones, what are the new forms of community and new kinds of knowledge that emerge. How does circulation of ideas and people in institutionalized spaces (viz. schools, universities, markets, governmental and non-governmental organizations) have a generative function? What is the process and production of such networks channelled through institutions? How are they linked with each other epistemologically and/ or ontologically? In this very possibility of such linkages how do they negotiate imperatives of power and privilege, border and transnationalism, mundane and official, postcoloniality and cosmopolitanism? In short, the panel seeks contributions that would examine the institutional interface of the Himalaya by exploring

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institutional representations, histories of institutionalised zones and the possibilities of dezoning and connections in the Himalayas. Studying Himalaya in Institutional Settings and Thinking beyond a ‘National’ Himalaya Swatahsiddha Sarkar - University of North Bengal, India Following Mary Louis Pratt’s idea of contact zone – one where cultures meet, clash and grapple within spaces of asymmetrical power relations – this paper looks at Himalaya as a dynamic cultural space that goes beyond national narratives to encompass current processes of regulating identity, history and belonging. National borders within Himalaya therefore seem to be an ongoing process rather than fixed entities. Multi-statal Himalaya is a misfit to the Westphalian shoe. As a space of cultural-social contact between individuals and groups, human and non-human subjects Himalaya is best represented as a liminal space – one that thrives on the constant (re)negotiations, overlaps, ruptures, discursivities and hybrids. The rich tapestry of multi-statal Himalaya is conspicuously absent when we try to examine it in the light of institutional attempts foregrounded in research and scholarship that go by the name of Himalayan Studies. This paper will examine some such pioneering attempts ushered in by research/ policy institutions located in the Himalayan region. It will try to explore what was ‘Himalayan’ in such attempts popularly known as Himalayan Studies. Is there really a need to rethink Himalayan Studies within the framework of institutional set ups? Can we really think of connecting these institutional attempts which in fact provincialised the Himalaya in their own terms? Can a global history of Himalaya be formulated out of the existing institutional arrangements of doing Himalayan Studies? Interrogating the institutional interventions in this manner will help us situate the Himalaya within and beyond the limits of zone, dezone and contact zone. Creating a Zone within Contact Zone: Institutional Interferences in The Foot Hills of the Himalayas during Colonial Times Somoshree De - North Bengal University, India The attempts to separate the hills from the plains or for that matter the highlands from the lowlands or valleys politically, administratively, culturally or otherwise are quite common to colonial governance no matter howsoever strategic, deliberate or arbitrary the very act of separation might have been. Following Scott this paper situates the Himalayas beyond the reaches of the State. The foot hills of the Himalayas on the one hand, due to its geographical location between the center and periphery of the state naturally assumes the character of a ‘contact zone’. On the other hand, frontiers in the contact zone represent the state mechanisms functioning of which however, went on unlike the mainland colonial administration. British Empire and its mechanisms of colonialism, as an institution, attempted to control its ‘turbulent’ and ‘resource’ frontiers in the Eastern Himalayas. The targeted region and its people, usually marked as ‘remote’ and ‘savage’, were brought under defined territory of control. This paper would discuss how the very act of frontier making was not always a case of top down administrative decision. Colonial state apparatus had to respond to and sometimes even forced to recognize the complexity of the region, it’s dynamic of power relations, questions of resource pool and control – issues that sanctify the region’s qualification as a contact zone. Individual or collective experiences at the frontiers further affected the ideologies of governing the region under colonial control. The paper attempts to explore these processes which in fact consolidated the idea of foot hills- in the Bhutan/Tibet Dooars – as a zone out of sub-Himalayan contact zone. Zone and/in the Making of an Institution: The Idea of a Himalayan University and Connecting Universities of the Himalayas Jayjit Sarkar - Raiganj University, India

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The phenomenon of what we deem today as modernity was a reaction to a very specific socio-cultural, geographical, and historical event and so is the birth of modern university. The watershed moment in this regard is the establishment of the University of Berlin in 1810, based mainly on the principles of the Enlightenment and the German Romantics like Kant and Schelling. This idea of modern university, often associated with the narrative of nation building and production of citizens, was replicated all over the world in due course. Institutions are created for the purpose of territorialization and often at the cost of the spatio-temporal specificities of a region. The history, politics, geography, culture of a region and the banal and the mythic consciousness involved with these phenomena are completely ignored for the sake of the establishment of an institution. The establishment of institutions, and especially universities, becomes then a violent act: a form of colonization and hegemonization. My effort in this paper would be to push forward an idea of university which comes from a multi-state, borderland zone like that of the Himalayas. I am here arguing for a Himalayan university as an idea, not just because of the location but rather locationality: a university or in due course a network of universities which will come from and embody the sheer lived complexity and spatiality of the Himalayan massif. This idea of a borderland university will be a poignant alternative to and a respite from the hegemonic mainstream and mainland modernity Networks of Knowledge and Tibetan Buddhist Community: Institutional Circuits of Tibetan Buddhism in the Indian Himalayas Swargajyoti Gohain - Ashoka University, India In this paper, I investigate the role of institutional spaces in education, (universities, research institutes, and conferences) in forging cross-border networks. I show how Tibetan Buddhist populations in the peripheries of the Indian state are drawn into a trans-Himalayan cultural network through such institutional spaces. In pre-modern Tibet, participation in monastic networks by people from the Tibetan borderlands helped propagate Buddhism in Tibet’s peripheries. Monks who went to monasteries in Tibet for monastic studies returned home and contributed to the expansion of Tibetan Buddhism. Since the reconstitution of a Tibetan community outside of Tibet after 1959, in addition to the monastic universities, a few uniquely modern institutes - such as the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies (CIHTS) at Sarnath, Varanasi, established in 1967, as a result of dialogues between Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India and His Holiness the Dalai Lama – have been engaged in preserving and promoting Tibetan Buddhist traditions among the diasporic Tibetans. These institutes, which combine modern knowledge with a Buddhism-based curriculum, also admit non-Tibetan Buddhist populations. The blending of Tibetan Buddhist knowledge with modern liberal education, arising from the interactions of the Dalai Lama with the western world (Lempert 2012), have structured these institutions of Buddhist learning in India, some of which are located in the Indo-Tibetan borderlands. I look at the discourse in these institutes as well as in conferences to understand the cultural solidarities that are fostered through participation in these institutional spaces, with particular focus on the non-Tibetan populations of the Indian Himalayas. This paper looks at institutional spaces as the medium through which one can imagine trans-Himalayan futures being shaped. Of Refuge and Cyberspace in the 21st Century: The Case of Tibetan Exiles in the Himalayan Region and Beyond Sudeep Basu - Central University of Gujarat, India The lines of flight which connects Tibet with Dharamsala and others centres in the diaspora has the imposing Himalayan ranges which need to be traversed; journeys through these mountainous tracts often proving hazardous and fatal for many. Yet traffic of people and goods for a variety of reasons across the otherwise tranquil Himalayas has been a common occurrence for centuries, although now in trickles due to heavy patrolling along the militarized borders. In the early years of exile, once

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Tibetans seeking refuge made it to host-lands, contact with their co-ethnics back home was virtually impossible. That is no longer the case, with the coming of information technology, despite the massive online surveillance systems put in place by China. Coming into the digital age, Tibetan exilic realities and subjecthood are increasingly torn between nostalgia, restraints, aspirations, life-chances as well as the wider global processes and regional or national policies that impact their lives. Struggles of Tibetans to make a place in the world, as refugees-becoming-diasporas, are not simply about territorial gains and losses. It is also about expression of one’s own being in exile as a means of making sense of one’s past and preserving what threatens to get erased over time. ‘Virtual Tibet’ or Tibet online is the site where not only are these personal, aesthetic and political expressions aired but what also gets created at these sites are an agonistic field of representations and counter-representations or anti-representations of Tibetan refugees vis-à-vis their significant Others. In these exilic journeys of epic proportions, it is not only Lhasa or Shigatse or one’s own village which has been left behind but also the aura of the Himalayas. What optics can we have by shifting the centre of the Tibetan world from Lhasa to the Himalayas for Tibetans and refugee scholars alike? How can we begin to conceptualize travel, embodied self, borders and imagining Tibetan exile life through this shift of centre in an age of communication technology where mountains and borders are overcome in cyberspace? This paper seeks to probe how the discourses and ‘communicative rationalities’ surrounding the proliferation of a vibrant media interactive spaces among lay Tibetans, enables us to visualize a future Tibet, of who Tibetans are as a collective, which is linked with the question of the ontology of ‘settledness’ of Tibetans around the Himalayas and beyond.

BEYOND EXCEPTION: THE CHINESE "ZONE" AS EXPORT MODEL ACROSS ASIAN BORDERLANDS I

Convenor and Chair: Alessandro Rippa - Tallinn University, Estonia Discussant: Timothy Oakes - University of Colorado Boulder, United States Since Aihwa Ong's (2006) famous intervention, the debate on development zones in Asia has systematically engaged with the issue of "exception." More recently, with the expansion of Chinese influence across the region special zones have also been interpreted as an extension of Chinese power abroad and as the spearhead of the Belt and Road Initiative’s "debt-trap diplomacy." At the same time, several studies have demonstrated that SEZs across Asia’s borderlands are not only sites of exceptional governance but also particular state tools that function as technologies of territorialization in areas deemed remote and previously inaccessible for state authorities (Nyiri 2012, Rippa 2019). Against this backdrop, this panel engages with the emergent role of the Chinese zone as a medium through which China seeks to export its development model(s). In particular, papers in this panel follow the development of the Chinese zone from a space designed to attract foreign capital for domestic development, to one that serves the purposes of exporting not only capital, but also models of governance, technological innovation and surveillance, but also planning and civilization. In China, many SEZs scattered around the country have become incubators for Chinese companies with international aspirations. Abroad, Chinese zones reflect and disseminate a particular model of development, while setting up favorable conditions for Chinese companies to operate internationally. Rather than "exception," then, what seems to define today's zones across Asian borderlands is their aspiration to particular models of planning, well visible in the ways in which such zones are designed, branded, and marketed. It is through such processes that the "zone" maintains its powerful promises of speedy development. Engaging with this approach, papers in this panel will discuss the following themes: • Temporality: zones are eminently ephemeral and transition is one of their key aspects. • Transnationalism: ethnographic moments of encounter between a particular "Chinese" model and local ideas of development, environmental sensitivities, and socio-political power structure in particular trans-border contexts.

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• Models: the zone as a design model, and the role that particular branding efforts play in its development across culturally and politically diverse regions. • Infrastructure: the tension between what is laid down initially as a zone infrastructure and the material outcomes that often diverge significantly from the original plan. • Zone-City: a critical approach to the zone as a new form of urbanism. • Technology: the zone as a space designed for technological innovation, but also as a site of experimentation with new surveillance technology. From Borders to Bridgeheads: Yunnan and Xinjiang as the “Qiaotou” of Global China Juliet Lu - University of California, Berkeley, United States Western China has always been a strategic region to the formation of the Chinese nation. Historically, its remote wildness defined the civility of Eastern China. After 1949, the integration of the region’s land and ethnic minority dominated populations was portrayed as proof of the CCP’s meddle and narratives of the Chinese paternalistic state. With the Go West initiative in the 2000s, the region became a frontier for resource extraction feeding Eastern China’s rapid development. Now, under the Belt and Road Initiative, the same region is shifting from remote frontier to gateway of connectivity. Yunnan and Xinjiang provinces have been named “Qiaotou” or bridgeheads and receive increasing central government funding and administrative responsibility for fostering trade and investment of Chinese capital in the regions they neighbor. This paper compares their histories as frontiers through the lens of the State Farms system in Yunnan and the Bingtuan system in Xinjiang – originally borderland military units, turned after 1949 into state agribusiness institutions, which served comparable roles in claiming ‘wasteland’ for the Chinese state and drawing Han migration into minority dominated border regions. I then examine the recent designation of both provinces as bridgeheads by reviewing the events, institutions, and programs launched in each province as a result, and connecting these to the establishment of two Special Economic Zones on the borders of each province: Khorgos in Kazakhstan, and Boten in Laos. I argue that Yunnan and Xinjiang are two very different bridgeheads, with Yunnan provincial leadership using an increasing openness to gain independence from Beijing, and Xinjiang, in contrast, representing the site of extreme and increasing central state control. The comparison shows that province-specific histories of state formation within China’s borders, particularly through technologies, logics, and institutions of resource governance, paved the way for China’s current day global integration. Technical Experts and the Production of China’s Airport Economic Demonstration Zones Max Hirsh - Hong Kong University, Hong Kong S.A.R., China Recent scholarly work on China has devoted much attention to policy directives that aim to export a “China Model” of infrastructure-led urban and regional development to emerging economies in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Less attention has been paid to the origins of those infrastructure models, which form the centerpiece of the Chinese government’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This paper addresses that gap by studying the development of China’s airport infrastructure from the 1980s to the present. Focusing on the rise of so-called “Airport Economic Demonstration Zones,” it posits aviation as an insightful lens for framing the multidirectional processes by which infrastructural and urban planning expertise was imported into China from Europe, Japan, and North America during the post-Mao period of Opening Up and Reform. Drawing on fieldwork conducted at airports in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai—as well as on expert interviews with architects, planners, and engineers—the essay argues that an analysis of the transnational origins of China’s infrastructural expertise can help us to better conceptualize the processes by which the “China Model” of infrastructure-led urban development is currently being exported abroad. Khorgos: Branding, Expectations and “Civilization” in a Chinese-Kazakh Zone Verena La Mela - University of Zurich, Switzerland

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The large shopping complexes, two-lane highways and high-tech surveillance systems of the “International Centre of Boundary Cooperation” (in short ICBC but in Kazakhstan usually referred to as “Khorgos”) give it the appearance of a small but growing Chinese town. However, the visa-free shopping and tourist zone sits right on the Sino-Kazakh border and is accessible from both countries which administer it at the same time. The construction of Khorgos in 2013 raised high expectations among the local population in Kazakhstan. People imagined a free trade zone and were disappointed that trading there came at higher costs than expected: “They say that the bazaar we used to go to in Khorgos is still there. Usually big trucks go there now. And people do not go there because they have to pay for it. It is not for free.” Like Nuriya, the Uyghur trader quoted above, many other local actors were disappointed by the promises made about the zone: infrastructure was built slower than expected or was poorly planned, official rules and regulations frequently changed and access to resources within the zone was not distributed equally. Despite these disappointments Kazakhs and Uyghurs in Khorgos often discuss the arrival of “civilization” in connection to Khorgos and the new technology arriving from China. In my paper I trace the recent history of the Khorgos free trade zone through several interviews conducted in loco with small-scale traders and zone officials and discuss to what extent we may call the Chinese zone a model of “civilization.” Camp Zone: The Xinjiang Model of Interlinked Safe Cities and Coercive Industrial Parks Darren Byler - University of Colorado Boulder, United States Since the “People’s War on Terror” began in China in 2014, Xinjiang has become a special borderland zone for security technology development and textile manufacturing. In order to develop this new production zone, state authorities have partnered with private industry to build an integrated web of “safe city” surveillance projects that uses a “Xinjiang Model” of policing to restrict the movement of targeted borderland populations. This security system is supported by hundreds of punitive internment camps where Turkic Muslims deemed “pre-criminal” are reeducated before being sent to work in adjacent industrial parks. A 2019 government document describes the camp system as a new “carrier” of the Xinjiang economy. It credits them with attracting numerous private companies to relocate in “satellite” factories in the industrial parks. These parks, built as part of the SEZ of Kashgar, the cross-border SEZ of Khorgos and elsewhere in the region as part of Eastern China “pairing-assistance” programs, offer state-subsidized lease agreements, shipping and worker training. These incentives and deeply-exploitative wages make the factories in the Xinjiang camp zone highly profitable. This paper argues that the Xinjiang camp zone is a model that incentivizes private industry to produce a borderland lumpen proletariat. This form of private industrial “extrastatecraft” (Easterling 2014) utilizes “safe city” technology to hold Turkic Muslim populations in place on the border with Central Asia. It uses the threat of the punitive camp system to force them to work at low wages. Elements of this system have broader implications for targeted populations in other border regions. For instance, the same Chinese technology companies are building “safe city” projects in Malaysia; camp systems are being built in Myanmar in part with Chinese state funding.

BEYOND EXCEPTION: THE CHINESE "ZONE" AS EXPORT MODEL ACROSS ASIAN BORDERLANDS II Convenor and Chair: Timothy Oakes - University of Colorado Boulder, United States Discussant: Alessandro Rippa - Tallinn University, Estonia Since Aihwa Ong's (2006) famous intervention, the debate on development zones in Asia has systematically engaged with the issue of "exception." More recently, with the expansion of Chinese influence across the region special zones have also been interpreted as an extension of Chinese

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power abroad and as the spearhead of the Belt and Road Initiative’s "debt-trap diplomacy." At the same time, several studies have demonstrated that SEZs across Asia’s borderlands are not only sites of exceptional governance but also particular state tools that function as technologies of territorialization in areas deemed remote and previously inaccessible for state authorities (Nyiri 2012, Rippa 2019). Against this backdrop, this panel engages with the emergent role of the Chinese zone as a medium through which China seeks to export its development model(s). In particular, papers in this panel follow the development of the Chinese zone from a space designed to attract foreign capital for domestic development, to one that serves the purposes of exporting not only capital, but also models of governance, technological innovation and surveillance, but also planning and civilization. In China, many SEZs scattered around the country have become incubators for Chinese companies with international aspirations. Abroad, Chinese zones reflect and disseminate a particular model of development, while setting up favorable conditions for Chinese companies to operate internationally. Rather than "exception," then, what seems to define today's zones across Asian borderlands is their aspiration to particular models of planning, well visible in the ways in which such zones are designed, branded, and marketed. It is through such processes that the "zone" maintains its powerful promises of speedy development. Engaging with this approach, papers in this panel will discuss the following themes: • Temporality: zones are eminently ephemeral and transition is one of their key aspects. • Transnationalism: ethnographic moments of encounter between a particular "Chinese" model and local ideas of development, environmental sensitivities, and socio-political power structure in particular trans-border contexts. • Models: the zone as a design model, and the role that particular branding efforts play in its development across culturally and politically diverse regions. • Infrastructure: the tension between what is laid down initially as a zone infrastructure and the material outcomes that often diverge significantly from the original plan. • Zone-City: a critical approach to the zone as a new form of urbanism. • Technology: the zone as a space designed for technological innovation, but also as a site of experimentation with new surveillance technology. Southern Solidarity? Special Economic Zones and the Circulation of Planning Models in Zambia Dorothy Tang - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States Special economic zones (SEZs) have played an important role in China’s global investment strategies since the “Going Global” policy in 2000 and the recent “Belt and Road Initiative” of 2013. Currently, there are 113 Chinese-financed economic zones in 46 countries underway—of which twenty are officially and funded recognized by the Chinese government. This paper examines the design and planning of SEZs in Zambia to understand the relationship between Chinese state-led overseas development projects and their relationships to the host countries. As one of the first sites of Chinese development aid in the 1970s and subsequent investment in the 2000s, Zambia has a long-standing history of “Southern Solidarity” with China. Zambia is also one of the first sites of Japanese experiments in “South-South Cooperation” in which a tripartite collaboration, including Malaysian consultants, were crucial in shaping Zambian foreign investment policies. A spatial comparison of SEZs separately funded by Chinese investors and the Zambian state suggests that urban design decisions, such as location, infrastructural connections, land-use planning, and environmental concerns are subject to competing domestic politics and geo-political interests. In addition, while the SEZ model has largely been credited for the China’s miraculous urban and economic transformation since the 1980s, its origins and proliferation are far more global. By tracing the genealogy of Zambian SEZs, we uncover a diverse network of international actors, deep histories of engagement, and a wide circulation of planning ideas that collectively shape Zambia’s urban landscape. Development with Chinese Characteristics? Dry Ports, Aid, and Borderland Geopolitics in Nepal

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Galen Murton - James Madison University, United States At numerous sites along the Nepal-China border, the rapid construction of new trade zones appears to be transforming what were once viewed as exceptional infrastructural spaces into a new model of bilateral development practice. Specifically, Beijing’s financialization and construction of new dry ports within Nepali territory – particularly along established and emerging ‘power corridors’ in Gorkha, Rasuwa, and Sindupalchok districts (Murton and Lord forthcoming) – are heralded in Kathmandu as promising new spaces for enhanced import capacity (and less certain export potential). Presenting a new model of infrastructural scale in the Himalayan borderlands, these spectacular trade zones also suggest an important dimension of Chinese state intervention is especially ‘sensitive spaces’ (Cons 2016) inhabited by Tibetan exiles and refugees. For example, public-private joint ventures between China Aid, Bureau 14 of the Chinese Railroad Construction Company (CRCC), and international contractors based in Guangdong and Shenzhen provide a welcome alternative to decades of delayed and unfulfilled Western and Indian development promises for constituents across Nepal (Paudel 2018). However, the assemblage of dry ports along the Nepal-China borderlands and the establishment of new special economic zones facilitated by Beijing go hand in hand with contingent political commitments in Kathmandu with respect to the One China policy and international extradition policies. Bearing in mind these new terms of Sino-Nepali ‘infrastructural relations,’ this paper asks how ‘localized geopolitics’ (O’Tuathail 2010) are translated into material and security forms and if this dynamic also reflects a 21st century model of development with Chinese characteristics. Zones of Capture: Casino Development, Superstition, and the Spatiality of Luck Juan Zhang - University of Bristol, United Kingdom In this paper, I use casinos in Macau SAR as an example to illustrate an alternative aspect of the development zone beyond its physical infrastructure, the built-environment, or the new models of governance championed in such a space of exception. Focusing on the decorative and spatial design based on feng shui principles and technologies in and around Macau’s casino spaces, I draw in the immaterial aspect of luck and auspiciousness that are often overlooked but are regarded as having symbolic significance in everyday practice in making zones successful. From the famous Casino Lisboa with its “bird cage” to the complex waterways of the ultra-modern resort the Venetian, spatial design has been utilized to capture investors and gambling customers as well as to lock in their wealth, contributing to the long term profitability of the casino industry and the prosperity of the city. Elsewhere, feng shui may be seen as a form of superstition incompatible with the ideas of development in economic zones; in Macau however, “superstitious” designs and practices are potent and productive, giving zones an aura of luck and potentiality. Such an aura fuels imaginations and brings investment to a place that was once nowhere and had nothing. Thinking of casinos as zones of capture, I aim to see how elements of magic and luck may become important components of zone making. On a broader theoretical level, I extend discussions on technology and infrastructure to include possibilities of rendering luck technical. As we think about Chinese development zones in the hard language of planning, building and governing, it may be useful to also think about the “softer” techniques of making development work, techniques that often involve certain elements of magic, luck, and gambling as such zones capture both capital and imaginations. Deep Waters and Global Futures: Gwadar Port along the New Silk Road Ayesha Omer - New York University, United States This paper explores the technological mediation of deep waters as standing reserve, through which Gwadar’s deep sea is configured as a conduit, and its associated port and special economic zone are organized as a critical node in a global network of trade and communication flows. It argues that the

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technical arrangement of this standing reserve, conduits, and nodes, is discursively co-constituted as a global future for the Pakistani nation, and the wider Chinese maritime silk road. Built in 2006 by the Port of Singapore Authority, Pakistan’s Gwadar port at the Arabian Sea is currently under lease with the Chinese Overseas Port Holding Company (COPHC) for 40 years to operate a “Free Zone” (a tax-free special economic zone) and expand the existing port terminal. Both Gwadar Port and the Free Zone are critical infrastructures of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC)—a flagship project of China’s global Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Tied to Gwadar’s deep sea are indigenous fisherfolk communities, whose access to these waters is increasingly restricted through a militarized apparatus of violent control. Moreover, such projected futures of global maritime routes and connections are complicated by Gwadar’s position in Pakistan’s Balochistan province that continues to experience a decades-long Baloch separatist insurgency. Fisherfolk in Gwadar have protested the port long before CPEC, but recently their protests have taken up the language and politics of indigenous rights. Thus, the Gwadar port and special economic zone security infrastructures reflect these violent moves to establish Pakistani sovereignty upon a fraught, insurgent landscape. Drawing on ethnographic research, participant observation, and visual media analysis, this paper examines Chinese infrastructures of Gwader’s Free Zone and port terminal as configured within (and limited by) the situated political, ecological, and technological dynamics of Gwadar and its position relative to the Pakistani state.

BORDERING REGIMES: CO-EXISTENCE, COMPROMISE AND COMPETITION AMONG MINORITY ACTORS AND STATE-MAKING IN 20 CENTURY EAST ASIA

Convenor: Kelly Hammond - University of Arkansas, United States Chair: Christian Hess - Sophia University, Japan For regional powers like the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communists and the Chinese Nationalists, by the middle of the twentieth century securing the support of minority actors living across East Asia’s various borderlands was imperative to the regional and global success of their ideological programs and state building efforts. This panel explores ways that non-state actors influenced or intervened in the process by which state-mandated borders took shape in the Chinese periphery. Linkhoeva focuses on the Buriats, a nomadic group who moved fluidly between the Soviet Union, China and Manchukuo in the years leading up to imperial Japan’s defeat. In her work, she shows how the convergence of Soviet, Chinese and Japanese histories actually provides a much fuller picture of the Buriat role in facilitating or impeding state-building in the Inner Asian borderlands. Weiner examines Chinese Communist United Front efforts in the 1950s along the Sino-Tibetan frontier, which Party leaders imagined would enable the “gradual,” “voluntary,” and “organic” transformation of an imperial borderland into a consolidated part of the new socialist, multinationality-state. Focusing on the triple frontier sandwiched between the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Pulford anlayzes how the three socialist states promoted coeval historical and temporal frames to rationalize cross-border relationships in a multi-ethnic frontier region. Finally, Hammond uses minority Muslim actors who retreated to Taiwan with the Nationalists to highlight how the Nationalists managed to shore up international support among new post-colonial Muslim states in their efforts to retake the Chinese mainland. Together, the papers illustrate how hard states have to work in the borderlands to co-opt, convince, and coerce diverse frontier communities to join their state-building projects. As we all show, the competition for loyalty was fierce. In this regard, it is in those borderland places where the state is forced to negotiate with minority actors that nation-making really starts and coalesces. As the panel demonstrates, borderlands are also the place where the successes and failures of state-making endeavors are often determined.

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Between the Hammer and the Anvil: Nomadic Migration between the Soviet Union, China, and Manchukuo Tatiana Linkhoeva - New York University, United States The Soviet Union and Imperial Japan converged in the Mongolian territories. These regions, known as Buriatia and Outer and Inner Mongolia, were geopolitically important and served as buffer zones between Soviet Russia and Japanese-occupied China. To tell the history of Soviet-Japanese-Mongolian relations, I focus on the Buriats, a Mongol-speaking borderland community in Russia, who had been living on the territory around Lake Baikal following the partition of the Mongolian lands after the Russo-Manchu agreements in the seventeenth century. By comparing Soviet and Japanese modernizing policies, I offer an examination of the lives of the Buriats who chose to remain in Soviet Russia, and the Buriat diaspora in Japanese-dominated Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, between 1900 and 1950. I place these communities alongside each other to show how the dynamics between the Buriats, the Soviet and Japanese regimes shared common features. Transcending political ideologies, the lives of the Buriats were bound together across this imposed border. As such, I move beyond the forced distinction between the communist bloc (Russia/Buriatia/Outer Mongolia/ communist China) and the anticommunist bloc (Japan/Inner Mongolia/Manchuria/Republican China), a division that has precluded identifying strategies and policies that great powers, regardless of their ideological preferences, deploy in dealing with “small people” caught up in regional power struggles. The United Front as ‘Subimperial’ Practice (or How to Win Friends and Influence People along the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands) Benno Weiner - Carnegie Mellon University, United States Borrowing from anthropologist Uradyn Bulag’s concept of “subimperialism,” which he describes as “tapping into the heritage of the former empire’s techniques of rule in the service of nationalism,” this paper examines early efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to integrate the multicultural borderland known to Tibetans as Amdo (primarily in present-day Qinghai province) into the new socialist state and nation. As in many ethnic border regions, prior to 1949 the CCP had no institutional presence in Amdo, a problem exasperated by the speed by which anti-Communist forces crumbled. The Party therefore ordered the recruitment of “pre-Liberation” religious and secular elites into a “patriotic United Front” one of three core tasks in “newly liberated minority nationality regions.” These were often the same people and institutions that previously had formed imperial-style relationships with the Chinese Muslim “Ma Family warlords” and before that the Qing imperial state. Unlike traditional imperial practice, however, the United Front was not simply a strategy for managing difference. Instead, Party leaders considered it a non-exploitative mechanism for the “gradual,” “voluntary,” and “organic” transformation of an imperial borderland into an integrated component of the socialist, multi-nationality state. Due in part to contradictions embedded within the Party’s ideological underpinnings and work practices, the 1950s United Front in Amdo ultimately failed spectacularly. Nonetheless, in its own time and in its own logics, I contend that the United Front was considered by its advocates a progressive alternative to strategies of nation building and the treatment of minority populations in the capitalist west. Moreover, it was fundamental to the manner in which the Party understood its own presence and legitimacy in borderland regions like Amdo and as such set and reflects the CCP’s institutional ethos and practices of sovereignty during the first decade of the People’s Republic of China. Temporal Coexistence? Making Coeval Friendships across Socialist China’s Northeastern Borders Ed Pulford – University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands During the 1950s-60s, the triple borderland between China, Russia and Korea was girded on all sides by socialist states whose revolutionary relations had a specific temporal dimension. After emerging locally from entangled and chaotic Manchurian guerrilla conflicts, the People’s Republic of China, the

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Soviet Union and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for a while entered a managed period of official coexistence, linked by Treaties of Friendship (Ch. youhao tiaoyue, Rus. dogovor o druzhbe, Kor. ch’insŏn choyak). These friendships affirmed not only mutual recognition of borders and sovereignty, but also the idea that socialist countries were now treading a common path towards a shared future. Working together through ‘cooperation’ – another treaty totem – their relative progress would be measured via the materialist indices of Marxist historicity. The USSR may have been understood to be ‘ahead’ of its Asian neighbours, but all coexisted within the same teleological temporality, while the capitalist world deviated down an errant historical path. This paper foregrounds the temporal qualities of cross-border relations between the PRC, USSR and DPRK and their populations, taking longstanding anthropological interest in the idea of ‘coevalness’ as a lens through which to study the three-way Friendship. Drawing on contemporary ethnography from Yanbian, the Sino-Korean region lying at this meeting of worlds, and historical material including the main local newspaper Yanbian Daily, I show how each state strove to promote official coeval historicities in the multi-ethnic borderlands. Temporal unity was expressed through adoption of a shared repertoire of national and cultural performance, and the mimetic transfer of a common lexicon for describing socialist historicity. The long afterlives of both endure today. As well as offering a new frame for understanding the specific ties among people in these three states, this paper argues for greater consideration of temporality in studies of cross-border relations in general. Cold War Mosque: Anti-Communism, Cold War Internationalism, and the GMDs' overtures to Post-Colonial Muslim States Kelly Hammond - University of Arkansas, United States This paper uses the construction and opening of the Taipei Grand Mosque in 1958 as a way to frame the Nationalists’ engagement with post-colonial Muslim states in the early years of the Cold War. Soon after the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan, they enlisted the services of long-time Sino-Muslims allies to get plans in motion to build a mosque in Taipei. In the paper, I argue that the construction of the mosque was a purposeful political gesture, intended to help the Chinese Nationalists re-establish linkages with anti-communist Muslim allies and to gain international support for their efforts to take back the mainland from the Communists. Using the construction of the mosque as a point of departure, I examine these outreach efforts to new, anti-communist, post-colonial Muslim states. By bringing attention to a certain segment of the Sino-Muslim community who were staunchly anti-communist and deeply opposed to the ways that the Communists treated Muslims on the mainland, we begin to see alternative visions for a Sino-Muslim future. This helps to reinforce the important point that Sino-Muslims were not only diverse in their religious beliefs, but in their political ones as well. These efforts also help decenter the United States and the Soviets as the only active agents in the East Asian Cold War. Focusing on Muslims living in Nationalist Taiwan recasts these individuals as active agents shaping an East Asian future rather than as passive agents in a bipolar world.

BORDERS IN MOTION IN FRONTIER ZONES I Convenor and Chair: Martin van der Velde - Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands This panel wants to address the processes of rapid change in the southeast Asian borderlands. The contributors all link their presentations to the concept of borders in relational motion with other aspects of the geography of growth and development, and the geopolitics surrounding these processes. Borders, or perhaps better the consequences of borders, might be considered to be constantly moving and in motion. They are part of evolutionary processes as well as evolutionary processes themselves. Borders are also clearly relational and multi-scalar, horizontally as well as vertical constructs and in order to grasp what is going on, have to be studied in this way. This also

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gives rise to various ‘hidden’ borders that reflect frictions and discourses of practice coming out of all sorts of border-related mobility (physical or non-physical). These hidden borders will, in many cases, not correspond to nation-state sovereignty (or similarly defined territories) and being in motion creating frontiers, again both in a more concrete physical interpretation as well as more abstract societal. This panel consist of two parts namely as Borders in motion in Frontier Zones I and Borders in motion in Frontier Zones II. Below is the list of the first part of panelists and topics in Borders in motion in Frontier Zones I Martin van der Velde provides insights into the utilization of the Threshold Approach in examining the decision-making process of individuals who (plan to) move in space. This paper focuses especially on the impact of a multi-scalar force-field on labor-market dynamics in the border-region. This presentation is also meant as a more conceptual backbone for the overarching theme of “Borders in Motion”. Shubhanginee Singh analyses the transition of a frontier into a border zone taking place in Arunachal Pradesh, India. Lidya Sitohang elaborates the insight of a Cross Border Dynamics framework in examining manifest and latent cross-border interactions in a border regional development context at the Indonesian-Malyasian border. Francesco Buscemi's highlights the Technosphere concept to acknowledge the weapons-society relations to address the gap in the existing theoretical framework. The list of the panelists in the second part of this panel continues in Borders in Motion in Frontier Zones II. Transnational Labour Migration: A Multi-Scalar Perspective on Cross-Border Labour Market Regions Martin van der Velde - Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands This presentation wants to discuss cross-border labour mobility. Trying to understand this flow we apply first of all a threshold approach that was developed on borders, mobility and migration. Central in this approach is the decision-making process of individuals who (plan to) move in space. During this process they have to decide on three geographical thresholds. The first concerns the idea to cross national borders, the second the possible destination (across the border), and the third concerns the mobility trajectories or routes involving borders. This decision-making process is embedded in a ‘force-field’ of impacting factors on different levels of scale. This paper wants to focus especially on the impact of this multi-scalar force-field on labour-market dynamics in the border-region. To do this is applies an adapted version of a scheme originally developed by Chen (2018) in the context of cross-border cooperation. This scheme is setup around two sets of factors, the first one composed of the actors on different levels of scale and the second one of the mechanisms (resources, power, and opportunities). This presentation is also meant as a more conceptual backbone for the overarching theme of “Borders in Motion”. Transition from a ‘Frontier’ to a ‘Border’ Shubhanginee Singh - Jawaharlal Nehru University, India Historically, the present territory of Arunachal Pradesh, which falls under Schendel’s reference of ‘Zomia’, has existed as one of the ‘empty’ territories on the periphery of Indian state. The region and its people had thicker cultural and trade ties with people across the Tibetan plateau than rest of India. At the time of independence of Indian state, it was referred as a ‘frontier region’, or ‘frontier tracts’ instead of a border state. It was treated as a frontier from several perspectives of settlement, resource, and security. In last few decades the territory has emerged as strategically most important last border state of India in the eastern sector. This attention to the territory of Arunachal Pradesh was accorded by Indian state after the Sino India war of 1962. Firstly, in this paper an attempt will be

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made to see the transition of a ‘frontier’ into a ‘border’ with the establishment of political and territorial authority of Indian state in this region. The presence of state has been ensured in this ‘frontier’ through operationalisation of dual dynamics of security and development. To counter Chinese presence across the border, Indian state has undertaken several highway projects, along with construction of several dams, advanced landing grounds, which is simultaneously accompanied with suspension of previous regimes of resource ownership of native people and establishment of a new order. In order to understand these contemporary transformations in the ‘frontier’, second objective of this paper would be to use ‘border’ as an analytical category to bring forth lived experiences of citizenship of communities in the region. This would be an attempt to gather the understanding of communities towards the unmaking of hitherto ‘frontier’ and making of the ‘border state’, as well as their engagement with the contemporary developmental state. Cross-Border Interaction in the Context of Border Region Development in Krayan, Kalimantan, Indonesia whilst Garuda is in my Chest Lidya Sitohang - Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands The world is on the move. Various parts are striving for interdependence and integration according to Martinez’ typology (1994). Nevertheless, his typology does not allow for a sufficient understanding of the dynamics of border crossing behaviour. In this paper I therefore propose an analytical approach to cross-border dynamics that provides a better framework for the ways in which borders are produced and reproduced. The cross-border interaction referred to in this paper focuses on the interplay between border inhabitants, the state, and institutions in the Krayan border region with Malaysia. This interplay can be characterised by the development in this border region on the one hand, and by the shared cultural background of the inhabitants of the two border regions on the other. By considering characteristics influencing cross-border interactions, this paper unravels the key factors involved in the making and remaking of the border by inhabitants. These factors show how inhabitants crossings are sometimes enabled and at other moments constrained. More specifically, this paper addresses three types of cross border interaction: accepted, contested, and non-manifest. With this distinction we not only give insight into how contemporary cross-border behaviour is looked upon, but also how the interaction between the two adjacent states often has developed, impacts of state sovereignty on cross-border activities, and the other way around. The impact strongly differs per activity. This not only shows that a dynamic approach to the cross-border interaction process is necessary, and also helps to understand why, whenever border inhabitants are questioned about their border-crossings and regional development, they respond with the saying 'Garuda di dadaku, Malaysia Ringgit di perutku' (‘Whilst Garuda is in my Chest, Malaysian Ringgit is in my stomach’). This is a clear indication for the fact that both mental-emotional as well as a more rational factors are at play. Means of Violence and Authority in the Borderlands of Myanmar Francesco Buscemi - Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Italy How does the control over the means of violence impact on the configurations of authority and political orders in the borderlands? In the last decades a vocabulary of borderlands, margins, no man’s land, frontiers, and areas of limited statehood has been crafted to analyse political authority beyond and behind the state. Central to these approaches is the idea that no monolithic control over the means of violence exists in such areas. This paper explores how the acquisition and control of means and technologies of violence by non-state actors impacts on political orders beyond the state. Based on fieldwork carried out in 2018 and 2019, the focus rests on the case of Myanmar, which is deemed as a crossroads of arms proliferation in Southeast Asia. Drawing from critical geography’s spatial turn, the article attempts to trace non-state actors and processes of arms proliferation situating them against the landscape of resistance and absence

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of monopoly over the means of violence in Myanmar borderlands. Practices of arms availability and control are then , through the prism of three categories of space: territory/territorialisation, place, and scale. The paper argues that complex patterns of arms availability and forms of control over weapons put in place by a variety of actors at multiple levels have emerged in mutual relation with the constitution and distribution of socio-political spaces. This generates assemblages of governability that ultimately impact on the configurations of state, governance, and peace in the borderlands. Trying to overcome deterministic understandings of weapons-society relations, it addresses a significant research gap as no comprehensive conceptual framework has been elaborated on this matter. Moreover, it strives to conceptualizes arms as meta-resources and, borrowing the concept from the field of geology, as part of the so-called “technosphere”.

BORDERS IN MOTION IN FRONTIER ZONES II Convenor and Chair: Martin van der Velde - Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands This panel wants to address the processes of rapid change in the southeast Asian borderlands. The contributors all link their presentations to the concept of borders in relational motion with other aspects of the geography of growth and development, and the geopolitics surrounding these processes. Borders, or perhaps better the consequences of borders, might be considered to be constantly moving and in motion. They are part of evolutionary processes as well as evolutionary processes themselves. Borders are also clearly relational and multi-scalar, horizontally as well as vertical constructs and in order to grasp what is going on, have to be studied in this way. This also gives rise to various ‘hidden’ borders that reflect frictions and discourses of practice coming out of all sorts of border-related mobility (physical or non-physical). These hidden borders will, in many cases, not correspond to nation-state sovereignty (or similarly defined territories) and being in motion creating frontiers, again both in a more concrete physical interpretation as well as more abstract societal. This panel consist of two parts namely as Borders in motion in Frontier Zones I and Borders in motion in Frontier Zones II. Below is the list of the second part of panelists and topics in the panel of Borders in motion in Frontier Zones II. Nur Widiyanto highlights how borderless zone in the interior Sabah (Malaysia) is resulting from the Mount Kinabalu enactment as a tourist destination. Paiboon Hengswan provides an insight into how tourism mobility may create space of precarity or even danger in Pai town in Mae Hong Son province (Thai-Burmese border). Ainul Fajri presents the case of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar in crossing the floating border of the Malacca Straits between Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, to seek asylum. Arindam Sarma's elaborates insights into how the precarity of lives in India’s Northeast borderland is constructed through literary texts. Tourism Development and The Creation of Borderless Zone in Southeast Asia; A Study in Kinabalu Park Area, Sabah, Malaysia Nur Widiyanto - Ambarrukmo Tourism Institute Yogyakarta, Indonesia In the last few decades Southeast Asia has witnessed the growth of tourism as a new key driver for the economic progresses, including in Sabah, Malaysia. According to the statistic available, the number of tourist arrival to Sabah 3, 6 million people and earned RM, 7.82 billion in 2017. Among dozens of tourism destinations, Mount Kinabalu is the tourism icon for Sabah and the most popular site for tourist to visit. However, the establishment Kinabalu Park has brought a dilemma for the Dusun community living nearby; it has triggered the dispossession from the customary lands, but it

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offers various economic opportunities. Employing ethnographic method, this study explores influx of foreign migrants from Indonesia to several villages surrounding Kinabalu park. Along the history, for local people Mount Kinabalu and agricultural especially growing paddy act as the core of cultural pattern. However, the enactment of Kinabalu Park in 1964 has offered tourism as the more profitable economic sector for local people. After decades of engaging tourism, agricultural lands tend to be abandoned, left for the elders and foreign workers especially from the hinterland areas of Indonesia, especially Tana Toraja and East Nusa Tenggara. Recently, church and the Indonesian school are the melting pot of hundreds of Indonesian to gather, showing the huge numbers of Indonesian inhabiting villages nearby Kinabalu Park to grow vegetables. Religious factor and the advance communication technology also play its important role to this hinterland to hinterland migration and creation of borderless zone in the interior of Sabah. The majority of Indonesian migrants are predominantly Christians, similar to the majority religion of the host community and the advent of ICT, these Indonesian migrants ensure that their family in the home country that crossing the Sulawesi Sea to grow vegetables in Sabah is the promising option. Death in Pai: Precarious Lives in the Mobilized and Noisy Tourism Space of Border Town, Mae Hong Son Province, Thai-Burmese Border Paiboon Hengsuwan - Chiang Mai University, Thailand “…[P]laces to play are potential sites of death and destruction…” John Urry (2004: 206). The expansion of people mobility at both inside and outside region happens in the borderlands; trading border town and tourist border town, such as Pai town, Mae Hong Son province. Tourism can be seen as process, rather than the product, that is reconfigured through flow of people, images, culture and things (Rojek and Urry, 1997) Similarly, the development of border town to be tourist border town, as Pai, accelerates the increasing of mobility of people and things in and out the area across the nation-state border, particularly tourists travelling in and out, which will affect the social relation in communities and natural resource management that have been changed. In addition, tourism mobility in borderlands of Pai creates what we call “resource frontiers” (Tsing, 2005; Peluso, 2017), which someone, especially capitalists, gains benefit. While other people, such as small farmers, are excluded from resources. Precisely, running tourist town of Pai, the karn alum alouy (compromising) between local government officials and tourist investors has emerged. The process of defining tourist space of Pai border town not only revalues borderlands, economically, and creates local identity in openness space, rather than closeness space, but also creates space of precarity, or even dangerous space (Sheller, and Urry, (eds.), 2004) Therefore, this paper examines the process of Pai border town making as tourist space through tourism mobility that creates the chance in economic development of Thailand. However, it causes the precarity of life or unavoidable dangers. Border(ing) between Human Conditions: Indonesia’s Response to Boat Refugees Ainul Fajri - Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands The Malacca Straits between Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand has been a scene of the “floating border” for mixed maritime movements to these countries. Regardless the irregular migrants have a right to seek asylum under the international law and not to be penalized for their mode of entry, only a small number of the maritime asylum seeker authorized to land onshore. In May 2015, the Indonesian fishermen rescued boatloads of the Rohingya refugees from Myanmar and the Bangladeshi migrants in a severe condition despite orders from the Indonesian military not to help those caught at sea. It was worth noting that all of the Rohingya refugees arriving by boats at that time were recognized as prima facie refugees and received a decent temporary assistant in the host. On the contrary, many asylum applicants that arrived by air with a valid visa and then go on to pursue asylum claims facing an orderly queue and lack of access to accommodations. Legally speaking, both categories are subject to the same assessment criteria; in practice, they require

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further investigation. Thus, this paper seeks to answer how do the border (floating border or airports), and the process of crossing the border play a role in determining the outcome of asylum-seeking in Indonesia? In another word, How do we make sense Aceh fishermen’s humanity against “those who arrived in dire condition” after rickety boat journey, and the asylum procedure applied to those “privileged social class“ who arrive through the airports and regular border checkpoint?” Drawing on the case study of Rohingya refugees in Indonesia, this paper will contribute to our understanding of the frictions and discourses of border consequences of different sorts of border-related mobility. Trauma and Transformations: Redefining Citizenship and Identity in the Borderlands of India's Northeast Arindam Sarma - Chaiduar College, India Through an in-depth analysis of three literary texts, this paper attempts to show how the borderlands in the Northeast, as much as they can be seen as products of social and political negotiations of space, have produced marginal, expendable and vulnerable people, and at the same time, given rise to heterogeneous scenarios of manoeuvring, negotiation, collaboration, and resistance among these people. The three texts selected for the study are four Assamese short stories—“No Man’s Land” (2008) and “Simanto Pothor Kahini” (The Tale of the Border Road, 2009) by Anuradha Sarma Pujari and Bipul Khataniar respectively, and Siddhartha Deb’s English novel Surface (2005). While the first two texts deal with the precarious lives of people in the India-Bangladesh border, living forever under the long shadow of the partition, grappling daily with issues like displacement, cultural confrontation, and homelessness, Deb’s novel depicts the hard, uncertain way of life on the India-Myanmar frontier under the constant shadow of ethnic militia, impoverishment, and territorial violence These texts make deep engagements with the complex and contingent forms of social collectivity existing among these peripheral people who inhabit the borderlands of the modern nation-state. The paper argues that these literary texts, despite highlighting the precarity and trauma of everyday life in these regions, also depict these people as subjects of their own histories, and not simply passive victims of sovereign power. Thus, the paper revisits state-society relations and the ongoing transformations of citizenship, identity formations and sovereignty in the borderlands of the Northeast.

COEXISTENCE OR COMPETITION FOR RESOURCES? AGRARIAN TRANSFORMATIONS ALONG CHINA’S INLAND BORDERS I

Convenor: Henryk Alff - Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNEE), Germany Co-convenor and Chair: Michael Spies - Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNEE), Germany Over the past three decades, rural communities along China’s inland borders have faced cataclysmic and largely interconnected social, economic and ecological transformations. In the post-Soviet states bordering China, for instance, collective farms have been dismantled, the productivity of evolving smallholder agriculture has suffered from a sharp decline of financial inputs, the deterioration of infrastructure and the lack of knowledge concerning sustainable agricultural management. Rural precarity overlapped with and facilitated political marginalisation and rural-urban migration. In various regional contexts, Chinese agricultural and infrastructural investments (incl. what is often termed as land-grabbing) or the global or regional demand for agricultural commodities have led to the overexploitation of natural resources along with ecosystem degradation and substantial changes in livelihood systems. This panel scrutinises recent agrarian dynamics along China’s inland borders taking an empirically grounded and case study-based perspective. It draws attention to the interest of state

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governments and local communities in increasing agricultural production in the face of national nutrition (in-) security, on the one hand, and the increasing regional/global demand for food (grain, vegetables, meat) and non-food (biofuel, cotton residues, wool, wood) commodities, on the other. The contributions to this panel explore the multi-scalar social negotiations between different human (and non-human) actors (state officials, local farmers, agricultural firms, technical infrastructures etc.) in shaping present and future agrarian transformations. Given the decreasing availability of and increasing competition for resources (water, agriculture commodities etc.), the contributions to this panel may sketch out and conceptualise (in an inter- and transdisciplinary way) more sustainable transboundary trajectories for agricultural cooperation, in particular in the context of emerging bio-economies in the region. The panel will be structured into two sessions. While the first session will focus on multi-scalar policy changes (in food security, infrastructural interventions, legal systems) in transboundary agrarian change, the second discusses and conceptualizes interactions over agricultural transformations on the ground, looking at various borderland contexts. Food Security and Grain Giants: Russia, China and Geopolitical Risks Jiayi Zhou - Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Sweden This paper examines the shifting geopolitical and resource landscape of food in relation to Russia and China: two agricultural heavyweights whose grain consumption, production, and trade trajectories are likely to have critical impact on global markets and for global food security. In recent years, Russia has emerged as the world’s largest exporter of wheat, while China’s imports for key agricultural commodities have continued to increase alongside consumer demands. Recent trade wars, economic sanctions, and 'counter-sanctions’ highlight how trade relations have become politicized if not securitized issues among major national governments, even as growing demands for environmental stewardship and new technical innovations (for instance towards the bioeconomy) are challenging traditional, state-based notions of resource (geo-)politics. This paper situates the bilateral and multilateral trade policies of these two powers within the broader geo-political, -economic, and -environmental context. Finally, it examines the prospects and perils for sustainable food security outcomes at the local-, national- and international levels in light of these shifting dynamics. The „Soybeans Rush” in Amur Oblast of the Russian Far East Borderlands with China and its Social Consequences Natalia Ryzhova - Palacky University Olomouc, Czech Republic Demand for soybeans is causing considerable changes in the agricultural economy of Amur oblast; one of the regions of the Russian Far East. “Soybeans rush” is encouraging small farmers and big companies to introduce all lands, including those which previously protected soil from erosion or waterlogging into circulation. Science-based crop rotation is becoming abandoned, resulting in land depletion. The redistribution of property over land continues, in which both large Russian, usually non-regional companies and Chinese entrepreneurs participate. It seems that rural societies are even more suffering from soybean economic boom. That is because soybean production does not require a significant number of workers; just fifteen of them can process 10 thousand hectares of arable land. The drawback of such productivity is extreme redundancy in rural labor. Rural locals are increasingly losing their meadows used for grazing. With other post-soviet negative factors, all these consequences of “soybeans rush” lead to an even greater marginalization of Amur villages. The followers of “bioeconomics” often argue that the development of such resources as soybeans is the future that will, for instance, enable to reduce the negative climate change. However, the potential “public good” turns into the current troubles of the local population and environment. In my paper, using field data, I will focus on the locals’ perception of “soybeans rush.”

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The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and Agricultural Change in Northern Pakistan Michael Spies - Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNEE), Germany Recently, a leaked policy document on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) highlighted agriculture as a priority sector for future Chinese investments in Pakistan. This created significant media outcry and raised concerns about land grabbing, national food security and economic dependencies on China. While these debates are highly speculative, there is very little empirical evidence on direct Chinese investments in Pakistani agriculture. However, there are manifold ways in which the long history of China-Pakistan economic cooperation has shaped agrarian developments – in particular in the border region of Gilgit-Baltistan as a result of major infrastructure investments. In a case study on a high mountain farming community in Gilgit-Baltistan, I investigate how the construction of the Karakoram Highway and its subsequent improvements through the CPEC project has shaped local farming systems. This important road linking Pakistan with China not only provided access to new agricultural markets, but created new economic opportunities through migration and transboundary trade. These factors contributed to major social change that affected local agrarian developments in complex ways. The paper outlines future trajectories of the CPEC–agriculture nexus in Gilgit-Baltistan, highlighting the unique geopolitical situation and dynamic social-political changes in this border region.

COEXISTENCE OR COMPETITION FOR RESOURCES? AGRARIAN TRANSFORMATIONS ALONG CHINA’S INLAND BORDERS II

Convenor: Henryk Alff - Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNEE), Germany Co-Convenor and Chair: Michael Spies - Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNEE), Germany Discussant: Juliet Lu - University of California, Berkeley, United States Over the past three decades, rural communities along China’s inland borders have faced cataclysmic and largely interconnected social, economic and ecological transformations. In the post-Soviet states bordering China, for instance, collective farms have been dismantled, the productivity of evolving smallholder agriculture has suffered from a sharp decline of financial inputs, the deterioration of infrastructure and the lack of knowledge concerning sustainable agricultural management. Rural precarity overlapped with and facilitated political marginalisation and rural-urban migration. In various regional contexts, Chinese agricultural and infrastructural investments (incl. what is often termed as land-grabbing) or the global or regional demand for agricultural commodities have led to the overexploitation of natural resources along with ecosystem degradation and substantial changes in livelihood systems. This panel scrutinises recent agrarian dynamics along China’s inland borders taking an empirically grounded and case study-based perspective. It draws attention to the interest of state governments and local communities in increasing agricultural production in the face of national nutrition (in-) security, on the one hand, and the increasing regional/global demand for food (grain, vegetables, meat) and non-food (biofuel, cotton residues, wool, wood) commodities, on the other. The contributions to this panel explore the multi-scalar social negotiations between different human (and non-human) actors (state officials, local farmers, agricultural firms, technical infrastructures etc.) in shaping present and future agrarian transformations. Given the decreasing availability of and increasing competition for resources (water, agriculture commodities etc.), the contributions to this panel may sketch out and conceptualise (in an inter- and transdisciplinary way) more sustainable transboundary trajectories for agricultural cooperation, in particular in the context of emerging bio-economies in the region. The panel will be structured into two sessions. While the first session will focus on multi-scalar policy changes (in food security, infrastructural interventions, legal systems) in transboundary

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agrarian change, the second discusses and conceptualizes interactions over agricultural transformations on the ground, looking at various borderland contexts. Elephant Foot Yam in the Borderlands: Rethinking the Role of Agriculture as a Driver of Social & Economic Change in Chin State Mark Vicol - Wageningen University, The Netherlands Co-authored paper with Bill Pritchard & Yu Yu Htay Analysis of contemporary agrarian change and rural development in the upland regions of Southeast Asia has hitherto focused primarily on the role of boom crops and agricultural commercialization. This is also reflected in policy narratives that conflate rural households’ fortunes to the expansion of a particular kind of entrepreneurial agriculture. In this paper, we problematize the dynamics of economic and social change in the uplands of Chin State, Myanmar, against this conceptual backdrop. Growing Chinese demand has led to the emergence of a new cash crop (elephant foot yam) in southern Chin, with the potential to shift both livelihood and land-holding patterns. Yet, we argue that the everyday dynamics of rural development in southern Chin consists of a more diverse set of interconnections, reflecting the manifold ways in which Chin households are inserted into the ‘global rural’. This is demonstrated by the patchy emergence of elephant foot yam, vis-à-vis non-local livelihood formation and the organization of livelihood pathways around the maintenance of local social, cultural and economic practices, including swidden production. The implications of our field insights mean that in southern Chin, it is misplaced to explain processes of upland rural change exclusively via an agricultural commercialisation narrative. Such a narrative may over-emphasize the potential of commercial agriculture in household livelihoods in this region, and essentialise a linear process of capitalist transition. Land, Labour, Law: “China’s” Attempts to Secure Access to Tajikistan’s Landed Resources Irna Hofman - University of Oxford, United Kingdom Post-1991 political and economic transformation in Tajikistan has been a gradual process, in which international actors (foreign governments and international institutions) have played important roles. Nowadays “China” as a “non-traditional donor” is increasingly active in Tajikistan; Chinese loans and grants have become the most important foreign source of capital for the Tajik economy. Whereas foreign direct investment by “Western” private companies remains limited, particularly because of the difficulties of doing business in Tajikistan, and the “messiness” of law, the number of Chinese companies investing in the Tajik economy continues to grow. The increase in Chinese businesses active in Tajikistan is for instance seen in the growing number of Chinese agri-businesses and smallholder farms cultivating Tajikistan’s farmland – even though arable land is scarce in Tajikistan. Given the ambiguous interpretation and the sometimes selective enforcement of laws and rights in Tajikistan, the question is how Chinese actors secure their land investments in the country, and how they safeguard access to the resources most important to farming: land, labour, and water. This brings us to a more general question: Do Chinese actors follow the footsteps of other foreign actors (who have sought to “transplant laws”) and seek to enforce legislative changes in Tajikistan? In this paper, based on unique ethnographic insights in Tajikistan, I discuss and aim to answer these questions. I use the concept of the “agrarian order” to attend to informal and formal laws in rural Tajikistan; the differences between law on the books and law in action; and, the multidimensional nature of agricultural production, in which land, labour and environmental laws intersect and shape the way in which farming takes place. In doing so, I contribute insights into a hitherto largely understudied dynamic, as well as an understudied region in legal sociology. Development Hub or Periphery? Agricultural Change in the Kazakhstan-China Borderlands Henryk Alff - Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNEE), Germany

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Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, rural communities in the Kazakhstan-China borderlands have faced cataclysmic and largely interconnected social, economic and ecological transformations. While collective farms, often being highly productive during Soviet times, have been dismantled across the region, evolving smallholder agriculture has suffered from a sharp decline of financial inputs, a deterioration of infrastructure and a lack of knowledge with regard to sustainable agricultural management. The proposed paper contribution is based on recent ethnographic fieldwork data in Panfilov District, being located at one of major cross-border road connections and hosting the Kazakhstan section of the Khorgos SEZ. It explores, how the border situation (and eventually the border’s changing permeability for people and goods since the 1980s) eventually shaped and conditioned agricultural practices until today. Taking a socio-spatial assemblage/political ecology perspective, the paper scrutinises, how the practices of key actors in agriculture have been constantly re-negotiated in face of recent political, social and ecological transformations. Special attention will be drawn to the impact of China’s agricultural and infrastructural policy across its borders and particularly the development of its expanding bioeconomy going along with a rising demand for agricultural commodities.

CO-EXISTING ETHNICITIES AND (CO-EXISTING) MATERIALITY ON THE NORTHERN ASIAN BORDERLANDS

Convenor and Chair: Aurore Dumont - Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités, France The collapse of the USSR and the recent One belt One Road Initiative launched by the Chinese government have brought new political and socio-economic stakes on Northern Asian borderlands. The now opened borders lead to the emergence of movements and interactions between people and objects. Following the recent works on frontier perspectives in Northern Asia (Frontier Encounters: Knowledge and Practice at the Russian, Chinese and Mongolian Border, ed. Billé, Delaplace, Humphrey, 2012; Northeast Asian Borders: History, Politics, and Local Societies, ed. Konagaya, Shaglanova, 2016; Mirrorlands: Russia, China and Journeys in Between, Pulford, 2019), we wish to explore how borderlands shape ethnicity and materiality in the everyday life of minority groups living in different parts of Northern Asia (from Mongolia, Russia, Northeast China to Korea and Japan). Bringing together anthropology, sociology, and other related disciplines, this panel aims at understanding how daily or sporadic coexistence between transborder people (i.e. same ethnic groups scattered in different countries such as the Buryats, the Hezhe/Nanai the Evenki, the Mongols, Koreans, and so on) shapes a changing self-perception of “ethnic identity” and produces a plural materiality. Materiality is not restricted to any particular object but would rather encompass a variety of forms, including basic commodity, artefacts, exhibition, political meetings, etc. We are particularly interested in exploring the following topics: - Cultural and politics exhibitions on different sides of the border - Interethnic meetings or encounters - Cultural heritage and material culture - Comparison of the impact of cultural politics on different sides of the border Changing Perceptions of Ethnicity on the Sino-Mongolian and Sino-Russian Borderlands Aurore Dumont - Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités, France The borderlands demarcating North-East China with Russia and Mongolia are home to numerous Tungus and Mongol trans-border groups. Separated for decades, these indigenous people have, since the fall of the USSR, more opportunities to meet each other during various economic and cultural

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exchanges. What happens then when people from the same ethnic background but living in different countries interact? What kind of perceptions do the borders create, eliminate or transform? This presentation addresses the issue of ethnicity and the way its perception is shaped through regular and irregular meetings along the borders. It gives special focus to “otherness” and “likeness,” two notions that are recurrent in everyday discourses. The research is based on fieldwork conducted over the past 10 years among the Tungus and Mongol “ethnic minorities” scattered in the Heilongjiang province and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. I will present multiple case studies involving Buryats, Orochen and Evenki who bear witness to diverse impressions and feelings about their “kin-others” during trans-border meetings. "(Re)Creation of Visible “Ethnic Identities” amongst the Hezhe in China and the Nanaï in Russia: A Comparative Study of Cultural Heritage Processes Anne Dalles - École Pratique des Hautes Études, France In Northern China, the safeguarding of Hezhe crafts and practices, promoted both by the UNESCO and the Chinese administration, resulted in the creation of a new type of artefacts made from fishskins, and the promotion of shamanistic storytelling. In Russia, amongst the Nanais, the promotion of the usage of fishskins goes alongside the wider feminine activity of embroidery, known to protect the wearer from evil spirits. Through the comparison of these different contexts, two ways of considering what is « ethnic » can thus be confronted. On the one hand, in China, the (re)creation of heritage is linked to tourism and is promoted within a financial framework. The valorisation of the material (fishskins) and practice (storytelling) as a mark of ethnicity goes alongside the creation of objects and shows within new structures and networks to promote them. On the other hand, in Russia, the valorisation of embroideries as cultural heritage creates a “visible” culture in museums, expositions and shows. The emphasis on an “old knowledge”, transmitted through generations, is used to legitimize the practice and knowledge of the artist, who then becomes a bearer of tradition. In this presentations, I will attempt to show how the place of the artefacts or shows thus created underline the place of each group within a dominating culture (numerically and culturally), whose cultural politics influence the production of material culture. The Buryat ‘Three Manly Games’ in Three Non-Buryat Nation States: Traditional Sports’ Role in Shaping a Transborder Minority ’s Stefan Krist - Inner Mongolia University, China Baigal Khuasai - National University of Mongolia, Mongolia The Buryats settle in Russia, Mongolia and China near the borders with the respective two other countries, thus are both border and transborder people and, in addition, an ethnic minority everywhere. The paper deals with the Eryn Gurban Naadan, the Buryat ‘Three Manly Games’, archery, wrestling, and horse racing, of which in all three countries numerous competitions are held locally and regionally, but several also at supraregional and international levels. The paper discusses the transborder movements of people, animals, objects and ideas in conjunction with these sports activities, which have greatly increased since the opening of the borders in the early-1990s. The most striking examples for this process are biennially held sports and folklore festivals attended by Buryat sportspeople and artists from all three countries. The largest of these events are the Altargana festivals, which are hosted on a rotating base by the regional governments of Buryat regions in Russia and Mongolia since the mid-1990s. Buryat sportspeople – especially wrestlers – and Buryat artists – especially dancers – are however also crossing the borders for attending smaller local events. By doing so and by competing in these sports with each other and by dancing and singing together they foster a common Buryat self-identity and, at the same time, the self-esteem of the members of the

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Buryat minorities in all three countries, as these events showcase their culture as distinct from the Russian, Mongolian and Chinese. Efforts made by the organizers of these events for reinforcing a common Buryat identity are described, and in particular the measures which were taken to unify the competitions’ procedures, rules and equipment and gear requirements, but also the differences which remain due to the decades-long separation and the different cultural influences from the dominant ethnic and national cultures in the three countries, thus a process of ongoing negotiations between still plural identities and materialities. The Buryat ‘Three Manly Games’ in Three Non-Buryat Nation States: Traditional Sports’ Role in Shaping a Transborder Minority ’s Baikal Hywsai - National University of Mongolia, Mongolia The Buryats settle in Russia, Mongolia and China near the borders with the respective two other countries, thus are both border and transborder people and, in addition, an ethnic minority everywhere. The paper deals with the Eryn Gurban Naadan, the Buryat ‘Three Manly Games’, archery, wrestling, and horse racing, of which in all three countries numerous competitions are held locally and regionally, but several also at supraregional and international levels. The paper discusses the transborder movements of people, animals, objects and ideas in conjunction with these sports activities, which have greatly increased since the opening of the borders in the early-1990s. The most striking examples for this process are biennially held sports and folklore festivals attended by Buryat sportspeople and artists from all three countries. The largest of these events are the Altargana festivals, which are hosted on a rotating base by the regional governments of Buryat regions in Russia and Mongolia since the mid-1990s. Buryat sportspeople – especially wrestlers – and Buryat artists – especially dancers – are however also crossing the borders for attending smaller local events. By doing so and by competing in these sports with each other and by dancing and singing together they foster a common Buryat self-identity and, at the same time, the self-esteem of the members of the Buryat minorities in all three countries, as these events showcase their culture as distinct from the Russian, Mongolian and Chinese. Efforts made by the organizers of these events for reinforcing a common Buryat identity are described, and in particular the measures which were taken to unify the competitions’ procedures, rules and equipment and gear requirements, but also the differences which remain due to the decades-long separation and the different cultural influences from the dominant ethnic and national cultures in the three countries, thus a process of ongoing negotiations between still plural identities and materialities.

DISRUPTING NATIONAL BORDERS: REPRESENTATIONS OF CONTESTED SITES IN FILM AND POP CULTURE

Convenor: Melody Yunzi Li - University of Houston, United States Chair: Fang-yu Li - New College of Florida, United States Film and Pop Culture have been critical means to challenge conventional views of national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. This panel focuses on the representations of contested sites in film and pop culture and how these representations expose the mechanisms behind the construction of national and cultural borders, and how the technological development of public media is used to reimagine and reshape borderlines. Kenny Ng’s paper examines Cold War borderscapes and cinematic expression in colonial Hong Kong and asks how borderscapes structure film narratives and frame cinematic imagination that provides a possibility of border-thinking to counteract nationalism and political propaganda. Lu Tian’s paper studies how K-pop music is used to attract foreign fan-

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tourists to urban and rural places in Korea, and how K-pop tourism becomes a site of contention and negotiation between the state, local municipalities and transnational fandom, as they are all active agents in the (re)making of the K-pop-featured places. Fang-yu Li’s paper examines Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide (2012) and how its portrayal of a dystopian future cautions against the development of global capitalism and information technology, which can easily disrupts current national, cultural, and geographical boundaries as new borderlines are redefined by socioeconomic status under global capitalism. Melody Yunzi Li’s paper examines Lenora Lee Dance Company’s dance works on Chinese immigrant experiences and how body as a contested site to resist against borders. Borderscape, Fire, Refugee, Riot: Cold War Hong Kong Cinematic Imaginary Kenny K.K. Ng - Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong S.A.R., China This paper examines Cold War borderscapes and cinematic expression in colonial Hong Kong. Whereas an ideological fortress separated leftist and rightist organizations and partisans, the frontier between the People’s Republic of China and colonial Hong Kong was an unsettled space of contestation in the early 1950s. The border was itself a space of physical confrontation, kidnapping, and armed conflict between British and Chinese troops. The massive ‘illegal’ influx of Chinese refugees from the mainland into Hong Kong was referred to by the US as ‘refugees from the Free World.’ Numerous destructive fires in the squatter settlements alarmed the US and PRC governments sufficiently to send humanitarian aid to the colony. Meanwhile, colonial officials refused entry to Hong Kong to PRC ‘comfort delegations’ which sought to visit fire-struck, homeless people, in turn provoking riots in the border regions. Conspiracy and paranoia reigned in the government’s anti-communist measures in social and cultural fields, and this saw the swift deportation of mainland film workers together with protest leaders of fire victims in 1952. The paper asks how borderscapes and crises structure film narratives and frame cinematic imagination. It studies film texts from opposing camps, including Halfway Down (1957) produced by US-backed Asia Pictures; and Dividing Wall (1952) and Between Fire and Water (1955) produced by leftist Great Wall Pictures. These films, regardless of their ideological orientations, were tenement dramas and narratives of migrants and exiles seeking moral reformation and collective union, and provided a possibility of border-thinking to counteract nationalism and political propaganda. The Rise of K-Pop Tourism: State, Local Municipalities and Transnational Fandom Lu Tian - Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong S.A.R., China Riding on the overseas popularity of Korean popular culture, also called Hallyu or Korean Wave, Korea has witnessed an unprecedented boom in its tourism industry. This study intends to examine how K-pop music, the central force of Hallyu in recent years, is used to attract foreign fan-tourists to urban and rural places in Korea. Driven by the economic want and political ambitions of the state and local municipalities, K-pop tourism is an instance of how Hallyu is incorporated as a policy initiative both for the national interest and for urban and regional development and promotion. In addition, K-pop tourism should also be seen as a participatory practice of transnational K-pop fans, whose affective commitments to K-pop and idols create additional values of places, which can be in turn used in the place marketing strategies. As a result, my project employs a mode of inquiry that aims to denaturalize the rise of K-pop tourism, not only by historicizing the socio-political demand/desire of the state and local municipalities for popular culture-induced tourism, but also by highlighting the cultural motivations and aspirations of transnational fandom in planning, managing and refining tourist experience. I argue that K-pop tourism is a site of contention and negotiation between the state, local municipalities and transnational fandom as they are all active agents in the (re)making of the K-pop-featured places. Reshaping Borderlines under Global Capitalism: Technology and Social Ineqality in Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide

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Fang-yu Li - New College of Florida, United States This paper examines Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide (2012) and analyzes how Chen’s portrayal of a dystopian future reflects the potential damage global capitalism and technological advancement may cause to human society. Set in 2025 in a small island Guiyu, modeled on an actual town of Guiyu in Guangdong where major tech-waste are dumped and processed, the novel delineates how local tech-waste recycle companies exploit migrant workers for profit and how global IT companies and international environmental protection companies compete for market and resources in third world countries. By depicting how a tech-waste recycle girl turns into a cyborg and leads the rebellion of waste-recycle laborers against local and global capitalist oppressions, Chen cautions against the widening of social gap under current global economic system and the danger it could bring when advanced informational technology can facilitate the mobilization of large scale rebellions across national borders. Chen’s projection of the future, I argue, is a critical reflection of the present where technology can easily connect people across national, cultural, and geographical boundaries while new borderlines defined by socioeconomic status are gradually emerging under the new power structure of global capitalism. Moving Beyond Borders --Lenora Lee’s Dances on Chinese Immigrant Experiences Melody Yunzi Li - University of Houston, United States Lenora Lee is a dancer, choreographer based in San Francisco. Her dance company has created many multimedia performance works integrating dance, music, video projections and text that incorporate technology. This paper particularly examines her dance works that focus on Chinese immigrant experiences, including “Reflections,” “For Lee Ping To,” “The Memory Room,” “The Interrogation Room,” “Passages,” and “Within these Walls.” It asks, how Lee uses body as a contested site to resist against the physical and infrastructural borders. For instance, “Within These Walls” (2017) retell the harsh experiences of early Chinese immigrants detained on Angel Island within the confines of the compound. The hopes and fears are conveyed through the environment as well as the dancers’ movements. The audience is largely free to roam, entering and exiting a variety of converging and diverging storylines and physical spaces. The skilled dancers’ interaction with the confined spaces signify the immigrants’ resistance against confinements and movement beyond the border imposed by the Chinese exclusion act between 1882 and 1943. Its sequel, Dream of Flight, continued its story. Its name indicates the new hopes for Chinese immigrants, who have gone out from the walls that have confined them for hundreds of years. The immigrant bodies, symbolized by the dancers’ bodies, move beyond the restraints and controls from the authorities. And the development of new media and technology has facilitated the movement.

EXPRESS TRAIN TO CONVIVIALITY AND COEXISTENCE? THE KUNMING-SINGAPORE RAILWAY AND THE RESHAPING OF BORDERLANDS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

Convenor, Chair and Discussant: Phill Wilcox - Bielefeld University, Germany The new Kunming-Singapore Railway aims to connect Southern China with Singapore, and will pass through Laos, Thailand and Malaysia on its route. It is a key part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and is supposed to improve infrastructure and opportunities for all the countries through which it passes. In the words of a YouTube song by the Xinhua News Agency about the BRI, such initiatives will provide: “mutual benefit, joint responsibility and shared destiny”. This speaks to an aspiration for the railway as an institution for coexistence that will benefit individual countries, their populations and the wider regions through greater connectivity. The Lao-China part of the railway, which will connect with the existing railway in Vientiane is set for completion in 2021 with other phases in the following years.

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Scholarship on transport infrastructure recognises that such projects carry far more meaning beyond their physical structures (see amongst others: Elinoff 2016, High 2009). This is particularly important in projects that cross international boundaries. Dalakoglou and Harvey (2012) argue that transport systems both negotiate and consolidate borders while promising new connectivity. This is apt for considering the Kunming-Singapore railway, which aims explicitly to do both. The Kunming-Singapore Railway aspires to be part of a bright future of coexistence under the BRI, but how this will transcend into everyday life remains to be seen. This inter-disciplinary panel aims to consider the Kunming-Singapore Railway critically, reflect on its cost implications and questions of who will benefit and lose out from the project. We ask what it means to those who live along its route, where and how this will lead to societal changes with greater connections through the railway with China and throughout much of Southeast Asia? What is the cost of the railway for those whose traditional homes are impacted by such initiatives and is the price of such development worthwhile? Ideas of mutual benefit, and shared destinies are all very well, but it is vital to ask how these are experienced and negotiated in lived experience. In so doing, panellists may also consider whether forms of coexistence that emerge from the Pan-Asia Railway are actually new, under what circumstances and their implications. Between Rails and Roads: Aspired, Feared and Lived Cross-border Connectivity in Luang Namtha, Northern Laos Simon Rowedder - National University of Singapore, Singapore At the crossroads of the ‘Kunming-Bangkok Highway’, officially opened in 2008, and the ‘Kunming-Vientiane Railway’, planned to open in late 2021, the northern Lao province of Luang Namtha has been praised as a major regional hub of transportation and logistics. Its unfolding role of linking together the markets of China and Thailand fully aligns with various geo-economic visions projected onto Laos by different actors over two decades – be it the architects of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) Economic Corridors or Laos’ government’s advertising of transforming Laos from a land-locked to a land-linked country, which has been most recently taken up by China’s ambition to develop Laos into a central node of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This paper examines how those top-down mappings of cross-border connectivity, infrastructure and development intersect with local experiences, aspirations, fears and practices on the ground. While there is a newly emerging profile of small-scale traders and entrepreneurs who embrace new transborder infrastructures, skilfully experimenting with arising economic opportunities and flexibly crossing over to China or Thailand, others associate with them previously experienced or, in the case of the railway, imminent dislocation and resettlement. Therefore, this study aims to explore both opportunities and adversities that are at play for sustaining old and creating new (cross-border) livelihoods amidst rapidly shifting infrastructural landscapes gradually gravitating towards China. Considering Luang Namtha a ‘marginal hub’ with its emerging social infrastructures of conviviality (Marsden and Reeves 2019), understood in its historical context of being ‘a cosmopolitan space of cultural contention’ (Badenoch & Shinsuke, 2013, p. 60), this paper pays particular attention to the ways whereby social relations and networks across and within national boundaries are framed in discourse and forged in practice to live up to the everyday reality of transregional infrastructural connectedness by rail and road. Dreams of Connectivity: The Pan-Asia Railway and the Politics of Movement in Northeast Thailand Richard MacDonald - Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom Long before a single length of track has been laid, high speed rail enters the dreams of urban developers. In essence, these are dreams of increased flows of people and capital coming to the city: investors, consumers and conventioners with money to spend, medical tourists, the elderly seeking

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long-term affordable care. It is the dream of untapped demand sustaining a property boom without a subsequent crash. This presentation draws on long-term fieldwork looking at urban change in the city of Khon Kaen in Northeast Thailand, a future station location on the stretch of the pan-Asia railway that will eventually connect a historically peripheral and economically underdeveloped region of Thailand with Southern China via Laos PDR. My aim for the presentation is twofold: firstly, in order to establish what it is urban developers dream of when they dream of highspeed rail, I will provide an overview that tracks the various ways in which the promise of the high-speed rail track has been leveraged by diverse private and public agencies – private hospitals, the entrepreneurs of the city development corporation, the municipality - promoting urban development plans and agendas. Secondly, and more importantly, I want to shift perspective to focus on Khon Kaen residents facing displacement and eviction due to large-scale urban development projects that are premised on the dreams of high-speed rail. Taking note of the way resistance to evictions and displacement is articulated and mobilised, my aim is to explore the underlying politics of movement set in motion by the anticipation of high-speed rail coming to Northeast Thailand. Remaking Borderland: Financial Entanglements and Labor Politics along Trans-Laos Railway Wanjing Chen - University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States This paper addresses the cascading impacts generated in the ongoing making of Kunming-Singapore Railway. I contend that while the infrastructure project’s potential to realign regional political economy has garnered unprecedented amount of attentions, the contingent and unfolding processes of its making remained largely under-explored. Drawing on dynamics from Lao section of the railway (trans-Laos railway) under construction since 2016, I demonstrate how its top-down financial turmoil ripples out to the ground. As the project’s funding failed to arrive on time, multi-scalar financial entanglements were provoked, in which Chinese enterprises contracted to implement the railway were coerced to self-fund construction. The situation eventually exacerbated labor exploitations. As Lao labor demonstrates more success to resist exploitations in forms of delayed and denied wage payment, they were gradually substituted by the more vulnerable Chinese counterparts. Dynamics in the making of the railway rendered some conventionally perceived beneficiaries (Chinese enterprises and workers) of the project its de facto victim at present stage. These crucial yet fleeting implications occurred as capitalist landscape on mainland southeast Asia is undergoing infrastructural remaking are crucial for forming a critical and comprehensive understanding of the railway.

IMAGED AND IMAGINED NORTH KOREAN MATERIALITIES: FUTURE BORDERS, ARCHITECTURES, CARTOGRAPHIES, LANDSCAPES

Convenor and Chair: Robert Winstanley-Chesters - University of Leeds, United Kingdom Discussant: Sung-Kyung Kim - University of North Korean Studies, South Korea North Korea’s future is marked by possibilities and presumptions. Much analysis of the Pyongyang and North Korea to come focuses on future relationships with the south, political vacuums, population displacements, security threats and hypotheticals; few questions are asked of the nation’s current materialities. Rather than theoretical or conceptual, future North Korean bordered landscapes will be complex physical co-productions of past, present and future, generating new terrains. How might we imagine such spaces and places characterized by the coexistence of the realistic and surrealistic, mundane and heroic, certain and contingent? This panel explores architectural, design, cartographic and topographic exercises in bringing the materialities of North Korean borders and memorial zones into the present, seeing across, through and beyond them and constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing them in theoretically considered but imaginative futures. Using the tools of architecture, engineering, cartography, futurology and human geography, this panel aims to produce new ways of imaging and imagining North Korean border and memorial

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landscapes. Robert Winstanley-Chesters first considers areas of the nation close to its northern border and places of vital political memorial as lively active materialities, techno-natures currently in the services of its ideology; Xiaoxuan Lu and Bo Wang suggest analyzing water as an urbanizing agent at intersections of the material and cultural, acting upon the Tumen river region bordering China, North Korea and Russia; Dongsei Kim examines four spatial examples to illustrate how spatial fissures of the border between North and South Korea become a stage and a proving ground for thawing inter-Korean relationships; Finally Dongwoo Yim reviews Pyongyang, a potentially de-bordered city of the future’s socio-economic change through its physical transformations and foresees development paths that may occur with expansion of market-oriented economy in the city. Imagining and Remembering North Korean Troublesome Memorial Architectures Robert Winstanley-Chesters - University of Leeds, United Kingdom North Korean memorial architectures, monuments and bordered spaces have formed part of a wider framework of Charismatic politics and landscape which has underpinned Pyongyang’s ideological narrative and national mythology. This paper considers these places holding in mind the work of writing from Critical/Human Geography and Materialist Philosophy on the power of technologies, material objects, things and forces in the wider frameworks of politics and culture. Natures co-produced by humans, technologies and the global environment are vibrant, active, lively matters in flux. Does this flux and liveliness however cross temporal or anamnestic boundaries. Following a transformation on Korean Peninsula in which North Korea and its borders as we know them might cease to exist, how would future politics and cultural power impact on terrains so heavily transformed by the culture, ideology and history of Pyongyang. How will we imagine these future political landscapes and natures? How will we remember North Korean architectures of history and memory? This paper considers in particular, spaces in the north of the country, near its border with China, such as the Samjiyon Grand Monument, the Birch Trees of Lake Samji and the memorial terrains around Mt Paektu. The paper explores what it might be to remember such North Korean political/environmental materialities in a time when the nation as currently constituted no longer exists. How will these ideological, techno-natures be remembered, who will do this remembering and just how lively or active will these memories be? Divergent Memories of Tumen Shan-shui Xiaoxuan Lu - The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R., China Bo Wang - The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R., China Serving as a boundary between China, North Korea and Russia, the Tumen / Tuman River rises on the slopes of Mount Changbai / Paektu and flows into the Sea of Japan/East Sea. Since the Peking Treaty of 1860, the river and its surrounding areas have become a site of violent conflict and global power shifts for more than a century, notably the Russo-Japanese War from 1904 to 1905, the establishment of Manchukuo in 1932, the partition of the Korean peninsula in 1945, and the beginning of the Cold War in East Asia since mid-1950s. Two decades after the trilateral border opened to the outside world in the early 1990s, visible developmental changes have just started to emerge, notably the rapid Chinese funded infrastructure expansion aiming to better connect China’s landlocked northeast provinces with seaports in Russia’s Far East and North Korea. Utilizing the spatial and visual power of drawn cartography, and the sequential and temporal power of video, this project creates a fabricated and imaged transnational landscape, shifting the gaze from colonial and Cold War dreams to a new way of looking at the Tumen region on the verge of rapid change. Rather than a developable totality, the Tumen region is composed of a set of highly dynamic components that create an ever-changing whole through contingent processes of assemblage and dis-assemblage. More specifically, the project casts new light on water’s role as participant in not only the formation of physical reality of the riparian areas defined by this one river, but also the generation of conceptual relations among states within this transborder region. Each

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map, image, and video is a visual narrative of interrelationships between contemporary phenomena, historical background, and ever-changing conceptualization of the Tumen landscape. Fissures at the Edge: The DMZ as a Proving Ground Dongsei Kim - New York Institute of Technology, South Korea The Korean Peninsula has been ruptured since 1953 and few fissures or fractures have appeared in the divisive monolith in intervening decades. Inter-Korean relationship made an abrupt turn following Moon Jae-in’s election as South Korea’s President in 2017. The thaw in the relationship was expressed through the two Koreas marching under the Unified Korean Flag and forming a united women’s ice hockey team for the 2018 Winter Olympics hosted by South Korea. Following these cooperative political actions, a historic summit between Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un took place at the Joint Security Area (JSA) in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). This historic milestone at the border signalled how this space and surrounding territories actively become a stage for this dynamically shifting political change and how changes at the border can reshape inter-Korean relationships. This paper examines four spatial examples to illustrate how spatial fissures of the border between Koreas become a proving ground for the thawing relationship between them. First, the history of the Korean Unified Flag, used in 2018 is analyzed to explicate the symbolic role of maps in constructing a spatially unified Korea. Second, how infrastructure is used to construct a cohesive nation-state imaginary is illustrated through the reconnected railway crossing the DMZ. Third and fourth examples are the destruction of security infrastructures such as the ten Guard Posts and the North-South Korean joint project to recover fallen-soldiers from Korean war buried within the DMZ illustrate how border fissures actively deconstruct war memories and reconstruct new state imaginaries. Pyongyang Scenario, a City of Collision between Socialist and Capitalist Urban Regimes and its Future Scenario Dongwoo Yim - Hongik University, South Korea Though everlasting sanction on North Korea in the past couple of decades, it seems Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, has been gradually transforming in the period. And suddenly, but not surprisingly, we began to observe its new massive urban developments, such as Mirae Scientist Street or Ryomyong Street, in recent years, and it is no longer an argument that they are reflection of new market demand arising in the city. As a city that was built based on socialist urban regime since the 1950s is finally adopting market economy, and the city is being transformed with the logic of capitalist urban regimes. For instance, the city that tried to realize spatial equality throughout itself now develops certain areas of the city, such as waterfront developments, to meet real estate demand. It seems it is inevitable to respond to market forces that are driving socio-economic change of the country, and these responses are captured by physical transformations of the city. However, as a city that once tried to build an ideal socialist city might have a different urban development scenario than following any capitalist city model. By proposing masterplan scenarios of the city, this paper will look into features of socialist urban spaces in Pyongyang and how they could be remained, or reframed, while responding to new capitalist’s market demand as well as new technologies and industries.

Infrastructural Development and Human-Nonhuman Coexistence in Asian Borderlands

Convenor and Chair: Thomas White - University of Cambridge, United Kingdom/University of Zurich, Switzerland

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Discussant: Emily Yeh – University of Colorado Boulder, United States Often situated far from sites of industry and urban development and their concomitant environmental harms, borderlands across Asia are sites of significant biodiversity, as well as practices of extensive pastoralism characterised by a high degree of animal mobility. In recent years, however, many border areas have become sites of a range of large-scale infrastructure projects, including expressways, railways and mining-related infrastructure. This panel explores the ways in which infrastructure mediates the relations between humans and nonhumans. It enquires into the politics that have have emerged in border regions in response to the threats to both wildlife and domestic animals posed by infrastructural development. It asks whether shared concern for nonhumans has helped to enable human co-existence across borders, or whether such concern manifests itself in exclusionary ‘ecological nationalisms’. It also examines the ways in which the negative effects of infrastructural projects on nonhumans foster tensions between border dwellers and the state. But rather than merely seeing these infrastructural projects in terms of their negative effects on longstanding modes of human-nonhuman coexistence, the panel also seeks to shine a light on new forms of human-nonhuman coexistence that can be afforded by infrastructural development. This includes cases of ‘fraught coexistence’, where border dwellers must negotiate their entanglement with new invasive species and animal-borne diseases, for example. The panel thus seeks to bring recent social scientific interest in both infrastructure and human-nonhuman relations into productive conversation. Roadkill/Roadcare: Domestic Animals, Infrastructure and the Political Ecology of Inner Mongolia Thomas White - University of Cambridge, United Kingdom/University of Zurich, Switzerland In recent years China’s northern borderland of Inner Mongolia has seen the rapid expansion of road infrastructure. Rural areas of this sparsely-populated region have long been dominated by open-range grazing systems, and these new roads thus often traverse well-established trajectories of livestock mobility. This paper examines these roads as sites of fraught co-existence between humans and animals, with implications for human co-existence both within this borderland and across the international border with Mongolia. It highlights the politics of roadkill in the context of the history of ethnicized tensions over land use and development at this frontier between Han Chinese agriculture and Mongol pastoralism, and in the context of the state’s attempts to reduce the number of livestock in the region, ostensibly for environmental reasons.But rather than seeing roads merely as sites of violence and conflict between human technologies and animals, the paper shows how they allow for the performance of different modalities of interspecies care and co-existence. Some new expressways, praised in state media as the ‘most humane in China’, have passageways built into them to allow animals to pass freely underneath. The paper compares such infrastructural care bestowed by the central state to the everyday forms of care which are woven into the driving habits of local Mongols. It argues that the presence of animals on smaller roads is tolerated and sometimes even welcomed by these drivers. In the context of reduced livestock numbers in the region, such encounters provide moments of pleasure as well as ethical reflection. Finally, the paper compares these attitudes with those of pastoralists across the border with Mongolia, who see in plans to link up Inner Mongolia’s road network with new roads across the border threats to their much larger herds of free-roaming animals. Herder-Livestock Relations within a Mega-Infrastructure Environment Ariell Ahearn – University of Oxford, United Kingdom Troy Sternberg – University of Oxford, United Kingdom Co-authors: Fiona McConnell, Byamba Ichinkhorloo, Tsesu Purevsuren and Nadia Mijjidorj

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Whilst the extended Sino-Mongol border divides culture, language and pastoral practice, the disparate nations share a mega-infrastructure boom. Promoted as a development bonanza, resource extraction has a disruptive impact on Mongolian herders and their livestock. The mega-mines and infrastructure they bring (roads, pipelines, electric lines, fences, train tracks) are ladened with implications for livelihoods and the environment that pastoralists and their herds depend upon. The border frames the pastoralist world, draws roads and cargo and places humans, animals and minerals in a shared sphere. Our research in two Mongolian mining districts (Khan Bogd, Gurvantes) examines how infrastructural development challenges the co-existence of pastoralism and mining. This occurs through altered pasture access, land fragmentation, reconfigured livelihoods, perceived health threats (e.g. dust in human/animal respiratory systems; contaminated water), uncertain water availability and transitioning social patterns. In placing the herder-livestock relation within a mega-mining framing we identify the transition in practice and possibility confronting mobile pastoralists in the Mongolian Gobi. Gold Mining, Pollution and Local River Ontologies: Changing Patterns of Human-River Interactions in Kyrgyzstan Aibek Samakov – University of Tubingen, Germany Kemel Toktomushev – University of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan The China-led Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is often portrayed as a galvanic initiative that will change political, economic, and social landscape of the whole of Eurasia, with Central Asia being one of the most impacted regions. Indeed, BRI’s prospective infrastructure investments can stimulate economic growth, create positive spillovers, and produce long-term economic benefits for the region. Such projects, however, also affect the way local communities had interacted with their environments. Chinese investments into the extractive industry of Kyrgyzstan have already sparked a number of conflicts between local communities and mining companies. Accordingly, by mapping the reasons for and drivers of such conflicts in mining-affected localities of Kyrgyzstan, the paper seeks to highlight how perceived pollution of rivers and other water bodies by the mining industry comes at odds with local perceptions of flowing water as “an intrinsically pure substance”. The authors explore the ways in which mining-related infrastructure in Tian-Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan have been mediating and changing the relations between humans and non-humans represented by rivers and riparian ecosystems.

KNOTS IN THE SUPPLY CHAIN: RETHINKING THE "LOCAL" IN MODERN INDIA'S RESOURCE FRONTIERS

Convenor: Tanmoy Sharma - Yale University, United States Chair and Discussant: Sarah Besky - Brown University, United States The narrative of neoliberal capitalism subsuming diverse people and places within its fold has been accorded a peculiar finality in recent scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences. This panel seeks to complicate this teleological framework – both its affirmations and lamentations – by exploring the production and transformation of local lifeworlds within and through commodity supply chains. Our focus is on India's resource frontiers, from coal mines in Jharia to oil fields in Upper Assam, from the fisheries in the Sundarbans to the shrinking wetlands and forests in Manipur. These places, despite being zones of significant extraction and investments, are often conceptualized at the territorial, political and cultural margins of modern India. However, as ethnographically-oriented historians and historically-oriented ethnographers of South Asia, we do not suppose the projects of natural resource extraction to immediately produce either local resistance or untethered supply chains. Instead, we examine the moral orders, political and legal processes, cultural schemes

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and agrarian environments that crucially shape and are in turn shaped by flows of material value. Our ideas build on Anna Tsing’s (2009) insights on the revelatory links between supply chain capitalism and the contemporary human condition, as well as on Marshall Sahlins’s (1988) exhortation to attend to the “cosmologies of capitalism” that have shaped global trade. Yet, our debate is not over the lengths and spans of commodity chains and value chains, but over the figurations of the extractive processes in distinct ecological, political, legal and cultural settings. Exposing the knots in the supply chain, as it were, then is not to analytically defang the powers of corporations and consumers in altering local destiny, but to illuminate the ways in which larger material forces get localized in deeper structures of history and culture. In this panel, we therefore examine how the “local” with all its specificities come to interact and coexist with the “trans-local” in India’s resource-rich peripheries by bringing together diverse stories that explore the legal and ecological consequences of mine fires in Jharia (Shutzer), the blockades of oil and gas production by peasant communities in Upper Assam (Sharma), the intense moral dilemmas over crab-fishing in the Sundarbans (Mehtta), and the charismatic economy of pythons in Manipur (Moon-Little). Burning the Value Chain: Verticality, Property, and the Nature of India’s Coal Fires, 1908 – 1975 Matthew Shutzer - Harvard University, United States Mine fires in the Jharia coalfield of eastern India have been burning since the early twentieth century, producing a charred geography of former farm and forestland that over a million people depend upon for their livelihoods. The spectacular spread of these fires followed the movement of European and Indian capital into Jharia after 1908. The specific patterning of colliery investment in boom and bust cycles created a unique regional ecology of underground fires and land subsidence described by one observer as a space that “began to eat itself.” This paper explores a series of court cases and scientific investigations in the twentieth century that attempted to ascribe compensatory responsibility for Jharia’s coal fires through the language and precedents of tort law. The paper will specifically focus on the emergence, during the interwar period, of a globally-circulating discourse of “spontaneous combustion” as the primary causal mechanism of mine fires in both the regional context of Jharia and also comparable worldwide sites of fossil energy extraction. Rather than merely offering a social deconstruction of the discourse of “spontaneity,” this paper will instead trace the specific modes of legal thought spontaneity enabled within the value chains of global mining companies, and the manner in which Indian tort law came to enact novel scientific classifications relating to the agency of nature. The conceptual content of this agency, I will argue, drew firstly from orientalist constructions regarding the fecundity of tropical environments, and secondly, from the legal ambiguity of the standing of subterranean property claims in colonial law. This account of the legal and environmental transformation of Jharia reframes histories of property regimes in South Asia by moving beyond state-centered genealogies of legal knowledge. In its place, the case of Jharia exemplifies the legal slippages that construct human and non-human agencies, and the adjudicatory limits of private property regimes in defining both singular and collective culpabilities for environmental destruction. Fueled by Politics: Theaters of Extraction in Assam’s Oil Belt Tanmoy Sharma - Yale University, United States Gone are the days when the State’s tax demands would give rise to peasant uprisings in India. That however does not hide the fact of the peasantry’s continued dispossession by newer modes of accumulation in the countryside. What happens when the “subalterns” are accused of taxing the “sovereigns”? In Upper Assam in northeastern India– home to some of the world’s oldest running oil fields and tea estates – the State-owned extractive firms have increasingly begun to complain that they are being sacrificed for what they think is essentially a dispute between marginalized ethnic groups and the Government of India. In recent years, rural collectivities in Upper Assam have

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fashioned a politics of blockade that disrupts the flow of crude oil and natural gas from their villages to downstream refineries. These groups are not necessarily opposed to hydrocarbon extraction per se, but their mobilizations do manage to exact various kinds of commitments, goods and services either from the corporations or from the State. The ends of such blockades thus range from “economic packages” and the recognition of the Scheduled Tribe status for local communities to the acquisition of cooking pots for village rituals. While the oil-executives often see a money-motive in such actions that disrupt the hydrocarbon supply chain, the involved agents vigorously reject the reduction of their politics to money. This paper would present an unfolding drama of extraction and counter-extraction in Assam’s Tinsukia and Dibrugarh districts. I will historically and ethnographically explore the workings of rural politics in the subjection of corporate projects of resource extraction to local codes of identity and honor. In doing so, the paper will also tease out the nature of cultural, political and agrarian transformation in a zone of heavy investments and extraction like Upper Assam. Crab Antics: The Moral and Political Economy of Greed Accusations in the Submerging Sundarbans Delta of West Bengal, India Megnaa Mehtta - London School of Economics, United Kingdom Fishing for crabs, a livelihood practiced for generations in the Sundarbans forests of West Bengal, India, has undergone a radical moral makeover in recent years. Crab fishers are now the subject of frequent public denunciations by local authorities for their supposed greed and reckless endangerment of the entire ecosystem. I found these accusations of greed and moral profligacy fascinating and perplexing. In uncovering them, I trace how the narratives of global catastrophe and the disruptions in the commodity supply chain—live mud crabs are being exported to China—play out amidst pre-existing social hierarchies, and through the co-option of local ethico-religious categories around greed and need. In counterpoint, I explore the defences of the “accused”, and the rich moral distinctions crab collectors make themselves between greed [lobh], need [aubhav], desire [chahida] and habit [swabhav]. These accusation reveal the power of the far away to morph ordinary notions of good and bad in unpredictable ways. In this sense my argument adds depth to the view that capitalism is not a singular force, but an assemblage of practices and processes, with very particular histories of violence and paternalism. I trace the impact of global capitalism on the social realm of ‘ugly feelings’ (Ngai 2007) and present the thought-worlds of both the ‘accusers’ and ‘accused’ as they redeploy highly local notions of ‘need’, ‘greed’, ‘sufficiency’ and ‘desire’. In this context, I question the productivity of catastrophic thinking that, lacking political power, is deployed in a game of crab antics which fails to address the underlying environmental catastrophe, while displacing the psychic burden of greed onto the poor. Like the Fish Follow the Python: Charisma and Sovereignty in the Long Durée Edward Moon-Little - University of Cambridge, United Kingdom Pythons have a long association with charisma in Manipur, Northeast India. The great serpents appear in divination rituals amongst hill communities, as the pets of prophets, and on the crest of the ruling clan of Manipur: the Ningthouja dynasty. If the classic aquatic Indic tale of hierarchy is of Matsya and Manu, big fish eating little fish, amongst the Meitei of Manipur, the hierarchy is said to look like the fish following the python [lairen matung nga inba]. Taking the form of a celestial lairen [Meitei: python], the god Pakhangba is said to have founded the royal line, a stranger-king par excellence in the Sahlinian sense. Men too follow like fish. This paper tracks a series of environmental changes over the long durée in a borderland and how these relate to hierarchies of value regarding wildlife and forms of social hierarchy. The evidence presented is both archival and ethnographic. The symbolic bestiary of the Meitei kings primarily consisted of six types of animals: cows, elephants, fish, ponies, pythons, and tigers. When the royal family’s power began declining in the early 20th century, new extractive industries took

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hold which drew on the charisma of these species, in turn creating new hierarchies. Amongst these new extractive regimes -wildlife trafficking, tourism, deforestation, and wetland encroachment- pythons survive. Just about. However, they remain subject to an old value-chain dealing in python parts. This trade has been spurred on by religious revivalists who follow Pakhangba. I argue that the appeal of python parts is due to the continuing charisma of kingship and eschatological hopes for new forms of sovereignty where many of the ruptures caused by capitalism will be fixed.

KNOWLEDGE-NETWORK-INFRASTRUCTURE: (DIS)CONNECTIVITY AND AMBIGUITY OF THE BORDERS

Convenor and Chair: Busarin Lertchavalitsakul - Naresuan University, Thailand Most of the Asian borderlands today are becoming associated with economics-oriented cooperation and development of regional connectivity to expand resource use and access in formerly isolated areas. Infrastructure development as part of the transformative borders is established in various forms, encouraging people to create new ways for making a living. Meanwhile, the interaction of multiple actors and non-actors get involved to produce innovative strategies to be part of the trend through different types of (re)networking and knowledge production. This panel brings three main themes of knowledge, network, and infrastructure to shed light on and nuances of people’s livelihood and their everyday practices along the studied borderlands. This panel aims to grow discussions on knowledge of people who are living on physical borders and get affected by them. Diverse knowledge includes strategies to catch up with the changing structure and information technology to acquire more advantages in trade. This includes healthcare strategies among migrant workers that paradoxically creates loopholes of state control, leading to failure to monitor the spread of disease. This circumstance encourages us to think critically that how differently constructed knowledge engenders opportunities for some groups and unequal dependence of resources of those who are left behind. The cross-border network has been one of the aspects that borderland scholars have paid attention to. This panel introduces the freshest way to frame networks of human and non-human actors by asking “how does (re)networking intermingled with knowledge lead to politics of mobility of people, goods, finance, and technology. Last, this panel considers the concept of infrastructure from different angles. It traces infrastructure from a traditional perspective—how physical infrastructure like a bridge, road, and other constructions connect and promote flows of entities across the borders. Meanwhile, it illustrates ‘soft infrastructure’ in non-material forms of laws and regulations, bureaucratic systems, and other services to boost people’s mobility while restricting access to modernity at the same time. This panel illustrates that three main themes are explicitly interdependent, one could be intermingled with another. For example, network making is associated with knowledge production, or it can transform into social infrastructure that people have created. By seeing them this way, integrated borders potentially turn into connected and/or disconnected at the same time, and generate ambiguity of the borders in many ways. Cases studies will be presented from the panelists studying the transformative borders of Thailand with Myanmar and Lao PDR. Sending Money Back Home: Banking Digitalization, Myanmar Migrant Workers, and Thailand-Myanmar Border Trade Akkanut Wantanasombut - Chulalongkorn University, Thailand Thailand’s Ministry of Labor reported in 2018 that Thailand had accepted 3.1 million legal migrant workers from her neighboring countries, two-thirds of the figure came from Myanmar. For decades, this huge number of Myanmar migrant workers indirectly benefits Thailand-Myanmar border trade, especially the process they send money back home has been benefiting illicit trade. Since the banking services in rural areas of Myanmar where the migrant workers came from are not yet developed, the workers usually send money back home through informal channels, which are parts of a circle that

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the illicit border traders use for paying their Thai suppliers when purchasing goods. Thus, this remitting method of Myanmar migrant workers plays an important role in the Thai-Myanmar border trade. Yet the development of technologies in recent times has changed their ways of remittance dramatically. The digitalization of banking systems has offered migrant workers choices to do so. This research investigates how the digital banking sector affects different groups having relationships with Myanmar migrants: their ways of living, their relatives’ living condition at home, and working environment with Thai employers. This research particularly looks at how this remitting method reflects everyday politics, and how the technological changes can probably create a chain-reaction to the Thailand-Myanmar border trade in a new era. It also examines how the recent banking digitalization in both countries breaking through obstacles of financial mobilization in the past. The Bio-legitimacy of Migrants and the Shattering of Physical Border Policing Prachatip Kata - Ministry of Public Health Thailand, Thailand Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) has been widely recognized as a threat since the TB epidemic was declared a global emergency in the 1990s. In 2017, Thailand’s National Strategic Plan on TB (2017–2021) was developed to contain the MDR-TB epidemic. With the high prevalence of TB cases, “migrant workers” from neighboring countries were identified as high-risk populations and being demanded special attention. In parallel, one of the developments of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC)’s objectives is to promote freer mobility of migrant workers to be laborers. In Thailand, the Thai government pushes forward the cooperation on labor as a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with neighboring countries. According to the MOU, Thailand initiated the policy to screen TB case among migrant workers, assigning them to be checked up their health conditions before receiving a work permit. However, the regulations are not implemented and practiced at the health stations located at the border. Migrant workers then are not screened right after crossing into Thailand. The consequence is that they achieve to move to Bangkok’s centers and industrial zones in several provinces without getting a TB screening test, some of them even independently select the hospitals to receive the tests by themselves. This paper, on one hand, aims to discuss the impact of this policy which is based on the principles of the human rights of the ill and global migrant health, including the democratization and universalization of access to healthcare. On the other, from different aspects, this policy reproduces the device of bio-legitimacy as surveillance apparatus. The paper illustrates that the process of legalization to protect MDR-TB cases of migrant workers as a highly-risk group does not only express a new form of biopolitical regime and governmentality of immigration but also shattering the physical border policing and declining of racialized boundaries. Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge No. 4: The Politics and Poetics of Cross-Border Infrastructure Development in the Northern Thai Border Suebsakun Kidnukorn - Mae Fah Luang University, Thailand This paper illustrates the relationship between the bridge connecting Thailand and Lao PDR and the politics and poetics of cross-border infrastructure development. The Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge No. 4 is located in Chiang Khong district, northern Chiang Rai Province, Thailand which is opposite to Bokaew Province, Lao PDR. It is so far the latest one of the total four constructed for facilitating national boundary crossing over the Mekong River that borders the two countries. This international border crossing is projected as part of the land traveling route in the shortest distance from Thailand to Kunming Province, China. The bridge has been fantasized to promote mobility of people, goods, and investment for economic integration in the region. Drawing from my data collection, I argue that the bridge is the product of a hierarchically political project among the countries in the Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS). Meanwhile, it shows the poetics of infrastructure development by which the bridge is constructed to be a metaphor of regionally connecting for economic purposes. The opening of the bridge persuades business people to invest in the border areas. In consequence, Thai

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investors have rushed to get benefits and exploit this cross– border infrastructure by building up large hotels for accommodating Chinese tourists. They dream of constructing a new city where real estates are prepared for trading, and being as logistic nodes for exporting agricultural products to China. However, they thus far failed to achieve their economic goals due to regulations in both Lao PDR and China that prohibit the export of Thai goods across the borders. Moreover, they face with Chinese competitors who venture the business in Chiang Rai and well as those on the Lao side. A Checkpoint: Border Bureaucracy and Ambiguous Infrastructure in the Myanmar-Thailand Borderland Busarin Lertchavalitsakul - Naresuan University, Thailand A border checkpoint is one of the core infrastructure signifying sovereignty, and symbolizing state attempts to consolidate national security. On the opposite, it is also seen as sites of local communities' desires and economic opportunities awaiting on the other side of the border. Along the borders between Myanmar and Thailand, different types of checkpoints are established by the Thai State but their functionality remains slightly studied. The Thai government has recently promised to upgrade one of the informal checkpoints located in the western province of Mae Hong Son into the category of ‘permanently official’ to boost regional economy and tourism, including to establish logistic networks on a wider scale, by spending lavish budget to study the possibility of the project. However, its success has been suspended due to political unpredictability on the Myanmar side. This paper looks at the procedure of upgrading the checkpoint and its current operation through the framework of ‘border infrastructure’, on how its consequence impacting on various groups of people’s livelihood. The checkpoint infrastructure development includes hard and soft types of projections regarding town planning, technological operated system setup, bureaucratic apparatus, and regulation and law implementation. Employing a qualitative research method, this study has found that the performance of different state agencies to maintain sovereignty and to manage cross-border flows through a checkpoint is conceptualized as ‘ambiguous infrastructure’ influenced by the uncertainty of political climate in peripheries. Thailand’s border bureaucracy has also put repercussion on cross-border mobility, while abating desires of the state, as well as a local dream of the bright economy towards the region. Different types and scales of infrastructure illustrate various perceptions of people towards the checkpoint and dynamic use of the border within a spectrum of opportunity, intermission, disruption, restriction and so on.

MOVING BORDERS, RESHAPING MOVEMENTS PERFORMANCE AND BORDERS IN CONTEMPORARY ASIA

Convenor and Chair: Areum Jeong - Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute, China This panel explores how performance acts reshape formations of physical, symbolic, and virtual borders and contact zones, and in return, how borderlands define bodily movements in contemporary Asia. In Performance in the Borderlands, Ramón Rivera-Servera and Harvey Young observe that while borders are designed to confine the flow of currency and human mobility, borders also become fluid, porous, and mobile, thanks to the intimacy and the constant “performance” of everyday life across borders and in borderlands (2011). Anna Tsing similarly calls attention “not only to global claims and their effects on social life but also to questions of interconnection, movement, and boundary crossing” (2000), arguing that borders are also situated in “zones of awkward engagement” that produce “frictive” relations (2004). From this theoretical vantage point, we ask: How might acts of performance, broadly defined, take place in spaces or “nonspaces of boundaries and borders” (Lionnet and Shih 2005)? How might we reconsider borders and contact zones today by taking movements and performance into consideration? And how might such performances challenge, reinforce, or resist borders and contact zones, and further impact our way of theorizing and conceptualizing borders?

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Areum Jeong’s paper, “Power Dynamics and Virtual Borders between Korean Fans and International Fans in K-pop Fandom,” examines the consolidating and splintering of K-pop fandom communities based on power dynamics between domestic Korean fans and international fans, and explores how we construct transnational communities and networks based on affect. So-Rim Lee’s paper, “One Dream, One Asia: Rhetoric of Business, Technology, and Transnationalism in Z-POP,” examines Z-POP DREAM—a business project inspired by K-pop’s global success, founded by a team of entrepreneurs and blockchain technology specialists from South Korea and Japan—and explores the techno-transnational rhetoric Z-POP employs to piggyback on K-pop’s transnational success, selling their business model as the next step to making K-pop more accessible to non-Korean fans, cover dancers, and trainee-hopefuls dreaming of becoming an idol. Soo Ryon Yoon’s paper, “Moving Along and Across Borders: Dance and Dancing Bodies Between Proliferation and Confinement,” examines Japanese choreographer Michikazu Matsune’s performance Dance, If You Want to Enter My Country and West African dancers in Asia, for example, Guinean dancers who were deported in 2014 from South Korea due to the Ebola scare, and discusses the contradictions between proliferation of transnational performance exchange and tightening of border controls. Power Dynamics and Virtual Borders between Korean Fans and International Fans in K-pop Fandom Areum Jeong - Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute, China According to statistics released by the Korea Foundation, there are more than 90 million dedicated fans of Korean popular culture around the world. K-pop fandom is a highly organized networked community with specific communal goals carried out by affective labor. Fans mobilize their resources via digital media and technology and perform affective labor to achieve those goals (Jeong 2017). While domestic Korean fans and international fans try to maintain an amicable relationship in order to accomplish their communal goals, they can become antagonistic toward one another when different goals clash against each other or when they have different positions regarding a specific issue. Through a close examination of fans’ discussions via online communities, interviews, news articles, and social media, this paper examines case studies of how domestic Korean fans and international fans create amicable or antagonistic relationships (depending on circumstances), and discusses how borders are formed or erased via online and offline spaces. This paper also focuses on the clashes between domestic Korean fans’ lawsuit against former K-pop group SECHSKIES member Kang Sung Hoon (for the Kang’s corrupt and deceitful actions) and international fans’ opposing position to “stan” with Kang. This research aims to provide new literature on K-pop fan behavior, particularly on fans’ affective labor and organized networked performance. “One Dream, One Asia”: Rhetoric of Business, Technology, and Transnationalism in Z-POP So-Rim Lee - University of Pennsylvania, United States Z-POP DREAM is a business project inspired by K-pop’s global success, founded by a team of entrepreneurs and blockchain technology specialists from South Korea and Japan. Treating K-pop as a business model, Z-POP DREAM takes inter-Asian transnationalism seriously; its “Z-pop” idols (two groups have so far come out of their effort, tentatively named “Z-boys” and “Z-girls”) hail from Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines; the fan consumer base it caters to are also from the seven countries. Showcasing a fan-voting system fueled by blockchain technology, Z-POP DREAM boasts to have invented a new business ecosystem for creating, circulating, and consuming global pop idols. This talk explores the techno-transnational rhetoric Z-POP employs to piggyback on K-pop’s transnational success, selling their business model as the next step to making K-pop more accessible to non-Korean fans, cover dancers, and trainee-hopefuls dreaming of becoming an idol. How does such “industry speak” inform, interact with, or resist an established transnational rhetoric of K-pop? What utopic notions of technology and transnationalism do we see in Z-POP

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DREAM’s “One Asia” rhetoric? How does such discourse of technology at once mask and underscore the line between national and transnational? And how does it promise to make this line less visible? Moving Along and Across Borders: Dance and Dancing Bodies Between Proliferation and Confinement Soo Ryon Yoon - Lingnan University, Hong Kong S.A.R., China In “Moving Along and Across Borders,” I argue that reinforced nation state boundaries bar dancing bodies from moving across different borders while simultaneously proliferating artistic practices through dance diplomacy and exchange. More specifically, I argue that dance and dancers are ambivalent figures, which become both the means to promote a nation state’s cultural strength and a primary source of moral panic, because of dance’s uncontainable and immeasurable disposition. Dancers of non-white racial backgrounds or non-Euro-American nationalities are particularly vulnerable to reinforced national borders and security measures, who often experience complicated and unreliable immigration bureaucracy, suspicions for infectious disease, and racialized biases against their temporary work status as an artist. The contradiction feels mostly acutely at more obvious checkpoints such as airport check-in counters, security check lines, and passport control booths, but also in mundane spaces beyond physical borders, such as performance stages. This presentation explores these spaces in relation to how dance and dancing bodies instill both fascination and fear, based on case studies including Japanese choreographer Michikazu Matsune’s performance Dance, If You Want to Enter My Country and West African dancers in Asia, such as an instance of Guinean dancers deported in 2014 from South Korea due to the Ebola scare. Combining part of my primary research on African diasporic performance in Asia as well as analysis of recent dance works, I discuss the contradictions between proliferation of transnational performance exchange and tightening of border controls. I also discuss how, within these confines, dance artists critique and explore the issues through their dance works.

ORTHOGRAPHIC PLURALITY: CASE STUDIES FROM MAINLAND SOUTHEAST ASIA’S BORDERLANDS I Convenor and Chair: Masao Imamura - Yamagata University, Japan Discussant: Nathan Badenoch - Kyoto University, Japan Borderlands are spaces of linguistic diversity; they are also spaces of plural orthographies. This panel will analyze the unusual dynamics of orthography development, in which a kind of pluralism often endures. How do stateless speech communities engage in orthography development and live with multiple ways of writing the same language? The multi-disciplinary panel will present a set of case studies from Myanmar, India, Bangladesh, Thailand and southwestern China (Yunnan), covering languages including Karen, Lahu, Wa, Palaung, Jinghpaw, Meitei/Meiteilon, and Cak/Sak. In the borderlands of Southeast Asia, religious organizations—rather than the states—have been leading the efforts of orthography development. New orthographies have proliferated since the arrival of Protestant missionaries in the early 19th century and began translating the Bible into local vernaculars. These efforts continue to this day. Various non-Christian actors have also been involved in orthography development. The course of orthography development—from the initial stages of research and design to the later stages of education and institutionalization—is long and complicated, requiring a variety of resources and expertise. Because it is difficult for a religious organization to dominate the process and bring sufficient resources, however, an orthography development project often fails to achieve its goals. Efforts of standardization—of script, pronunciation, word breaks and spelling, among others—are often contested. Even if an orthography is successfully developed by a group of experts, successful dissemination requires institutions, technologies, and media. While rare resources and expertise might be supplied by diaspora communities, the decentralized nature of borderland

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networks easily results in multiple projects pursued separately. This panel will examine a range of effects--both intended and unintended--of this plurality. Religiosity and Politics in the Development of the Karen Orthographies Hitomi Fujimura - Sophia University, Japan The Karen, a minority group in Burma and Thailand, not only have multiple languages; they also use many different orthographies. By narrating a history of the Karen orthographies, this presentation demonstrates that the choice of script is strongly based on the religious identity among the Karen. The Karen scripts and orthographies first appeared in the early nineteenth century. Baptist missionaries devised orthographies for several Karen languages, such as Sgaw and Pwo. Of these, the Sgaw script was most widely circulated through printed media and school education. Separately, Buddhist monks invented a distinct Pwo orthography, now called the Buddhist Pwo script, in order to write Buddhist teachings and compete with the Christians. In the twentieth century, the Christian Sgaw script became politically dominant due to nationalistic efforts of the Karen political organizations, consisting largely of Christian Sgaws. It was used in official letters and school textbooks, in an effort to assert a unique culture. Even under the censorship of the military government, publications in the Christian Sgaw script were produced for private circulation in Myanmar; they were also printed in other countries. Despite the variety of Karen orthographies, the Christian Sgaw orthography was ostensibly becoming the ‘official’ Karen language. The dominance of the Christian Sgaw script has been challenged in the 2000s, however. New Sgaw orthographies, one designed by Catholics in Thailand and another called the Buddhist Sgaw script in Myanmar, have publicly appeared. This pluralistic orthographic condition, attached to religious associations, throws the religious differences among the Karen into sharp relief, with the effect of casting doubt on the prospect of pan-Karen unification. This presentation also speculates that the importance of the religiosity of the Karen orthographies might retreat in the future, as enthusiasm for Karen literacy with any orthography has grown since Myanmar’s political transition in 2011. A Tale of Two Scripts: Indic and Roman Orthographies for Jinghpaw Keita Kurabe - Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan Masao Imamura - Yamagata University, Japan Jinghpaw (alternatively Jinghpo and Singpho) is a minority language spoken in the northern part of Myanmar. The same language is also spoken in southwestern China (Yunnan) and northeast India. The set of conventions used today for writing Jinghpaw was devised by Protestant missionaries working in Myanmar. Development and reform of Jinghpaw orthography was far from straightforward, however. It appears that the choice of script in particular was a vexing issue to the missionaries themselves. In the 1880s, the Baptist mission first created Jinghpaw orthography with Indic letters much like the Burmese. This orthography, however, did not gain traction, and was later abandoned by the mission, which in the 1890s devised another orthography using the Roman alphabet. This Roman-script orthography has prevailed as the official orthography among Jinghpaw speakers in Myanmar, where the vast majority of the speakers reside. This “success” is rather puzzling, however, in that the Indic-script orthography proposed earlier is in fact linguistically superior. The Indic-version is also easier to learn for those with Burmese literacy. We present findings from our investigations of (a) the efforts by the American missionaries in the past and (b) the perceptions and understandings of the present-day Jinghpaw speakers regarding the two orthographies. “New Lahu orthography” and its usage in Southwestern Yunnan, China Mio Horie - Nagoya University, Japan Yoichi Nishimoto - Kanazawa University, Japan

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The Lahu is one of the the upland groups living in the borders of China, Myanmar and Thailand. They had not had their own writing system until the Christian missionaries in Myanmar created an orthography using the Roman alphabet in early 20th century. In 1953, however, the Chinese government officially created “the Lahu script trial programme” and presented an orthography different from the missionary version. The local linguists in Yunnan removed tone marks of the old orthography and used consonant letters to show the various tones, claiming that it is easier to write with a Roman-letter keyboard. The authorities were proud of this version as more practical. Despite these efforts, however, the missionary version remains the most commonly used Lahu orthography. This presentation will show a contrasting history of multiple Lahu orthographies, highlighting different ideas of wisdom and culture. The three Orthographies of the Wa Language: Three ways to imagine Society and State Hans Steinmuller - London School of Economics, United Kingdom Three competing orthographies exist for northern Wa (Paraog), a language of the Palaungic branch of Austro-asiatic languages: the ‘Bible Wa’ created by Baptist missionaries, the ‘PRC Wa’ promoted in the People’s Republic of China, and the ‘Official Wa’ promoted by the authorities of the United Wa State Army in Myanmar. In this presentation I compare the lexicon, uses and institutional context of the three Wa orthographies. The conventions of each orthography have to do with the work of Baptist missionaries, as well as ethnographers and party officials, and I will briefly introduce the differences between the three orthographies. Each orthography has its own distinct lexicon, and I will point in particular to a number of markedly different concepts, in particular those related to Chinese, Burmese, and English loanwords. The orthographies are used in different contexts: while PRC Wa is used in official documents in China, Bible Wa and Official Wa have become immensely popular on social media. In the public spheres that rely on these orthographies, there is also constant discussion about the ‘correct’ ways of writing, as well as the correct expressions used for modern concepts. The presentation situates these discussions in their institutional context, and points to three different ways of imagining abstract concepts such as society and state. ORTHOGRAPHIC PLURALITY: CASE STUDIES FROM MAINLAND SOUTHEAST ASIA’S BORDERLANDS II

Convenor: Masao Imamura - Yamagata University, Japan Chair: Makiko Kimura - Tsuda University, Japan Discussant: Patrick McCormick - Journal of Southeast Asian Studies/Kyoto University, Japan Borderlands are spaces of linguistic diversity; they are also spaces of plural orthographies. This panel will analyze the unusual dynamics of orthography development, in which a kind of pluralism often endures. How do stateless speech communities engage in orthography development and live with multiple ways of writing the same language? The multi-disciplinary panel will present a set of case studies from Myanmar, India, Bangladesh, Thailand and southwestern China (Yunnan), covering languages including Karen, Lahu, Wa, Palaung, Jinghpaw, Meitei/Meiteilon, and Cak/Sak. In the borderlands of Southeast Asia, religious organizations—rather than the states—have been leading the efforts of orthography development. New orthographies have proliferated since the arrival of Protestant missionaries in the early 19th century and began translating the Bible into local vernaculars. These efforts continue to this day. Various non-Christian actors have also been involved in orthography development. The course of orthography development—from the initial stages of research and design to the later stages of education and institutionalization—is long and complicated, requiring a variety of resources and expertise. Because it is difficult for a religious organization to dominate the process and bring sufficient resources, however, an orthography development project often fails to achieve its goals. Efforts of standardization—of script, pronunciation, word breaks and spelling, among

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others—are often contested. Even if an orthography is successfully developed by a group of experts, successful dissemination requires institutions, technologies, and media. While rare resources and expertise might be supplied by diaspora communities, the decentralized nature of borderland networks easily results in multiple projects pursued separately. This panel will examine a range of effects--both intended and unintended--of this plurality. Making Palaung Orthography in Myanmar's Borderlands Takahiro Kojima - Tsuda University, Japan This presentation will explore the process of making Palaung orthography in the borderlands of Shan State, Myanmar. The Palaung are a minority and upland population of this area, while the Shan are rulers of the valleys. Previous studies concluded that the Palaung simply use Shan script and they lacked their own script. It was also said that in their Buddhist practices the Palaung would typically deliver teachings in the Shan language and use texts written in the Shan. Through my fieldwork in some Palaung villages in Shan State, however, I found that the Palaung have translated Buddhist texts to deliver dharma teachings in the Palaung language using the Palaung script. One factor here is that the social contacts between Burmese and Palaung people have intensified, thanks to an increase in migration and the spread of the government schools. As a result of these interactions, the influence of the Burmese language has become stronger than that of the Shan language. This does not necessarily mean that the Palaung simply assimilate into the Burmese, however; rather Palaung elites seek to establish a standardized orthography. With the political thaw in Myanmar after 2011, Palaung leaders started to make an orthography textbook in an effort to achieve higher autonomy in education. This activity has been contested, however, because of wide differences among the dialects and various traditions with scripts. Owing to these differences in language among the Palaung sub-groups, the textbooks composed in Samloŋ language, which is mainly used in Namhsan, are difficult to understand for other sub-groups; some Palaung sub-groups keep using their own textbooks. Each of these sub-groups still maintains a micro-local community by remaking and reinforcing connectedness among themselves. This tendency, however, may face difficulty as they seek to position themselves as the Palaung in the making of democratic Myanmar. Yelhou and Miyan Mayek: Multiscripturalism, Identity and Contested Orthographies in Meetei Language Deepak Naorem - University of Delhi, India This paper will look at the history of orthography development in a recalcitrant borderland space between Myanmar and India. Societies in this region are generally associated with oral cultures. However, Christian missionaries and colonial officials also encountered several literate societies. This paper will look at one specific literary culture which originated in Imphal valley, and later made its way into the Barak valley. When missionaries and colonial officials encountered the Meetei language around 1780 CE, it was already a written language. However, in light of inaccessibility to the script and a popular opinion among the colonial officials that the old Meetei script was not suitable, they started developing new scripts. They both borrowed from existing orthographies in the neighbouring regions and developed a new one using the Roman alphabet, which they had already done with other languages. This led to the development of multiple orthographies. This paper argues that the development of these orthographies was contested and resisted by the native informants and interpreters. With the emergence of nationalist and language movements in the region during the early decades of the 20th century, multi-scripturalism began to occupy centre stage vis-a-vis larger questions of identity and aspirations for an independent homeland. This led to the rejection of certain orthographies as colonial, foreign or miyan; and only one particular orthography was promoted as authentic, indigenous or yelhou. This paper will look at the relationship between choice

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of orthography and ethnic or nationalist movements, and explore if the existence of multiple orthographies disrupts the political visions of these movements in this borderland space, which challenges the nation-making projects of post-colonial states like India and Myanmar. Tribal Writings and Orthographies in Manipur Takenori Murakami - Kyoto University, Japan Manipur state in Northeast India has more than 40 languages within and Manipuri / Meiteilon, being an official language of the state, has the biggest number of speakers as well as of printed materials. The language currently has 3 kinds of scripts in use despite the state's effort to unify them into the traditional Meitei Mayek of dominant Meitei people and Roman script is used by hill tribes just as they write down their own tribal tongues in modified Latin alphabet system which has its origin in the Bible translations by early foreign missionaries. Among the tribal population Tangkhuls and Thadou-Kukis have biggest number of published items not confined within Bible-related materials but novels, poetries, histories, folklores and even books on socio-political issues are printed in their own languages, though with a certain extent of discrepancy and inconsistency in orthography. Rongmei-Kabuis, another huge influential group who have higher literacy in multiple scripts and wider religious choices compared to other tribes, now face the problem of contested orthographies as to which script to use, with tonal markings or not,and to what degree of compliance with their sacred texts. Smaller tribes also struggle in establishing distinct and commonly shared orthography under the ongoing assimilative pressure from neighboring languages. In this presentation tribal language publications in Manipur are examined and discussed in relation to the surrounding dominant languages to witness the process of transition between oral and literary variants when a tribal language formerly used only in a spoken basis acquires an agreed writing system or plunges into the inevitable controversy of orthography, and then tries to establish the literary standard which is operative enough to express their identity and to be accepted by the speakers. The Cak Script: Problems and Proposals Keisuke Huziwara - Kyoto University, Japan Cak/Sak (ISO 639-3 ckh) is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the borderland between the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh (Cak) and the Arakan Mountains in Burma (Sak). The total number of native speakers of this ethnic minority is very small: estimated to be around 3,000 in Bangladesh and 1,000 in Burma. Although Cak and Sak are mutually intelligible as long as native words are concerned, communication can be difficult because of Bangla loanwords in the former and Arakanese/Burmese loanwords in the latter. Until recently, Cak/Sak did not have a script of its own. When they write, the Cak people use the Bangla, whereas the Sak use the Burmese. By the beginning of the 21st century, however, the Cak script was developed. In recent years it has been introduced to the public through a publication by Ong Khyaing Cak (2013). The author--a younger brother of the creator of the Cak script, Mr Mong Mong Cak--is an intellectual who thought that Cak must have its own script because it is different from both Bangla and Burmese. In the book, the fundamentals of the proposed writing system are explained in Bangla and Burmese. Nowadays, people have begun teaching children the Cak script. However, it is not accepted by adults, who continue to use Bangla, Burmese or Roman script when they communicate on social media. In this presentation, a history of the orthography development of Cak up to Huziwara (2015) and the reception of the orthographies by the speakers will be first reviewed. One key issue is the basic phonetic correspondences between Cak and Sak. A tentative orthography used in the forthcoming Cak-English-Bangla-Burmese dictionary, a revised version of Huziwara (2016), will also be demonstrated.

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PARTITIONS OF THE SENSIBLE: BORDER AESTHETICS IN ASIA Convenors: Andrew Grant - Boston College, United States Rupak Shrestha - University of Colorado Boulder, United States Chair: Nadine Plachta - Heidelberg University, Germany Discussant: Tong Lam - University of Toronto, Canada Asian borders take form through a number of aesthetics. They can be found in terrifying fences and guard towers, warding off possible trespassers with threats of interment or death. They can also take form as powerful spectacles that pronounce territorial sovereignty and entice neighboring populations. They can also work more subtly, asserting territorial presence through the boundaries etched on maps and circulated to naturalize cartographic literacy and a sense of bordered belonging. Such borders can also be challenged, as communities and artists seek to create new zones of co-existence through aesthetic practice. We take inspiration from dell’Agnese and Szary’s (2015) proposal that “border aesthetics is another way of expressing the relational dimension of socio-spatial interfaces and of questioning their political component.” The aesthetic register is an important way of accessing politics in its relational and experiential dimension. This panel will explore aesthetics to better understand the political relations that help (de)construct the border, with particular attention to aesthetic technologies and the communities of sensibility that they help create. To this point, we invite studies of boundaries, borders, and border zones that engage with Rancière’s contemplation of communities of sense. How do such communities emerge and what are the material and representative fruits of their labor? What technologies are mobilized to challenge dominant border sensibilities? What sorts of coexistences do they propose? Furthermore, how do those with diminished political power challenge partitions of the sensible that exclude their voices? The objective of the panel is to survey the array of practices through which border aesthetics in Asia operate, and to compare practices to find structural similarities and differences, as well as possibilities for making borders less violent, less imposing, and more equal spaces. The Contested Politics of Heritage and Art Intervention upon the Borderland Transformation in Postcolonial Hong Kong Chiu-Yin Leung - The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R., China This paper investigates the socio-spatial transformation of border landscape in Hong Kong with the focus of heritage and activist practices. Whereas the de jure boundary between colonial Hong Kong and the corresponding political regimes in China remain unchanged since 1898, the rural borderland of Hong Kong was formalized with the spatial practices of Frontier Closed Area and also normalized with collective facilities such as military fences, detention centres, graveyards and landfills. Meanwhile, the rapid economic reform and urban growth of Shenzhen since 1980s had created a contrasting landscape across the border. The sovereignty return of Hong Kong in 1997 thereafter provokes the intertwining forces of urbanization and statization which might have reterritorialized its socio-spatial configurations in recent years. The reopening of FCA and new initiatives of mega-infrastructure projects have threatened the massive displacement of primitive land uses, rural traditions and colonial monuments. In response, the borderland communities have mobilized their collective insurgency over the right to the city against the hegemony of these state spatial projects. The border landscape is therein becoming a heterotopia of contested meanings, deviations, rituals and other possibilities. This paper discusses the particular role of heritage and aesthetics upon such bordering processes. This ethnographic and participatory action research engages with a couple of border villages last five years. It traces how different historic buildings and military facilities are being treated, preserved or vanished, including a case comparison of fort houses built by the colony and village society respectively. Alternatively, the indigenous villagers and cosmopolitan rebels use traditional and art festivals to intervene upon the infrastructure projects for different causes through their re-

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articulation of colonial histories, national identities and borderland imaginary. The case of Hong Kong illustrates the possibilities of border aesthetics as not only the expression of power but also an agent for changes. “Once Here, You Do not Need to Go Abroad”: Rethinking Borderscaping through Khorgos Yi Gu - University of Toronto, Canada This study looks at how an anxiety-driven desire to embrace a developmentalist aesthetics has framed the way by which multiple forces—the Chinese state, private enterprises, local residents, and visitors—present and view Khorgos, a city at the China-Kazak border newly created as part of China’s One-Road-One-Belt initiative. Despite its strategical significance and international visibility, the claim that Khorgos is to become a world-class trading center has little tangible support on the site, especially after the pull-out of shadow companies following the 2017 exposé that Khorgos’s local prosperity heavily relied on its role as a tax haven for China’s movie industry. Manifesting the unevenness in the financial prowess and scale of China and Kazakhstan, the local economy on both sides of the border has increasingly relied on Chinese domestic tourists, mostly coming from the bottom ladder of the highly stratified tourism market without other overseas experiences. Based on ethnographic research as well as digital data collection, this paper looks at visual elements in Khorgos such as architecture and graphic design, as well as large quantities of photographs and composite images uploaded and circulated in the digital space. This constellation of visual products on Khorgos reveals how the state’s vision of Khorgos is not promulgated by a sleek and successful delivery, but instead is widely embraced precisely because of its precarity. An understanding of this complicated dynamics sheds new light on the state control that has successfully obtained compliance among the Han Chinese over the mass detainment of Muslim Uighurs since 2016. The case of Khorgos also challenges the scholarly approach to borderscaping that tends to equate the processual nature of border formations and the heterogenous non-state forces to the potential of subversion. Aesthetic Borderings and the Political: Political Engagements between Walung Indigneous Peoples and Tibetan Refugees in the Northeast Nepal Himalayas Rupak Shrestha - University of Colorado Boulder, United States The Nepali, and the Chinese, state apparatus see particular events and activities as illegible and illegal - border crossings, familial ties, wedlock. These events are met with extradition, illegal in itself as no agreement has been reached between the two states in contemporary times for such. The sovereignty of the state lies in its (cap)ability to erase. It is always in the lookout to erase what it renders as illegible. Although, Nepal sees forms of Tibetan refugee practice as illegible, this illegibility is not illegal. The Nepali state treats any Tibetan illegibility as extra-illegal through extraterritorial policing praxis. The two states have aestheticized the visuals of this borderland - what belongs and what does not and as a result constructing what is visible and what is rendered invisible. What becomes of practices that do not belong in both states? In this paper, I explore Tibetan refugee engagements with Walung indigeneous peoples of the northeast Nepal Himalayas. Borderland peoples in the NE Nepal Himalayas, through dissensus, re-imagine what is deemed invisible and illegible by the state. I borrow from Ranciere and Arendt in thinking through the political with a focus on doing and action rather than being. Situating knowledge in action moves political analysis away from Walungnga’s singular identity of being in one nation and rather places it in multiplicities that are engendered through political alliances across political communities and sovereignties that repurposes and intervenes borders. It creates a new understanding of borderlands that is ruptured yet imagined as a whole through a politics of indigeneity. Through vignettes engendered from ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines the ways in which the peoples of the borderlands modify, interrupt, and rupture the aesthetic field and imagination of borderlands and create political possibilities through co-existence and dissensus.

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Bounding China: Boundary Lines as Border Aesthetics in Cartography of China Andrew Grant - Boston College, United States Polychromatic contours, red outlines, dashed lines, shaded borderlands, barely visible traces: there are many ways to highlight Asia’s cartographic bodies and each approach promotes a particular way of seeing the world. Furthermore, which cartographic depiction is chosen and who draws it is highly political. This paper explores the politics of aesthetics around drawing China’s body. Using from contemporary and historical maps of China, this paper shows that drawing – or not drawing - China’s boundary is a politically fraught process in which differently positioned political actors must carefully navigate how to express the Chinese state body. Showing the China’s boundaries reinforces notions of Chinese territorial claims and ultimately the Chinese national geobody. Not showing or downplaying these boundaries speaks to China’s regional hegemony, both as a civilizational force and as a dominant, even imperialistic, regional power. While China’s cartographic body can be expressed in both of these ways – national and imperial – there has long existed a careful state politics concerning who is allowed to represent what body and in what context. Making an aesthetic error by representing the wrong sort of boundary in the wrong context has geopolitical significance. Additionally, challenging the dominant aesthetic order is also an opportunity to assert alternative imaginative geographies. Drawing from several cases of mapped depictions of China’s borders in its northeast, western, and southeast, I will demonstrate how the politics of drawing China continues to have impacts on Asian geopolitics today. Furthermore, I argue that there are important differences beyond the distinction of boundary or no boundary, and that there is much to learn from paying attention to the aesthetic quality of borderlines, the nature of their shifts, and the techniques behind them in maps both historical and contemporary.

POLITICS OF GATEWAY: NEGOTIATING CO-EXISTENCES AND GOVERNANCE ACROSS BORDERS I Convenor and Discussant: Eva Hung - The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R., China Chair: Po-Yi Hung - National Taiwan University, Taiwan Borders can be both rigid and fluid, constraining and facilitating, and promoting and discouraging connectivity. Borders exist to create social, political and economic divisions; yet, under certain circumstances, they also minimize differences and enhance material flows, human contacts, and technology and idea exchanges. Many border zones, in historical times, were not marginal regions, but prosperous strips of international trade corridors facilitating material flows and cultural diffusion. Border and borderland studies often inquire into the different political conditions and cultural climates under which border zones thrive as gateways for co-prosperity or impedes co-existence and development. This panel brings together a total of six papers, looking at a variety of borderlands (including those in-between Hong Kong and China, Vietnam and China, Malaysia and Singapore, and Russia and China) and development corridors (such as China-South Asia, China-Central Asia, and Taiwan-Southeast Asia). The papers will be located in two sub-panels with different emphases. This first sub-panel discusses governance and developments discourses with border-crossing material cases. Yuk Wah Chan’s paper sets out to examine the borderlands as both contact and contested zones where state-state and centre-periphery relationships are shaped, and borderland governance and development discourses are transformed. Victor Chan’s paper focuses on the inscription of transnational world heritage at the “Silk Road” Zones. He argues that co-existence and shared historical and developmental themes across borders are often made possible not by history itself, but by practices of diplomatic negotiations and state relations. Po-Yi Hung’s study of the Taiwan bubble tea business in Vietnam brings in an interesting case enshrining a business-cum-nationalism trajectory from Taiwan. By carefully designing and pushing forward the package of an

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“authentic Taiwan” and its tastes, this tea- and border-making business actually creates both greater connectivity and divisions across national borders alongside Taiwan’s current southbound policy. Contact or Contested Zones? Borderland Governance and Discourses of Development in Asia Yuk Wah Chan - City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R., China Borderlands are both contact and contested zones. Lying at the edge of the nation, they can represent both the delimitation of state power as well as a defiance of the state. Whether borderland is a strip of prosperous zone, or a piece of no-man’s land often depends on borderland governance – which is more than the policies and ruling of one national government. Borderland governance is an outcome of the interactions of states and sets of national policies on both sides, as well as contacts and interactions of multiple actors of different nationalities, ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Policies on the state level and interactions on the ground level will lead to various opportunities (for prosperity) and constraints (for development). The reality of borderland living is also affected by the imbalance of power between the centre and the periphery, and the asymmetries of powers and capabilities. By using cases from the Hong Kong-China, Singapore-Malaysia and Vietnam-China borderlands, this paper examines the conditions under which there are occurrences of shifts of power and positions of the centre and the periphery, discursive re-articulation of borderland governance and changing aspirations of development. It will argue that borderland living actually offers glimpses into the problems of state governance in general and acts as frontier thermometers that detect changing state-state and centre-periphery relationships. Negotiating Transnational Heritage Conservation: Cultural Co-existence along the Silk Road Zones Chi-Ming Victor Chan - The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R., China The inscription of world heritage under the UNESCO framework has brought increasing world attention to heritage conservation. This is so not only because of the intrinsic historical values of heritage itself, but also because of the economic and political importance embedded in heritage and historical sites. Instead of focusing on single-nation heritage inscription, the UNESCO in recent years has put emphasis on “transnational” heritage conservation of broad geographical zones that share similar historical themes, hoping to boost cultural co-existence amongst concerned nations and borderland communities. Inevitably, this complicates the heritage conservation process and heritage politics regarding dissonant interpretations of histories. This paper examines the evolution of heritage diplomacy practices and the nomination of “transnational” UNESCO world cultural heritage sites along the “Silk Road” zones. It will focus on two “transnational” heritage site nominations in China-Central Asia and China-South Asia borderlands. The successful inscription of “Silk Roads: the Routes Network of Chang’an-Tianshan Corridor” as World Cultural Heritage in 2014 has in fact demonstrated a series of diplomatic efforts and compromises between the involved countries and parties. However, the result in the China-South Asia nomination ended up in dissonance and diplomatic standstill. The paper argues that whether cultural co-existence and shared identity can be enshrined in heritage conservation is largely dependent on the practices of diplomatic negotiations and state-state relations. The cases also precisely illustrate how the meanings of histories can be “undermined” or “over-interpreted” for political and economic purposes. Relocating Food Nationalism: Bubble Tea, Mobility and the Politics of Bordering between Taiwan and Vietnam Po-Yi Hung - National Taiwan University, Taiwan Bubble tea, or Boba tea, has been a more and more popular drink worldwide and an emerging international symbol of Taiwanese food culture. Meanwhile, it has also been a growing business not just in Taiwan but in other countries, where investors with different national backgrounds have

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endeavored expanding the bubble tea market. The expansion of the bubble tea market outside Taiwan, however, has worried the Taiwanese merchants of bubble tea. One of the major concerns has been the loss of “authenticity” of bubble tea as a national food symbol of Taiwan. While more and more bubble tea shops seem to brand the authenticity of Taiwanese taste as a marketing strategy, tea merchants and business investors from Taiwan have worried that Taiwanese people have in fact gradually lost the power to define and to qualify the authenticity of bubble tea. As a result, although overseas Taiwanese bubble tea merchants are positive to the international expansion of bubble tea market, they have struggled over ways to claim and to retain bubble tea as the authentic food of Taiwan. In accordance, Taiwanese tea merchants, especially those running bubble tea business outside Taiwan, have taken every step of the processing know-how as the bordering force, by which Taiwanese people are able to draw a clear boundary to differentiate the authenticity of Taiwan from others. In accordance, Taiwanese tea merchants have tried to export a whole “package of authenticity,” including the raw material, processing machines, and customized services, from Taiwan to the other countries. This paper, as such, takes the expanding bubble tea market in Vietnam as the case study to demonstrate the scenario. Theoretically, we combine food nationalism, border, and mobility as the framework to analyze people’s everyday practices in producing and consumption bubble teas. Methodologically, we follow a group of Taiwanese bubble tea merchants in Vietnam to investigate the relationship between the mobility of processing techniques and the bordering of authenticity regarding the emerging Taiwanese bubble tea market in Vietnam. From that, we argue the overseas expansion of Taiwanese bubble tea market has faced a dilemma between bordering and de-bordering forces in running bubble tea businesses in Vietnam. This dilemma has then become a mechanism to reconstruct the culinary meaning of a national food icon, as seen in placing Taiwanese bubble tea in Vietnam.

POLITICS OF GATEWAY: NEGOTIATING CO-EXISTENCES AND GOVERNANCE ACROSS BORDERS II Convenor and Discussant: Yuk Wah Chan - City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R., China Chair: Chi-Ming Victor Chan – The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R., China Borders can be both rigid and fluid, constraining and facilitating, and promoting and discouraging connectivity. Borders exist to create social, political and economic divisions; yet, under certain circumstances, they also minimize differences and enhance material flows, human contacts, and technology and idea exchanges. Many border zones, in historical times, were not marginal regions, but prosperous strips of international trade corridors facilitating material flows and cultural diffusion. Border and borderland studies often inquire into the different political conditions and cultural climates under which border zones thrive as gateways for co-prosperity or impedes co-existence and development. This panel brings together a total of six papers, looking at a variety of borderlands (including those in-between Hong Kong and China, Vietnam and China, Malaysia and Singapore, and Russia and China) and development corridors (such as China-South Asia, China-Central Asia, and Taiwan-Southeast Asia). The papers will be located in two sub-panels with different emphases. This second sub-panel examines the actual co-existence and ground-level interactions of people. The BRI connects China to Central Asia and Caucasus and brings the Chinese afar. Susanne Fehlings discusses how border trade encourages a large number of Chinese to settle in Georgia and examines their encounters and strategies of co-existence with the local people. Naomi Chi looks at the plights of asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East who reached the border zones of Korea and Japan. Co-existence is out of the question as people in both countries hold a general animosity towards intruding refugees. Ironically, the acts of excluding refugees with the intention of protecting one’s identity and national borders have actually challenged the sense of Korean-ness and Japanese-ness and forced the people to reflect on their own status quo in the world. The third paper by Eva Hung and Olga Adams, on the other hand, looks at how shuttle traders (and carriers) negotiate and

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contest their border-crossing at the checkpoint in the Chinese-Russian borderland. Shuttle trade, though informal, is highly organized in accordance with the checkpoint setting. The border arrangement and hence the checkpoint setup thus allow the co-existence of both the formal and informal passage of border-crossers. Chinese in the Caucasus: Grassroots Encounters in the Periphery Susanne Fehlings - Goethe University, Germany In 1890 a man named Liu Jungzhou from China’s Guangdong province came to Georgia and started to cultivate tea in Chakvi, a little town at the Blacksea coast. Although this man and his colleagues may be perceived as ‘one of the first modern cases of Chinese migration to the Caucasus’, it is only in the 21. Century that Chinese became visible as an ethnic group in what has been part of the periphery of the tsarist empire and the Soviet Union. In Georgia, today, Chinese appearance is associated with the New Silk Road Initiative. Through this initiative, Chinese have expanded their outreach and have, one could argue, removed their borders into places, which are in far distance to the PRC. Borders, here, do not manifest in physical borderlines but in encounters between local populations and Chinese newcomers. These encounters are shaped by prejudges, conflict and rapprochement. Sinophobia is a common phenomenon in post-Soviet Eurasia. In a jargon taken from Marxist theory, stereotypes describe Asian cultures as backward and wild. At the same time, unlike Central Asia or India, China, especially in the 80s and 90s, was often romanticized. In the Caucasus it was (and still is) admired for its old and rich civilization, which was compared to local equivalents in the past. The Chinese, who have become active in Georgia since the early 2000s are entrepreneurs or representatives of Chinese state owned (construction) companies. Their encounters with local elites, businesspeople and employees are shaped by pragmatic considerations. Still, social and cultural factors play an important role. In this paper I describe how Chinese adapt to local circumstances, how they are perceived by locals, and how they build social relationships in the Caucasus. This paper thus is about borderwork in a setting, where borders have faded. As special role, here, is taken over by Chinese Muslims, Uyghurs, who became the most important Chinese investors in Georgia. To Be or Not To Be? The Plight of Asylum Seekers in East Asia Naomi Chi - Hokkaido University, Japan In 2015, over 500 Yemini refugees landed in the Jeju Island of South Korea to seek asylum. An article in the Foreign Policy referred to the reactions of people in South Korea as, “South Korean public reacted to these refugees with hysteria.” In Japan, out of 19000, 42 refugees were given asylum status in 2018. A young Nigerian man died as a result of a hunger strike to oppose the long detention at one of the immigration centres that detain overstayers and undocumented migrants. These incidents in Korea and Japan are the result of the increasing number of refugees that have sought to seek asylum in Japan and Korea, due to the instabilities in Africa and the Middle East. Both Japan and Korea are members of the OECD with developed economies, yet, the acceptance of refugees are very low and there is still a great animosity towards acceptance of refugees in these two countries. However, what is particularly interesting is that with the influx of refugees, Japan as an island country and Korea as de facto island country (due to the 38th parallel), the borders of these countries are being challenged from the outside and Korean-ness and Japanese-ness are being challenged at the same time. This has implications to migration issues in these two countries as well. This presentation will attempt to examine the background to the increase in the asylum seekers in Korea and Japan, the current situation and legal framework in the two respective countries, the reasons as to why the acceptance of refugees are so low in these two countries, and provide some insights regarding migration and nationalism through this refugee phenomena. The Contested Checkpoint: Brokerage and Negotiated Crossing at the Chinese-Russian Borders Eva Hung - Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R., China

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Olga Adams - Moscow State University, Russia This paper compares two border zones of Russia bordering Heilongjiang province of China, Pogranichny–Suifenhe and Blagoveshchensk–Heihe, and discusses how the checkpoint arrangement configures the organization of shuttle trade and hence border-crossing to and fro China and Russia. Border checkpoint is a state institution common to all nation-states. In most instances it is highly securitized if not militarized. It is the prime establishment responsible for regulating trans-boundary movements and enforcing the selective permeability of borders. As border crossings are allowed only at sanctioned points of entry and exit, checkpoints are therefore the point of power negotiation among state and non-state actors in the maintenance and modification of borders as an institution of selective passage. Different types of border crossings are guarded by different state agencies such as customs, immigration, border police and military. Oftentimes, a significant difference can be found between the two sides of a border in terms of strictness of checkpoint control. At the local level, it is the immigration and customs officials who constantly negotiate the application of laws and exercise the discretion to decide on which kinds of goods/people to let go, in what quantities, by whom, at which checkpoints, and in what moments. In this sense, repeated negotiation of the licitness of social and commodity movements is a key activity revolve around the checkpoints. We examine in this paper the checkpoint regime and the co-existence of formal and informal border-crossers. We will discuss how the brokerage of shuttle (or carrier) trade is organized in accordance with different checkpoint settings, in this case, a land vs. river checkpoint. We argue that while the trade is informal to the extent that it is shadowy, the trade is indeed highly organized with complex division of labor, and we describe such a combination of organized competence and informal networks as “organized informality”.

REDEFINING CITIZENSHIP, TRADE AND TRANSPORT: CROSSOVERS & COEXISTENCES IN THE INDO-MYANMAR BORDER ZONE

Convenor, Chair and Discussant: Erik de Maaker - Leiden University, The Netherlands This panel focus on the various modalities by which people and goods move across the Indo-Myanmar border, and the extent to which these movements are affected by changes in policies enacted by the two states. The border between India and Myanmar has earlier largely been porous, with small scale trade and movement of cross-border ethnic groups taking place regularly. Policies enacted with respect to the border are ambiguous. The two constituent states attempt to increasingly control and thus close the border, while they attempt to open it by encouraging regulated border trade. The border between India and Myanmar has come into existence in 1937, during British colonial rule. Much of the border, which has a total length of 1624 km, runs through mountainous terrain, which is difficult to access for state forces. The border, located far from the centers of the respective states, has long been considered peripheral. From the 1990s onwards, India developed first its ‘Look East’ and then its ‘Act East’ policy, which focused on formalizing and encouraging cross border trade with its Southeast Asian neighbors. While investments were made in facilities provided by border towns, and infrastructures were extended, informal movement of people and trade goods became increasingly restricted. The Indo-Bangladesh border is also gaining further new significances in the light of the controversial Indian policies currently enacted (or about the be enacted) regarding post-independence citizenship. The National Register of Citizens (enacted in Assam, proposed across India) deprives large groups of Muslims of their right of residence. The Citizenship Amendment Bill (proposed) intends to grant citizenship to non-Muslim refugees from neighboring states. The issues that are central to this panel are developed in four papers. Lalmalsawmi’s paper focuses on how people in the context of an institutionalized Free Movement Regime across the border have negotiated shared identities. Konwar’s paper sheds light on the border town of Pangsau

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in Arunachal Pradesh, and how border interactions at Pangsau have increased after the reconstruction of the long abandoned strategic cross-border Stilwell Road. Yumnam’s paper elucidates on border narratives of Moreh, a border town in Manipur. Mitra, focusing on the growth of Champhai, a border town in Mizoram, contends that cross-border relations could undergo a major shift through the new trade and citizenship regime. Collectively, the papers explore the dynamic created by the changing economics of trade, and the newly imposed politics of citizenship. Negotiating Identity and Mobility Across the Chin State-Mizoram International Border: An Analysis of the Free Movement Regime and Its Implications C.V. Lalmalsawmi - Jawaharlal Nehru University, India The Chins and Mizos are an ethnically homogenous group belonging to the Tibeto-Burman linguistic stock spread across India, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. They are however mostly concentrated in the contiguous areas of Chin State in northwest Myanmar and Mizoram in India’s northeast along an unfenced 510 km international border across the Tiau River. The Indo-Myanmar border region is situated at the crossroads of South and Southeast Asia The colonial and post-colonial state-making processes and ‘mindless cartographic surgery’ of the region’s ethnic political landscape have resulted in their subsequent separation into different countries, under different political systems and citizenships. The Free Movement Regime (FMR) is a significant bilateral agreement that came into existence as an official acknowledgment of the traditional linkages and unique co-existence between the border communities in the Indo-Myanmar region. Allowing for a 16 km visa-free travels on either side of the border, the FMR aims to facilitate the free flow of the people and improve their socio-cultural, trade and economic ties. The paper explores the various ways in which the Chins and Mizos negotiate their shared identities rooted in history, ethnicity, culture and tradition across the border and how these are juxtaposed with the differences (and hence practices) in their national and political identities. It critically analyzes the impact of the FMR mechanism on borderland lives and its many implications on the trans-border kinships and relationships between the Chins and Mizos, and the manner in which it regulates cross-border mobility and connectivity. The effectiveness of FMR in the context of a long porous border will also be examined. In doing so, the paper will rely on both primary and secondary data based on fieldwork interviews and literature comprising of local indigenous writings. Interpreting Cross-Border Connectivity: The Case of Moreh, Manipur Babyrani Yumnam - Binghamton University, State University of New York, United States Cross-border connectivity has been the buzzword within India’s policy circles since the inception of the Look East Policy (now Act East Policy) in the early 1990s. In a policy paradigm aiming to expand national economic and political interests in the Asia-Pacific region, Moreh, a sleepy town on the Indo-Myanmar border became one of the spotlights of ambitious cross-border infrastructure projects and initiatives. Since the Indo-Myanmar Border Trade Agreement in 1994, multiple reports and papers have been written about Moreh – its potential to become India’s ‘gateway to the East’, problems of viability, and concerns of increasing insurgency. From the state’s perspective, such an initiative of economic integration held the dual promise of ushering material progress and hence peace to a region beset with age-old problems of political instability, separatist movements, and underdevelopment. But what exactly does this newfound attention on border crossings and regional connectivity mean for the people? How is the re-constructed version of ‘connectivity’ perceived in a border zone characteristic of unrestricted mobility that was put to an end by colonial and post-colonial map-making exercises? Examining these questions with the help of informal conversations and unrecorded interviews with “area borderlanders” themselves (van Schendel 2002, Baud and van Schendel 1997), this paper highlights the multiple layers of meaning and actual experiences of mobility in India’s northeastern borderlands. Documenting border realities in Moreh, I contend, is an

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attempt to highlight border realities and call attention to the usually silent (and silenced) histories, narratives, and agencies of marginal histories (Winichakul 1993, 2003, Kalir and Sur 2012, Baud and van Schendel 1997). Understanding Cross-Border Narratives and Trade at Pangsau in India – Myanmar Border Juri Gogoi Konwar - Tezpur University, India North East India representing Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram and Assam has historical ties with Myanmar (Burma), one of the adjacent countries of South East Asia. Pangsu pass of India and Myanmar border in Arunachal Pradesh is an identified area where inter - border trade takes place, cultural exchange between the border inhabitants are seen. Situated on the crest of the Patkai Hills on the India-Myanmar border, the Pangsau Pass offers the easiest routes to Myanmar from Arunachal Pradesh. Cross-border movements of men and materials continued in a restricted manner in the Indo-Myanmar border in Changlang District. The Governments of India and Myanmar have permitted entry of peoples having certain terms and conditions. The informal trade activity in Pangsu Pass have increased recently due to conversion of the Stilwell Road into NH-153.The border trade at Pangsau serves a convergent point for the people of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Myanmar which traverses the social barriers, inspires strong bond among the people with diverse cultures and traditions and also helps in economic growth. This market is not only expected to encourage human welfare but also India’s ambitious ‘Act East Policy’. The paper tries to understand how everyday life is reflected in border narratives and the impact of Pansau pass market help in shaping peaceful co-existence in border areas. An attempt will be made to examine the narrative cluster to see how the concerned factors like socio- cultural relation, expressive behavior, economic need and survival tend to assist in leading a cordial relation between the two nations. Data will be collected in and around Pangsau pass market involving the Singphos and the Tangsas living in either side of the border. In this context, the upcoming Pangsau Pass International Festival, to be held in January 2020 is also targeted to explore. Speculating the Frontier City: New Urbanization in Northeast India Snehashish Mitra - National Institute of Advanced Studies, India The town of Champhai in Mizoram state (India) is located within 30 km of the Indo-Myanmar border which has expanded in recent years as the cross-border trade flow has increased. The paper interrogates the urban formation in Champhai which has been shaped by numerous legal/illegal flows across border. There has been a surge in the infrastructural activities in Champhai and Zokawthar (border settlement), on the basis of which the paper evaluates the ‘frontier’ status of the borderland and the prospect of Mizoram in India’s ‘Act East Policy’. Champhai district shares border with Chin province of Myanmar. Fieldwork was conducted in Champhai where in-depth and semi-structured interviews were carried out with respondents ranging from government officials, school teachers and businesswo(men). Data collected from government agencies, indicating tax collection and smuggling activities over time gives an idea about the changing/ unchanging nature of border trade and attempts by Mizoram state government to increase revenue generation. Through the findings the paper attempts to convey the ongoing transition in the border areas of Northeast India and the subsequent urbanisation with a set of stakeholders ranging from the local traders, migrant labours across the border, smugglers and state officials. The Chins and Mizos, are ethnically encompassed under the ‘Zo’ identity . National borders however have created a perception of different against the Chins from Chin province of Myanmar in Mizoram. Drawing on earlier instances of violence against the Chins in Mizoram, the paper raises question on how the question of citizenship will be reconciled in Champhai as the trade flow accentuates over time. The question of citizenship in India is going through a tectonic shift through

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National Register of Citizens and Citizenship Amendment Bill. This complicates new regime of politics over citizenship, influencing the interface of commerce, communities and mobilities in the Indian borderland.

RE-IMAGINING CONNECTIVITY: SOUTHEAST ASIAN BORDERLAND THROUGH THE LENSES OF ZONES, INFRASTRUCTURES, AND TECHNOLOGIES

Convenor and Chair: Pinkaew Laungaramsri - Chiang Mai University, Thailand Mega technologies such as large-scale railways, roads, and special economic zones have become the key driver that have profoundly shaped the way Southeast Asian borderlands are imagined. From economic corridors to the Belt and Road Initiatives, a new mode of regional connectivity has been promised— an accelerating economic integration with a unified large market through the network of infrastructure. Various borderlands have been turned into cohesive economic zones interconnected by both hard infrastructure such as rail and road links and soft infrastructure such as trade agreements. New forms of economic connectivity and capitalism brought by the infrastructure-driven economic growth have come to replace local trades and livelihoods. Rural infrastructure, however, has been put to an end or simply made irrelevant to the emerging metropole border. Yet, many of these mega infrastructure schemes do not necessary achieve the outcome it promised. The result is a clash in connectivity where mobility and prosperity are accessible only by a certain group of people. By contrast, everyday technology, as employed by those who are cast out of the development center often engenders a different mode of connectivity. Small-scaled, mobile, and de-centered, this type of subversive technology represents a significant site of re-imagining a borderland as home and intimate place of connectedness that often fall outside the mega trend of the infrastructure establishment. This panel brings together a comparative analysis of two modes of technology: the mega and everyday technologies in the making of the borderland. It explores the different ways in which different forms and scales of technology generate distinctive space of interaction, mode of exploitation, and regime of exchange and accumulation. Through four borderland cases, the papers in this panel analyze how different modes of technology and distinctive forms of connectivity have shaped and reshaped borderland relations and the ways in which the complex social and economic transformations are produced by technological encounter. By taking technologies as both things and relations which are defined by a multitude of practices, this panel aims to bring about further discussions on borderland development and the politic of bordering. Through the lenses of technologies, the panel also hopes to shed lights on the different ways in which connectivity is (re)imagined, aspired, and contested in the making of borderland and regional integration. Local Responses to China Global Connectivity: A Study of Transition in a Thai Border Town in the Light of the BRI Initiative Panitda Saiyarod – University of Cologne, Germany An ambitious strategy to connect China to the world named Belt and Road initiative has resulted in many enormous infrastructure projects across the globe including Southeast Asia. Thailand is recently facing tremendous changes in infrastructure influencing by Chinese government. Transnational roads, railways, bridges, ports have been building along the border towns with the promise of prosperity, trade barrier reduction, job creation, better connectivity to public service and peacebuilding. The central government of Thailand has generally welcomed these infrastructure investments; however, the transnational project on improving downstream navigation along the Mekong River by removing rocks and islets has been dramatically rising local resistance in a Thai border town, Chiang Khong.

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This paper aims to demonstrate the tension between government and locals concentrate on the fear of natural resource grabbing, livelihood changing, and environmental risk which affect local human security in Thailand. The relevant cases of Thai border towns encountering politically unstable will also be discussed to illustrate their anxiety of being overwhelmed by the Belt and Road projects. Additionally, this paper will explore how the anthropological approach has contributed to a better understanding of the relationship among infrastructure, society, environment and individual. The transnational infrastructure projects are not just technical objects, but they have been encoded with fantasy, dream, and expectation for better future of individuals and societies that ultimately lead to invisible politics on infrastructure and governmentality. Sponge Capitalism: Complexity and Connectivity of the Transborder Cattle Trade in the Greater Mekong Subregion Kengkij Kitirianglarp - Chiang Mai University, Thailand The cattle trade across the border in Southeast Asia has been long before the border of the nation state. The transborder cattle trade is characterized by long-distance trade that is mainly on foot while relying on middlemen who have been caravans. Over the last 2 decades, China has opened a country to connect trade with neighboring countries in the region. Especially in connection with trade routes and actors of the cattle trade. The arrival of China, the largest market, has dramatically changed the pattern and path of cross-border cattle trade as the Chinese capital has determined product quality, trade network and trade routes. Actors have to adjust themselves in order to cope with the uncertain flexibility according to the situation in China. According to its flexibility, various actors in the region, whether brokers, farmers and government officials, need to have the knowledge and skills to understand the changing situation within China Along with relying on various tools and a variety of ways to relate to the resilience and flow of the cattle trade that has influenced China, This article proposes that the characteristics of Chinese capitalism in the cross-border cattle trade network are similar to sponges, which in themselves are without a single given forms. And because it lacks a rigid form within itself, the capital, so-called a sponge capitalism, can rely on a large number of mechanisms and tools to absorb surplus in terms of labor and resources in the region. The interaction with the incoming Chinese capital is therefore necessary to understand and find a way to face the flexibility and devoid of the trap of fixed trade forms. China’s Transnational Special Economic Zones in Southeast Asia: Fluid Capital, Infrastructure Practices, and Multi-scaled Assemblage Pinkaew Laungaramsri - Chiang Mai University, Thailand This research examines China’s transnational special economic zones (CTSEZs). As a transnational state capital, CTSEZs connect various actors together that form a multi-scaled assemblage that buttress the expansion of global China’s capitalism. Focusing on the fluidity of Chinese capital, this research investigates the varieties of Chinese capital as they operate independently and having established in certain national borders on a long-term basis. These capitals, despite the different backgrounds and origins, share a common characteristic—that is an ability to move towards a prospective region deemed politically and economically significant by China. CTSEZs therefore represent a liquid capitalscape that is always transforming, similar to the China’s model of development that has never been static but constantly shifting (from ‘going out’ strategy to its evolution into the Belt & Road Initiative) in response to a new mode of global imagining and in reaction to external pressures. Central to the research is the way in which a varieties and hierarchy of the Chinese state capital have economically and politically taken myriad forms and scales of engagement to negotiate its economic goals and the complex way in which the borderland have been turned into an infrastructure space through the establishment of special economic zones. This project is a comparative research in three CTSEZs in Southeast Asia comprising the Shwe Kokko Special Economic Zone in Myanmar, the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in northwestern

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Laos, and the Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone in Cambodia. As an infrastructure practice, the formation of these zones have not only involved capital mobility and accumulation with its mega infrastructure materiality fundamental to the Chinese urbanism and modernization, but the zone’s standards, regulations, and models have also had a profound impact on rural borderland infrastructure and livelihood. It is this complex form of interaction and connectivity brought by China’s zone infrastructure that has become the key driver of rapid social transformation of the borderland in Southeast Asia. Re-placing Borderland/ Re-imagining Home: Tamil immigrant and Everyday technology used in downtown Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Sorayut Aiem-Ueayut - Free University of Berlin, Germany In the past decade, the borderland has experienced across geopolitical issues between countries into the unclear area that contains the features of exceptional space. Simultaneously it has been presenting the traces of ex-regulation ruptures from the former geographical and the intense connectivity to re-imaging the unclear area for the human existence. This paper examines the questions on how borderland is drawn on the new place and how the technological practise can re-imagine the unclear area. The topic discussion is based on object-oriented enquiry and focused on the various forms of media technology that is evolving in the Tamil immigrant community in downtown Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, included three sub-topics. Firstly, the rising of borderland in downtown, which is enclosed with the demanding of labour by the fast-track economic development. The media technologies such as camera and printer are used as the immigration equipment to transform the Tamil into material forms in the local studio. Moreover, the (il)legal process and the crossing border can be started and end up in downtown which far away from the borderline, because “the checkpoint” is hidden in a little corner in the restaurant/shop in the area. The Tamil immigrant perceives this system in their term Kangani or migrant recruitment. Secondly, using a smartphone is the nexus for re-imagining the unclear area of downtown to be home. In the Tamil term Vittuku Pohren means been home, this term is instead the act of calling back home in South India. On this sense, the everyday technological object can lead to the new form of displacement, change the status of the user from stranger labour into the long-distance sense of belonging. Lastly, this study develops the idea of borderland within the zone of technology to contribute to a more vivid of border living in the motion.

SHAPING LIVES AT CONTEMPORARY ASIAN BORDERLANDS:

PRESENT SCENARIOS, FUTURE IMAGINATIONS I Convenor and Chair: Éva-Rozália Hölzle - Bielefeld University, Germany Connecting to the third theme of the conference, in this panel, we will focus on the question of how lives are shaped in contemporary Asian borderlands. “Shaping lives” has a double connotation and points towards a two-dimensional process. On the one hand, it draws attention on global, national and local forces that frame and impact human lives. On the other hand, it indicates the efforts and desires of individuals and groups to organize and form their existences creatively. The panel, therefore, focuses on the dynamics of structure and agency. It looks simultaneously at how these two forces collide at one time and harmonize at another in determining and forming lifeworlds at the borderlands. We invite panel presenters to consider the following questions: What are the contemporary global, national and local trends and discourses that translate into concrete policies, interventions or practices, which have the potential to impact lives at Asian borderlands? How do these shape lives on the ground? How do individuals and collectives respond and react to these

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interventions? What are the local understandings/perceptions of life and how do they differ from conventional and established global, national or regional frameworks? Decisive trends might unfold and surface in the present, but they also have significance for the future. They influence events yet to come and lives to be born but also shape how people imagine the future in the present. While the here and now does not entirely determine, it delineates potential futures of coming generations. In light of these, how do borderlanders imagine their futures? How and with what kind of hopes and fears are the next generations bestowed? This panel’s overall objective is to take a deeper look at how political and existential matters get entangled at borderlands. Such a focus draws attention to the fact that life is not merely regulated by but rather is the central issue at stake in politics (Fassin 2009). It implies everyday struggles and survival strategies of people. But it also indicates an effort in assuring the survival of the (nation)state, especially at its margins where state rule and law is volatile and requires continuous re-establishment (Asad 2004). Instead of casting them aside, this panel welcomes, therefore, attention to ambiguities and ambivalences that borderlands often attract and accumulate and that unfold in the structure of everyday life. Shaping Lives of the Enclave or ‘New’ Citizens in North Bengal, India Nasreen Chowdhory - University of Delhi, India The paper explores hierarchies of immobility that refugees/ citizens/ migrant experience during the conflict and the subsequent integration into the period of internal displacement. Population on the move from their place of origin often face severe challenges while they relocate to new areas. Some of these challenges faced appears in the form of hierarchy of belonging that prevents access of opportunity to refugee/ migrant communities. While facing challenges of integration, these communities face severe discrimination from host communities as well as the state apparatus. The forms of anxieties have adverse reaction on the members in the families. The story of chit or enclave people will be explored to break the binary of sedentary vs. immobility of people. The discourse on ‘mobility turn’ within social sciences tends to focus on ‘objects and subjects on the move’ that privilege the primordial linkages between people and place and their societal context (Urry and Sheller 2006; Malkki 1992). The paper interrogates the narratives of integration of new citizens in the northern part of Bengal in India. Data collected in the North Bengal especially in various relocated camps of former chit people suggest a nuanced understanding of rights of those who are indeed citizens, yet lead lives of non-citizens. The paper examines the experiences of immobility of new citizens in North Bengal, India. Southern China and Southeast Asia as (In)distinct: Shaping Lives along the Lao-China Border Phill Wilcox - Bielefeld University, Germany Conventional discourse on Asia argues that East Asia ceases at China’s borders with Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar and from these South East Asia commences, thus providing a clear delineation between these regions. Those living within ASEAN countries are expected to assume an identity that promotes ASEAN values and to acquire at least a basic knowledge of other ASEAN nations, whose flags are a common feature at public events. Yet to those who live in this borderland, lives are also shaped heavily by the region further north, thus rendering a distinction between South East Asia and Southern China increasingly redundant. This is particularly so in the age of increased connectivity, coexistence and increased movement across borders and especially as Chinese influence becomes apparent along its Southern borders and stretches further into those countries. While a source of considerable concern to critics especially of Chinese infrastructure development in poorer countries in Southeast Asia, this paper contends the situation is far more nuanced, complex and often contradictory than it first appears. Utilising Laos and its border with China as a case study, this paper argues that many local people living in border areas consider themselves very connected with China and negotiate their life worlds increasingly through and around the opportunities that increased

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coexistence offers through cross border work, study and consumption. This allows for the border as something to negotiate and transcend in future aspirations. Researched through detailed ethnography in Northern Laos, this paper argues that narratives of China in Laos and Southeast Asia generally often pay insufficient attention to grassroots agency and demonstrates how people shape their own lives along and through borderlands, as well as being shaped by the changing landscape around them. Borders in a Transboundary Landscape: On the Quest to Cure Mountains and People Martin Saxer – LMU Munich, Germany The “transboundary landscape approach” is an idea that gained considerable traction in the world of conservation and development. Looking at one particular transboundary landscape initiative in the borderlands of India, China and Nepal, I ask what happens when the notion of transboundary meets with the politics and fear to even mention borders. Reflecting on planning sessions and workshops I sat through as a research fellow in an international development organization, I explore how current mainstream ideas inform programmes and work on the ground. I analyze the partial erasures and various misunderstandings inherent in transboundary development and conservation work and show how the notion of a transboundary landscape – for all its benefits – glosses over the dreams and ambitions of those it seeks to help. I argue that unlike earlier “schemes to improve the human condition” imbued with high-modernist hubris (Scott 1998), the current mainstream of development discourse with its focus on green and participatory approaches calls for a different analytic perspective. I develop the idea of “curation at large” in order to critically analyze interventions in the name of development and conservation. Curation is thereby not understood in the museum sense of the term, but rather in its original meaning of curare: to heal or to cure – the fragile mountain ecosystem, cultural heritage, and people suffering from underdevelopment. A Bridge that Nobody Wants? Critical Infrastructure at the Sino-Myanmar Border Anja-Désirée Senz - Heidelberg University, Germany The border regions between Southwest China (Yunnan province) and Northern Myanmar (Shan State) are changing rapidly in the last years due to increasing cross-border trade, infrastructure investments and movement of people. The paper will discuss such dynamics with particular regard to transport and energy infrastructures, that at the same time have positive and negative effects to local communities. Such types of connectivity allow for more economic activities and income, but enable resource extraction and exploitation, too. Roads and bridges for example change landscapes, living places and the scale of regions, allow new forms of motorized transportation, modify patterns of trade and consumption. They as well challenge administrative management and local power structures. By linking them to regional and international arenas, they deeply influence local communities and because of such tremendous impacts are understood here as “critical”. The paper will take a village close to the official Sino-Myanmar border as a case study to investigate the lifeworld of the inhabitants and the ways local people are embedded and navigating through local, regional and national contexts, yet often left alone by a weak state administration and a lack of regulations that call for local self-organization in particular in controversial situations. Through the example of infrastructure building at the local level and the practical attempt to construct a bridge near-by the village, conflicts about land property and use are addressed, pro and contra arguments of the local community are presented and local survival strategies at “in-between spaces” of two very different states (the Myanmari and the Chinese state) are explored. The study takes the concept of mobility as a theoretical and methodological anchor and is based on fieldwork conducted in the border area since 2015.

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SHAPING LIVES AT CONTEMPORARY ASIAN BORDERLANDS:

PRESENT SCENARIOS, FUTURE IMAGINATIONS II Convenor and Chair: Anja-Désireé Senz - Heidelberg University, Germany Connecting to the third theme of the conference, in this panel, we will focus on the question of how lives are shaped in contemporary Asian borderlands. “Shaping lives” has a double connotation and points towards a two-dimensional process. On the one hand, it draws attention on global, national and local forces that frame and impact human lives. On the other hand, it indicates the efforts and desires of individuals and groups to organize and form their existences creatively. The panel, therefore, focuses on the dynamics of structure and agency. It looks simultaneously at how these two forces collide at one time and harmonize at another in determining and forming lifeworlds at the borderlands. We invite panel presenters to consider the following questions: What are the contemporary global, national and local trends and discourses that translate into concrete policies, interventions or practices, which have the potential to impact lives at Asian borderlands? How do these shape lives on the ground? How do individuals and collectives respond and react to these interventions? What are the local understandings/perceptions of life and how do they differ from conventional and established global, national or regional frameworks? Decisive trends might unfold and surface in the present, but they also have significance for the future. They influence events yet to come and lives to be born but also shape how people imagine the future in the present. While the here and now does not entirely determine, it delineates potential futures of coming generations. In light of these, how do borderlanders imagine their futures? How and with what kind of hopes and fears are the next generations bestowed? This panel’s overall objective is to take a deeper look at how political and existential matters get entangled at borderlands. Such a focus draws attention to the fact that life is not merely regulated by but rather is the central issue at stake in politics (Fassin 2009). It implies everyday struggles and survival strategies of people. But it also indicates an effort in assuring the survival of the (nation)state, especially at its margins where state rule and law is volatile and requires continuous re-establishment (Asad 2004). Instead of casting them aside, this panel welcomes, therefore, attention to ambiguities and ambivalences that borderlands often attract and accumulate and that unfold in the structure of everyday life. Looking both ways: Social and Symbolic Aspects of the Local Administration of the Isan-Lao Borderland Brett Le Saint - Center for Studies and Comparative Research in Ethnology - Montpellier, France As the Thai-Lao border separates the northeastern part of Thailand (Isan) and the Vientiane Plain, it has been described to have divided the ethnic Lao population into two different national entities. Following these assumptions, academic literature and Thai mass media considerate most of the northeastern region population to be of Lao origin which have led the Thai conservative voices to look at this population as suspect of disloyalty regarding the Thai state. Based on a 15 months ethnography of two villages situated on each side of the Mekong River, my proposal aims to question those assumptions and will focus on the licit but illegal aspects of local border administration which is partly based on the mutual acquaintance of border actors. Inherited from a long history of transborder mobility across the river, mutual understanding, kinship ties and working relationships are still structuring the crossings from one bank to another. Nevertheless, this mutual acceptance inherited from the past encompasses much more than a simple tolerance between metaphorical (and sometimes real) kin. First, this mutual acceptance isn’t so mutual as Thai people crosses the border much less frequently. Second, these asymmetric uses of the border has to be analyzed regarding the global, regional and local socio-political transformations and the way it has structured a real economy of desire at the border since the end of the Vietnam War. Through the analysis of

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these differentiated trends toward the uses and the administration of the border, my proposal attempts to show that the ambivalence of the relationship between Isan and Lao people reflects the intermediate position of the former in a regional geopolitical order and how life at the border can partially free itself from state regulation policies while being largely shaped by a diffuse nationalist rhetoric and the symbolic order it bears. De-/Re-/Boundaries in Zone of Indeterminacy: Peasant Workers in Sheznen, China I-Chieh Fang - National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan This research was mainly conducted in an electronics factory, THS in Shenzhen, special economic zone (SEZ) in China. O'Donnell, Wong and Bach (2017) pointed out that what makes Shenzhen thrive is its looseness and spatial exceptionalism, which arose mostly not from a plan but from the conjecture of various cultural and economic systems. At first glance, it is mixed, informal and chaotic, like a liminal space with ‘an ideology of informality, risk, and experimentation’. It allows movement across borders and values “steps up” and “steps down”. Jamie Cross (2014) terms the SEZ in India a ‘dream zone’. People coming here harbour dreamed of and desired futures which constitute, sustain and disrupt capitalism in contemporary India. It is arguable that the character of Shenzhen, as a SEZ, is ambiguity. It harbours dreams as well as nightmares. Here, rampant speculations accompany hopes for modernity and profit. And resistance cannot be assumed. During my fieldwork, the flexible, moveable and manipulatable characteristics of boundaries of various kinds are observable and experienced on a daily basis. The environment has encouraged people to develop countless knowledge, skills and philosophy to utilize such blurriness, uncertainty, and ambiguity. The migrant comes to learn and master it as a crucial way to survive here. Through analysing the life stories of peasant workers, this paper attempts to elaborate what social techniques these peasant workers develop to ‘evade, evoke and provoke the movement across its bordered spaces"(O'Donnell, Wong and Bach 2017: 4) Staying or Moving. Government Compliance and Agency in Post-Zomia Guido Sprenger - Heidelberg University, Germany James Scott has claimed that upland Southeast Asians consider the base of good life being their distance from state intrusion and the realization of freedom and independence. However, he qualified this by restricting his Zomia hypothesis to the period before World War II. Following this argument would imply to consider the current state of the uplands as post-Zomian or, in Bourdier’s terms, internal Zomian – people who pursue their ideas of a good life within the framework of a state in which they are marginalized minorities. As village-based non-Buddhist swiddeners in the uplands of Laos, the Rmeet are obvious candidates for such a description. The Lao government pursues a politics of moving remote villages closer to traffic infrastructure. The Rmeet in Luang Nam Tha Province have responded variously to these demands. Some villages and individual households complied with government pressure but remarkably, portray their decision to move in terms of their own agency. Others, like the village of Takheung, refused and negotiated their own way of complying with government ideas. This paper demonstrates how varieties of responses to state demands realize diverging visions of the good life, that are unified by the value people place on their own agency. Beyond 'Good Life': Politics of Survival at the Bangladesh-Tripura Border Éva-Rozália Hölzle - Bielefeld University, Germany The distinction between biological and socio-political existence has gained wide acceptance in different areas of disciplines, including social anthropology. The concept of ‘good life' has deepened this separation even further. The recent ‘anthropology of life' questions this dichotomy while drawing attention to the fact that life lived ‘integrates its various forms without rupture, linking bodily existence and immaterial survival, nature, and history' (Fassin, 2010:85). Following this new

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trend in my paper I will make use of the notion of survival since it allows combining different dimensions of life and at the same time it enables to explore how the political and the existential are entangled in the everyday. It also steers the attention towards action and dynamism instead of a condition that the idea of ‘good life' tacitly implies. For the art of living is not necessarily a life lived well but attains a value through the quest for life. The ethnographic study through which I will explore these points concentrates on a small War-Khasi village at the Bangladesh-Tripura border. Since the late 1990s villager's existence is under threat due to the expansion plans of a tea garden under which the villagers live and cultivate betel leaf since the British time. While the battleground between the villagers and the tea garden owner over the right to live is often the courtrooms, occasionally the village itself becomes a site where the disputes erupt in physical violence. Through the close examination of these clashes, two particularities surface. First, for villagers, the struggle to survive is deeply political since it also entails their cultural survival. Second, while for the tea garden administration the border is an obstacle, for the Khasis is a chance in the courtrooms and outside of it.

TECHNOLOGIES AT THE PERIPHERY: BORDERS, MATERIALITIES AND CULTURE

Convenor: Khetrimayum Monish Singh - The Centre for Internet and Society, India Chair: Amarjit Gurumayum Sharma - Jawaharlal Nehru University, India The idea of the Northeast India still tends to remain within a landlocked perspective, largely driven by rhetoric of developmentalism. This has shaped the discourse of understanding Northeast with centre-periphery policy and planning approach on infrastructures and development. However, till now very little to almost no attention has been directed in understanding the presence of technology, its infrastructures and, as a result, the creation of specific forms of culture (popular culture, informal markets, digital practices) in the borderland. This moves away from the usual focus and debate on the centre-periphery of top-down approach on planning development to a focus upon the presence of technology in the peripheral, giving rise to specific forms of consumption and practices. The understanding of the above is based on four case studies from Assam and Manipur, two borderland states from this region. This panel seeks to mobilise the understanding of various meanings of peripheral fluidity, and the subsequent emergence of alternate practices as result of technology. More specifically, the first and second case studies on border control measures, and cross-border economy of hardware goods reflect specific forms of cultural and informal outcomes. Furthermore, the third and the fourth case studies highlight specific forms and extent of consumptions of cross border technologies with examples of Korean pop culture and virality of social media memes from Bangladesh. With these case studies the larger engagement of this panel will be to try and locate material entanglements of infrastructures as a meaningful way of understanding the emerging cultures, which in turn challenge the way the region has been understood and engaged with. Making Borders Smart: Electronic Surveillance and Fluid Borders in Assam Khetrimayum Monish Singh - The Centre for Internet and Society, India In the wake of political rhetoric and legal concerns around the question of ‘illegal immigration’ in India, there has been a reinvigorated policy mobilization around the question of securitization and on the need for territorial reinforcement. In recent times, this has been specially in the form of newer technologies of international border control around the world, and more so in India. In this context, this paper focuses on the border control policies in Assam, largely due to the legal provisions and political history around ‘illegal immigration’ in these border states from Bangladesh. For this, the case study specifically focuses on the various methods of electronic surveillance of a 61 Kms stretch

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of international riverine border into Bangladesh by the Brahmaputra river in the Dhubri district. This includes parts on which habitable riverine islands/ areas (chars) exist and which represent the fluid nature of cross-border mobilities, now largely governed through hi-tech electronic surveillance to detect movement. Through this, the paper attempts to analyze the ‘sociotechnical building and maintenance’ of this infrastructure which represents larger concerns around ‘cartographic anxieties’ and securitization, and the role and mediation of digital technology in this ‘governance of risks.’ Circulation, Technology, and the Social Economy of Informal Practices: The Case of Moreh/ Namphalong Market in the Indo-Myanmar Rajiv Kumar Mishra - Jawaharlal Nehru University, India Khetrimayum Monish Singh - The Centre for Internet and Society, India The idea of circulation represents a flux, understood both in terms of the ‘forms of circulation’ as well as the ‘circulation of forms’. The former denotes the nature of the circulation, while the latter focuses on forms of content circulating in a given geographical area, both reflecting unique and specific cultural practices. This paper focuses on the circulation of technological artefacts, specifically hardware, such as electronics parts, mobile phones, accessories, and other such devices through Moreh (in Tengnoupal District), a town in Manipur (India) and through Namphalong Market (Myanmar) – international twin markets across the Indo-Myanmar border. The paper argues through this case study, that this cross-border trade transactions becomes one way of understanding the political economy of informal expertise, which emerge largely based on informal learning and negotiates the formal structures of economy and ways of accessibility of goods and services. For the case study, the paper uses data based on unstructured interviews and informal discussions in the Moreh/ Namphalong Markets in an attempt to understand the political economy and the informal practices enabled by these cross-border transactions. Memes Beyond Borders: Understanding the Virality of Bangladeshi Meme Content in Assam Sagorika Singha - Sarai, Centre for Study of Developing Societies, India This paper is intrigued by the current popularity of Bangladeshi social media content in the forms of videos, GIFs and memes in Assam and neighbouring states. By focussing on such content, generally consisting of hilarious Sylheti dubbed over Bollywood film segments, and spoofy, low-quality content of Bangladeshi Hero Alom of the so-bad-that-it’s-good kind, this paper introduces the conception of trivial mobile media matter. TMMM refers to transborder sharing of mundane, mostly social and mobile-media based, content which are triggered by cultural and linguistic affinity and access. These exchanges, both via the sharing of the content and the conversation online that follows, take place beyond the scope of the broader political dialogue and acts as an informal extension of transregional engagement impelled by otherwise trivial, social media ‘drivels’. These content and conversations, however, when read against the grain of the history across territories, reveal an alternative way of comprehending the transforming histories and new perspectives on borders and contested states. It opens up the subversive possibilities in imagining territories through the notion of marginalities, new media and shared affinities. Culture as Content, Content as Culture: Tracing the Korean Wave in Manipur Sylvia Sagolsem - University of Delhi, India The unprecedented and ongoing popularity of the Korean Wave or ‘Hallyu’ phenomenon in the northeastern region in India, especially Manipur, has been a result of several cultural and political reasons. First was the definitive banning of mainstream Indian popular culture (Hindi movies) by sub nationalist separatist groups in the state since 2000. This move was based on the agenda of protecting the local culture and tradition from ‘cultural imperialism’ of the Hindi cinema industry. Consequently, a vacuum was created which alienated generations from the Hindi Cinema Industry;

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and led to the introduction of Korean popular culture (movies, TV series, fashion, food habit and language) among the local population through various media. Second was the political economy of Korean cinema and TV dramas through Korean satellite channels such as Arirang TV and KBS World. Moreover, K-Pop music videos are also available due to the geographical ease of regional access through cross border trade markets, filling the demands of the local market fueled by a preexisting cultural affinity to East and Southeast Asian regions. This paper, while tracing the longer history of this phenomenon through older media practices, specifically focuses on the transnational and cross border flows of cultural content through the proliferation and diffusion of K-Pop content through the local market economy; and the emergence of newer forms of sub cultural content among the younger generation mediated through the ubiquity of smartphones over the last few decades.

TECHNOLOGIES OF CONTROL AND POLITICAL ORDERS IN ASIAN BORDERLANDS Convenor and Chair: Benjamin Hopkins – The George Washington University, United States Discussant: Francesco Buscemi - Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Italy Throughout the 20th century, Asian borderlands experienced significant political transformations as states engaged in various forms of sovereignty claiming projects in their respective peripheries. At the same time, the peripheral groups have incorporated to and sometimes resisted against the state expansion. The interactions between state and non-state actors in the region have produced varying shades of political orders. This panel engages with researchers from history, sociology, and political science to examine the uneven, contingent, and dynamic processes of social and political transformation in Asian borderlands. Specifically, the panelists examine how the technologies of control employed by state and non-state actors impact the production of authority and political orders in the borderlands through historical and contemporary case studies. Hopkins examines the development and diffusion of frontier governance institution across the British Empire colonies globally in the late 19th century. He shows how colonial state-building at the margin of the empire was deeply embedded in local political topography and culture and eventually reconstituted the political authority of the metropole metropolitan center. Kim traces the evolution of the state strategies that attempt to incorporate their respective frontiers to newly independent India and Myanmar. She argues the choice of state strategies to incorporate control borderlands was contingent on the local politics and deeply endogenous to the changing relationship between the frontier groups and the state centers. Chakrabarty explores the concept of legibility in the borderland state of Assam, located in North-East India. In so doing, she focuses on the state’s implementation of the National Register of Citizens to differentiate citizens from non-citizens, which in turn re-created ethnocentric sentiments around the notion of indigenousness. Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State Benjamin Hopkins – The George Washington University, United States Historically, how have states deal with the troublesome peoples of the periphery whose seeming culturally conditioned violence, pecuniary, and lack of ‘civilization’ make them poor candidates for regular state administration? This paper traces the development of a particular form of rule which cropped up along the external frontier of the emerging state system from the late nineteenth century onwards, and in doing so became globally ubiquitous. Beginning with British India and its Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) which formed the basis of administration along the North-West Frontier, this paper follows the proliferation of nearly identical colonial and national codes from

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mandatory Iraq and Palestine, to colonial Nigeria and Kenya, as well as South Africa, to Arizona and Argentina. Like the FCR, all these codes enforced a distinct form of authority which ruled the rhetorically ‘independent’ indigenous inhabitants of the borderlands by their own ‘customs and traditions’. This frontier governmentality excluded frontier dwellers from the modernizing influences of the state, rendering them not colonial subjects but rather imperial objects. Their story complexifies and enriches our understanding of the colonial state-building projects of the late nineteenth century. Rather than simply being a copy of the Westphalian states then being constructed in Europe, the colonial state was a hybrid, deeply entwined with the local political topography and culture but at the same time productive of new forms and norms of politics. Many of these originated along the frontier and were re-ingested into the heartlands of colonial authority – and onward to the metropolitan center. The margins made the metropole. The Shadows of the Sovereign: Competition, Coalition, and State Consolidation in Frontiers of Myanmar and India Min Jung Kim - American University, United States This paper examines the bottom-up process of post-independence state consolidation in the peripheries of India and Myanmar. It argues that the extension of state control in border regions (or lack thereof) is a deeply endogenous process that is sensitive to the local political dynamics and the subsequent center-periphery coalition building. I illustrate this argument by comparing the experiences of two of India's border hill districts -- Nagaland and Mizoram -- and Myanmar’s border hill regions -- Kachin and Chin -- as they transitioned into more autonomous territorial units within the Indian and Myanmar union respectively. These four peripheral regions share similar structural conditions and disintegrated violently after independence, but were subsequently reconstituted differently. Each case differs in its political transformation partly due to the nature of local politics and how political and violence entrepreneurs in the periphery are linked with the state center at various points in time. Some local actors gained access to government resources through grants of administrative, political, and fiscal autonomy. Local actors who allied with the state center leveraged their government connections to ensure local dominance and hegemony over their rivals. At the same time, the state center utilized local proxies for mobilizing electoral support and stability in contested frontiers. Tracing the changing politics in the peripheries and resulting center-periphery coalitions provides a mechanism for understanding how states govern their territories. The divergent experiences of order-making in India and Myanmar’s peripheries provide a rare opportunity to examine "the state" from below, emphasizing the agency of local actors in shaping the contour of the state formation process. The Making of the Citizens and Non-Citizens through the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam Anindita Chakrabarty - Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India The paper aims to understand how technologies of controlling population are devised by the contemporary state, in the context of the National Register of Citizens (NRC henceforth) in the North East Indian State of Assam. In so doing, the paper interrogates how borders come to be lived through the process of identifying the genuine citizens or the ‘indigenous’ and the ‘doubtful’, playing a determinant role in the logic of state control. The NRC aims to differentiate citizens from non-citizens, and entails a bio-political initiative on the part of the state to control the inhabitants. The paper unravels how this bureaucratic initiative and its implementation are experienced in everyday life, entailing conflicting notions of belonging, citizenship, or residency in the two valleys of the state of Assam, namely the Barak and the Brahmaputra, and create newer created newer ethnocentric feelings. This forms the foundation for newfangled drives for displacement and dispossession in Assam.

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The contemporary exercise of finalising the ‘authentic citizens’ through the NRC documents lineage of forefathers acquired through what is termed as the ‘legacy data’, and proof of residence of persons in India prior to the cut-off date of the midnight of 24th March, 1971. The borderland state of Assam however is characterised by its shared history, cultural familiarity, and socio-linguistic commonness with erstwhile East Bengal and present Bangladesh. The technological control on the populace thus represents the state’s imposition of objectifying attempts to define culturally specific identity according to a statist discourse. Therefore it is necessary to understand how technologies come to define the very notion of citizenship and the relatedness between borders and the categorisation of citizens and their delineations. The paper thus addresses the evolution of the endogenous forms of technology in South Asia, with a specific focus on contemporary India. THE FAMILIAR STRANGERS: DISCONNECTIONS IN THE SOUTHERN PAKISTAN-INDIA BORDERLANDS Convenor and Chair: Mustafa Khan – SOAS University of London, United Kingdom In the proposed panel we aim to approach a borderland spanning the region between the province of Sindh and the states of Rajasthan and Gujarat in India as place and space of transforming border regimes. In approaching the activation of borders in this region from a perspective of border regimes, we aim to trace and relate different struggles and structures of power impacting on the border and its social, political and economic functions for people in the borderland. These lands were divided in 1947 as the British left India, dividing territory into nominally Hindu and Muslim nations as they did so. Subsequently, most partition scholarship has focused on Punjab, and more recently Bengal, as stories of violence, displacement and loss became part of national narratives. Themes of memory, trauma and forgetting have come to dominate the field. Existing scholarship is however largely backward looking, dwelling on severed traditions, divided populations and lost forms of commensality and culture. Almost nothing has been written about how the Partition affected Sindh and Gujarat-Rajasthan: the southern borderlands of the western partition. Here the border was drawn through the sparsely populated Rann of Kutch and Thar Desert. The people there were often nomadic, at one extreme as pastoralists with local horizons and at the other international merchants with interests in Karachi, Bombay and further afield. At the time, there was little noteworthy violence and the pre-existing mobility of the most-affected populations perhaps made displacement less traumatic. The proposed panel brings together a set of scholars who are deeply involved in empirical research on these most particular of Asian borderlands in order to develop a lexicon of thought from the margins. These papers explore ideas of regionalism, caste, religion, mobility, development, language, borders and remembrance. Together, the material draws together a range of themes and preoccupations that have given these regions a particular character and consequently particular post-colonial conditions. Making them look the Other Way! The (Ir)rationality of Road Building in Sindh Mustafa Khan - SOAS University of London, United Kingdom Pakistan is undergoing massive road construction in previously inaccessible and peripheral territories, which is now represented as a major element of nation building. This chapter will focus on a set of roads being built in Tharparkar, south eastern Sindh, bordering both Gujarat and Rajasthan to facilitate access to a coal field. Today the strategic motivations for infrastructure

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construction are increasingly downplayed by the discourse of transnational connectivity in trade and development which transportation infrastructures are said to facilitate. Often brought under the umbrella of so-called “economic corridors” such massive infrastructures interventions are, we are told by the proponents of such projects, means for commercial and cultural exchanges, not devices of securitisation. This chapter will argue that road making in contested border regions of South Asia have their own logic, and often are processes of a thorough spatial reorganization as new roads increase connectivity, as well as the circulation of some people, some goods, and some capital. The decolonization process in South Asia involved partitions with the supposition that borders needed to divide different religious communities, who were unable to co-exist. In Tharparkar, the possibility of ongoing relations across the border, and the perceived permeability, instability and tenuousness of the India-Pakistan borders has been translated into a ‘cartographic anxiety’ about national survival that are violently mapped out on territory. In social science literature, road -making is seen as essential to the territorial process, often seen as the ‘handmaiden to state making’. However, the first road in Tharparkar was only built in 1987, almost four decades after independence. The process of ‘territoriality’ in the borderlands of Pakistan had followed its own trajectory: a claim for the rights over the people and territory followed by rights over its resources. The process of ‘state making’ here in its earlier avatar focused on systems of ‘coercion’ which aimed to override earlier ideas of ‘loyalty’ to kinship and sectarian groups towards the new nation-state, through a process of ‘controlling ‘and ‘reducing’ mobility of largely pastoral population, and by mapping the ‘border’, which involved violent conflict with India, and has now been followed with a greater interest in exploiting the districts natural resources leading to increasing investments in infrastructure. Sindh as a ‘Green Place’: Historic Memories of Mobility and Connections in Western Rajasthan Borderland Neha Meena -Jawaharlal Nehru University, India Historically, the Thar desert has been a homeland of various mobile communities, such as pastoralists. With the Partition of Indian subcontinent these nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoral communities, like Raikas, ended up residing and separated on the two sides of the India-Pakistan international border. Thereafter, the procedures of construction of restrictive border and nation-building have created situations of separation and loss of connections (in terms of social, cultural and economic) for pastoralists on both sides of the border. Despite that, even after decades of separation from those in Pakistan, people on the Indian side remember their connections with them, who are now politically denoted as ‘other’ and ‘stranger’, through emotions of loss, separation, and nostalgia. This chapter interrogates the perception, imagination, and memories of the border through oral narratives of Raika pastoralists in the western Rajasthan. The idea is to trace the historical memories of mobility, relationships and pastoral way of life of Thar region to the present day ‘sensitive’ border areas of Rajasthan. I intend to explore, in what ways in the present the Raika pastoralists perceive their past relationships with those who have become ‘other’, i.e., pastoralists on the Pakistani side of the India-Pakistan border? The broader aim is to understand affects of the border on historical relationships of Raikas with pastoralists of Sindh in the situations where the Indian state has largely ignored their mobility, connections, and pastoral lifestyle. Based on the archival history (deriving from ethnographic documents of British colonial agents to Rajputana princely state and census surveys of India) of the Thar frontier and ethnographic work of Raikas in the border areas of Bikaner (Rajasthan), this chapter examines consequences of construction of the border and subsequent practices of the state on the mobility, identity and traditional (social, cultural, and economic) practices of pastoralists. The chapter argues that construction of the border and bordering practices of the state in the regions of Thar has created the situations of identity transformation for Raika pastoralists. Resultantly, this change in livelihood strategies and pastoral way of life has lead to the circumstances of an identity crisis for pastoralists in the border areas.

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Pakistani Media, Islamic Knowledge, and the Transborder History of Sindhi Sufi Music in Kachchh, Gujarat Brian E. Bond - City University of New York, United States In the 1980s and 1990s, the influx of cassettes and radio signal from Pakistan led to profound stylistic changes in the Sufi music cultivated by Muslim communities in the Indian borderland of Kachchh, Gujarat, as musicians began to imitate their favorite Sindhi artists from across the border. In contrast to many regions in India where cassettes stimulated local music production (Manuel 1993), the mediatization of music in Kachchh led to the decline of a local performance practice known as kacchī rāg, which included poetic compositions in Kachchhi and Sindhi by Hindu and Muslim poets, and was performed by singers from both religious communities. Based on a year and a half of research in Kachchh, this paper traces the impact of Pakistani cross-border radio and cassettes on Sufi poetry performance in this border region, with a focus on Kachchhi Muslim musicians’ practice of imitating recordings by Sindhi artists. I argue two points related to this music-historical development. First, I suggest that recordings of Pakistani artists facilitated greater access to Islamic knowledge among rural audiences: contemporary singers in Kachchh model their performances on recordings, especially those of Ustad Mithu Kachi, that feature storytelling (dāstān) and verse explication (bayān), practices which have played an important role in conveying Islamic knowledge to listeners from communities with low literacy and limited direct access to Islamic texts. Second, I argue that the embrace of Sindhi kāfī and the subsequent decline of kacchī rāg were part of a larger trend in which Kachchhi society became increasingly fractured along the lines of religion and language amidst growing Hindu nationalism. Carrying this transborder musical history into the present, I discuss how the recent adoption of smartphone-based social media by Kachchhi Muslims has helped to reinvigorate their relationship with Pakistan-based Sindhi musical repertoire and its performers. India ukre giya: Exploring the Lost World along the Rann of Kutch and Rajasthan Vikram Das Menghwar - Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany The Thar has been a site of confluence between Sindh, Gujarat and Rajasthan. The folktale and folklore of the region refer to the desert as a sea, through which travel a cast of warrior, merchants and adventurers. The oral history of the communities the area show how connected Tharparkar was with regards to business and subsistence, barter economy as well as for smuggling with neighbouring regions of Gujarat such as Palanpur and Kutch. There are different myths and stories of crossing of Rann of Katch on camels and camel caravans. Myths and stories show strong socio-cultural and historical connection with Gujarat. Parkar, region of Thar, in particular had remained linked with Gujarat on account of its culture, language and architecture showing strong connections. Prior to partition, the cities of Bhuj in Kutch and Nagarparkar in Sindh were famous as livestock mandis. Bhuj in particular was the most important livestock market and the Rann was crossed by pastoralists from the Thar people to sell and buy animals. The region was disconnected after partition and physically disconnected after bordering and fencing which started in late 80s. It has not only disconnected people physically, but it has also disrupted trading networks. However, although at partition there was little migration reported in Thar, but it occurred in wars of 1965 and 1971 and has continued. Both the wars and then the fencing had great impact on socio-cultural life in both sides, and any illicit movement is now impossible. The phrase India Ukre giya (crossed Indian border) and Harass (fear which stay longer) are used for those Thari Hindus who had continued to migrate to India. The phrase ‘Moaro ka gonyoro ro dukh ghano’, meaning that the loss in death is better than dealing with loss of those who migrate to India. These phrases being used in Tharis daily life. In this chapter, I will explore how the meaning of that ‘loss’ of kinship or belonging of those who remain in connection with family members in India, but also the ‘loss’ of turning the familiar into strangers.

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THE TECHNOLOGIES OF STATE-MAKING IN THE INDIA-CHINA HIMALAYAN BORDERLANDS: LAND, LANGUAGE, AND INFRASTRUCTURE

Convenor and Chair: Gerald Roche - La Trobe University, Australia This panel examines the different technologies of state-making in the Himalaya, focussing on infrastructures, language, land tenure and tourism. State-making practices, spurred by increasing geo-political anxieties of India and China have produced integrationist projects encompassing language, territory, waterways and land. This is transforming the region, culturally, environmentally and politically. In the context of these geo-political tensions, both states have built roads, train-lines and airports, and dammed major rivers, while extracting resources in previously difficult to access this terrain. They have also govermentalized populations through various instruments of citizenship and belonging. In this context, co-option, denial and promotion of languages is increasingly aligned with statist projects. We highlight the operation of these state-making practices and their impact on lived experiences of border populations. We also engage with technologies of resistance that minoritized peoples deploy to protect their, rights to land, cultures, and responding to the slow creep of the Indian and Chinese states into their Himalayan borderlands. Land Tenure in Tibetan Settlements in India’s Border States Sonika Gupta - IIT Madras, India Since 1959, India has set up designated, often self-contained settlements to house the over 100,000 Tibetans who followed His Holiness into exile. Geo-political discussions of Tibet usually focus on the contentious space that Tibet occupies between the state interests of India and China. This paper departs from this, to examine the interaction of ‘state-interests’ between the Indian state and the Central Tibetan Administration, that represents all Tibetans in exile. In the 1960s, given its strategic and political concerns with China, the Indian government adopted a policy of setting up Tibetan settlements away from its Himalayan frontiers. However, since India and Tibet have a shared border, many Tibetans who arrived in India before or after 1959, continue to live in pockets in the Himalayan North-eastern states of India. Over time, the Indian state and the Central Tibetan Administration brought these areas of settlements under their combined statist gaze, regulating them through classificatory practices like population and land registers, that strictly defined membership within the exile community in India. This paper examines the efficacy and efficiency of technologies of biopolitics, such land tenure registers, as it unfolds in bureaucratic practices of land tenure, in delivering the state-interests of the Indian state and the CTA, specifically in bounded designated settlements along the Indian border. I argue that as with the nationalist projects of India and China, the CTA too has dominant state-making narratives that impinge upon the experience of exile in pervasive ways including their relationship to land as space, place and commodity. Rivers of Concrete: The Transformation of the Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra) River Ruth Gamble - La Trobe University, Australia The transboundary Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra) River flows across the Tibetan Plateau at an average altitude of more than 4000 meters, before entering northeast India through the world's deepest gorge. Recent clashes between China and India over its waters look set to intensify as both states seek to develop its basin. China, in particular, is engaged in a profound transformation of the river through multiple large-scale development projects: a series of hydro-electrical dams, a highspeed rail line, a freeway, relocated housing, tourism infrastructure, and large agricultural projects. What is more, many of the resources to build this infrastructure, particularly sand and water, are being taken straight from the river and processed in pop-up concrete factories along the river's edge. This paper will examine the environmental, cultural and geopolitical consequences of concretizing the river.

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Borderland Tourism: Infrastructure, Nationalism and the Environmental/Cultural Transformation of the Himalaya Alexander Davis - University of Western Australia, Australia The Himalaya is experience a surge in infrastructure projects, with roads, rail, and airports all rapidly proliferating amidst a backdrop of India-China-Pakistan tensions and resurgent nationalism. These projects are facilitating a massive move of troops and tourists from the plains to the mountains. Moreover, tourism as a means of ‘sustainable development’ has been promoted across the Himalaya by national and local governments. Taking Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh as case studies, I examine the rise of mass tourism in Himalayan India, examining the ideas of Indian identity that underpin the region’s newfound popularity, alongside its environmental and cultural narratives and impacts. In Arunachal Pradesh, a state in Northeast India which is claimed by China, tourism has been driven by memorials to the 1962 India-China border war. In Ladakh, a high altitude desert nestled between Tibet, Xinjiang and Kashmir, tourism has been driven by depictions of the region in Bollywood film, as well as memorials to the India-Pakistan Kargil war of 1999. I argue that the depiction of the Himalaya as an Indian borderland, and a site of national sacrifice, is a major contributor to the regions ongoing environmental and geopolitical transformation. The Road to Assimilation? China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Tibet’s Linguistic Diversity Gerald Roche - La Trobe University, Australia The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is currently intensifying the transport infrastructure networks within its Tibetan regions, and connecting these national networks to its international infrastructure mega-project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Whereas previous infrastructural development during the drive to ‘Develop the West’ consolidated Tibet’s position within the geobody of the PRC as an economic hinterland and transport cul de sac of the east coast, BRI is transforming the region into a pivotal heartland of a transnational infrastructure network through south, southeast, and central Asia. What will happen to Tibet’s linguistic diversity in this new era of increased international connectivity and mobility? Will the BRI be a road to assimilation for Tibet that enables the Party-state to erase the region’s linguistic diversity? Based on a critical reading of the PRC’s language policy and its implementation in Tibet, I argue that although roads can and are being used as tools of domination and assimilation, the impact of roads is likely to amplify existing trends rather than establish new ones. These trends involve the aggressive promotion of the national language, Putonghua, the subordination of recognized minority languages (such as Tibetan), and the on-going elimination of unrecognized languages. I therefore argue that although roads are important as technologies of colonial rule, far more important are the ontological and epistemic frames that undergird them and inform state policy—the technologies of state-led racialization.

WATERY CONNECTIONS: INTERROGATING THE INDIAN OCEAN AS A BORDERLAND

Convenor and Chair: Bérénice Guyot-Réchard - King's College London, United Kingdom From the first evidence of long-distance trade between Sumer and Harappa in the third millennium BCE to the circulation of migrants, soldiers and revolutionaries across the 19th c. Bay of Bengal or the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean’s history is that of a nexus for the interaction of people, cultures, ideas and commodities. Its port-cities big and small, its shores, the ships crossing its sea-lanes, all boast borderland characteristics. This ‘new thalassology’ around the Indian Ocean and Borderland Studies have largely developed in silos, however. The concept of the borderland remains under-employed in the study of the Indian Ocean while Borderland Studies, Asia included, is generally rather terra firma-minded. What then can we learn about historical and contemporary borderlands if we focus our gaze

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on maritime or ‘terraqueous’ spaces? How do bordering and border-crossing technologies, as well as extractive or distribution practices, work in and shape maritime environments? What forms of co-existence might such environments foster? The three papers in this panel deal with these questions by interrogating the specific nature of the Indian Ocean as a borderland, taking in different geographies and scales and different historical periods. In doing so, we seek not only to open up new avenues of inter-disciplinary conversation but also to ponder the ways we write and border “Asia”. The Konkan: Regional History on an Indian Ocean Coast Ananya Chakravarti - Georgetown University, United States South Asian historiography, which often takes as the bounds of its political imagination the geographical limits of state power, has been peculiarly blind to regions like the Konkan coast of western India, whose political fragmentation belie other forms of regional integration. This coast was, and is, the borderland mediating between the vast world of the Indian Ocean, and the mercantile, diasporic, ecumenical and imperial networks that operated within it, and the interior of the South Asian subcontinent. Despite its clear historical import, the coast has escaped the notice of historians as a coherent cultural region, due to its perennial political fragmentation. This paper presents an overview of a monograph project, which draws upon both early modern archival and ethnographic research to show how the Konkan must be understood as an interconnected and coherent region for both South Asian and Indian Ocean history. I focus in particular on two groups of mobile peoples and two cultural phenomena in demonstrating the regional coherence of the Konkan zone: 1) slaves and the Konkani migrant community of Kochi, Kerala and 2) deities of place and the Konkani language. By following the pathways of these people, their cosmologies and languages, I demonstrate how the Konkan coast may be 'mapped' as an Indian Ocean borderland. Extractive Geographies: Burma and the Pearling Zones of the Bay of Bengal Pedro Machado - Indiana University Bloomington, United States The Bay of Bengal’s oceanic histories have been indelibly shaped by the migrations and labour movements of South Asians across its waters and involved also the well-studied exchanges in tea, opium and textiles. Less well understood, however, is that its histories as a maritime zone were also influenced in no less important ways by robust marine goods economies that were underpinned by Chinese, Indian, Malaysian, British, American and Australian commercial interests. This paper explores the pearling economies and marine product trades of coastal Burma – including importantly those of the Mergui archipelago that were located in its southern reaches – as sites from which to trace complex oceanic linkages that braided together fluid geographies of extraction and distribution in South, Southeast and East Asia. Burma and the Mergui archipelago were thus constitutive of an expansive marine and ecological zone that ultimately also bound it to the global markets for pearls, shell and other marine goods in the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century.  A Bordered Sea: Sovereign Assertions in the Post-Colonial Indian Ocean Bérénice Guyot-Réchard - King’s College London, United Kingdom The first two papers of this panel explored the fluid and expansive geographies of belonging, extraction and circulation that permeated seemingly marginal Indian Ocean costal societies and moulded them into dynamic interfaces between Asia’s local worlds and the rest of the globe. This third paper takes a more macro-level perspective to sketch out how late 20th century Indian Ocean rim states, most of whom had recently emerged from colonial rule, sought to assert their legal, political and extractive sovereignty over their maritime borderlands. This included extending and enacting maritime boundaries as well as attempts to obtain and perform exclusive extractive control over the ocean’s fisheries and seabed resources, along with political campaigns for a zone of peace in the Indian Ocean. While such initiatives relied heavily on Afro-Asian ideas and networks, they were

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predicated on the erasure of the very oceanic space that stood at their geographic center. The imaginary promoted by the late 20th c. nation-state largely denied the Indian Ocean’s historical role as a meeting ground and a connective tissue, emphasizing its nature as a space for extraction and interstate relations instead. Yet these efforts rubbed against competing imaginaries and practices as well as against the ocean itself, underscoring the difficulty of bordering the sea.

ZONES OF CONFLICT AND CO-EXISTENCE: REDEFINING GOVERNANCE STRATEGIES AND TRANSNATIONAL CONNECTIONS IN ASIAN BORDERLANDS

Convenor and Chair: Martin Fromm - Worcester State University, United States Historically, borderlands in East and Southeast Asia have featured as zones of conflict and co-existence, marginal yet central to states’ management and utilization of human and natural resources. As such, borderlands have evolved as experimental sites in redefining the extent and limits of state sovereignty, governance technologies, labor mobility, and transnational linkages and cooperation. The papers in this panel explore these issues through the lenses of environmental conservation, post-colonial migrant labor regimes, international approaches to policing the borderland, and official and unofficial trading practices. In doing so, these papers shed light on the relationships between official national policies and on-the-ground lived realities and connections, the capacity of international collaboration to resolve borderland disputes, and the ongoing legacies of colonialism and historically contested frontiers in shaping the mobilization and exploitation of natural resources and human labor. Using French and Chinese diplomatic, political, and business correspondences to investigate the formation of the Police Mixte along the Sino-Indochinese border in 1895-96 in response to a kidnapping incident, Melody Shum evaluates the concepts, technologies, and stakeholder agendas involved in shaping an international approach to policing the borderland. Shifting our attention to the Cambodia-Vietnam borderlands during the period between 1963 and 1975, Pham Thi Hong Ha explores the tensions between official hardening of national borders and cutting off of diplomatic ties on one hand and on-the-ground realities of commercial exchange driven by regional political exigencies and local communities on both sides of the border. Juxtaposing national state policies and multinational corporation strategies against lived social realities and community formations of Burmese migrants along the Thai-Burmese borderlands, Adam Saltsman examines the legacies of colonial and post-colonial imaginaries and configurations of power in informing technologies of governance and reinforcing patterns of marginalization in post-conflict zones transformed into sites for the investment of capital and flexible labor. The historical implications of colonialism, migration, and competing claims to natural resources form a set of concerns in Martin Fromm’s paper, which turns our attention to an intensifying project of nature conservation along China’s northeast borderland with Russia as a site for redefining modernization, nationalism, and neo-colonial resource extraction in environmental terms. The Lyaudet Kidnapping Incident and the Establishment of the Police Mixte in the Sino-Indochinese Borderland (1895-1896) Melody Shum - Northwestern University, United States On April 24, 1895, Lyaudet, a Frenchmen working in the coal mines on Cái Bầu Island in Tonkin, his wife, and his little daughter were kidnapped and transported across the Sino-Indochinese border, less than 150 kilometers from the crime scene. This soon escalated into an international conflict that involved senior French and Chinese officials and the formation of a joint-rescue mission. The Lyaudets were rescued, but the incident exposed major problems of border governance, including issues of jurisdiction, trespassing, communication, banditry, and local grievances. For one thing, this borderland was still home to the remnant networks of the Black and Yellow Flag bandit armies formed during the Sino-French War (1884-1885). This paper argues that the Police Mixte, a Franco-

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Chinese joint-borderland policing institution established in 1896, was an international solution to these local problems. It was an attempt by the center to stabilize and systematize border governance across a landscape that had historically been difficult to penetrate without local knowledge. Utilizing French and Chinese diplomatic, political, and business correspondences as well as memoirs, this paper uses the Lyaudet incident to reconstruct the historical circumstances that had led to the formation of the Police Mixte. Why was it so important to police the borderland? What were the “tools”—laws, methodologies, and technologies used? What role did business enterprises play in making borders? How did ordinary inhabitants respond to the political and socio-economic changes brought forward by a border? Why were the French and the Chinese still so persistent in solidifying the border when they were fully aware of the violent and volatile history of the borderland? Seeing the region on both sides of the border as a single borderland, I focus on the interactions of different stakeholders and communities, demonstrating the contingencies of state building and governmentality at different scales and modalities. Trading activities on the border line between the Republic of Vietnam and Cambodia (1963-1975) Pham Thi Hong Ha - Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, Vietnam This paper analyzes commodity trading activities in the border area between the RVN and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s. The article explains why although the governments of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) and Cambodia had officially severed diplomatic and economic relations, and strengthened border control activities since the mid-1960s, trading activities in the border area were still exciting with many diverse forms and involving many different actors, not only between the two governments, but also including Western merchants, residents living on either side of the border, and forces of the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam (NLFSV). Using sources from the Vietnam Archives Centers, the paper shows that this phenomenon stems from three main factors: First, It was impossible to erase the very diverse trade routes that residents of both sides of the border had established over a long history. Secondly, the border area between the two countries was the vital supply area for the NLFSV. Therefore, despite the efforts of the RVN’s government, revolutionary forces in South Vietnam continued to create diverse ways of exchanging goods, ensuring relatively stable supplies for revolutionary forces in the South Vietnam. Finally, both governments of RVN and Cambodia recognized that the continuation of maintaining border trade was of great significance to both parties. For Cambodia, trading with the RVN was the only way to access consumer goods with the West without having to use its foreign currencies, which in Cambodia was relatively scarce at the time. For the RVN, the cross-border trade with Cambodia contributed significantly to the supply of many products in the markets in Saigon and in the border area at that time. Mutations in Governance in the Resolution of Gender Violence in Migrant Labor Compounds on the Thailand-Myanmar Border Adam Saltsman - Worcester State University, United States Thailand’s borderland with Myanmar has endured multiple iterations in national and regional imaginaries, from a space of colonial desire, to conceptualization as the edge of state sovereignty, to a conflict zone, and more recently as centrally located in 21st century plans of global connectedness. How these iterations accumulate and produce particular forms of political and social order for those living precarious lives in the borderlands is an important question that can help understand the shifting nature of governance in edge spaces like this. In this paper, I address this question by looking at the relationship between local police and ethnic civil society organizations on the Thailand-Myanmar border. I focus especially on their collaboration in addressing/resolving cases of gender violence perpetuated against Burmese working in Thailand’s industrial agriculture sector in the border districts of Tak Province. While previous studies highlight the semi-autonomous and translocal nature of governance in Thailand’s nine refugee camps for largely Karen and Karenni

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refugees, I focus instead on the little-studied labor camps situated in remote sites where groups of between 10 and several hundred migrant households are bounded by property-owners’ compounds. Literally and metaphorically in the shadow of high walls and fields, migrants in this sector often find themselves “beyond the law” and yet subject to alternative forms of discipline, including at the hands of police officers and other security officials. But the population of laborers must also navigate the authority of certain cross-border civil society organizations who legitimize their work in the language of ethnicity and humanitarianism. How do these different actors interact in ways that structure opportunities and constraints in the lives of migrant workers? And how do they influence the nature of sovereignty in the Thailand-Myanmar borderscape? This paper is based on qualitative research conducted in Tak province between 2012-2014 and in 2017. Remaking the “Great Northern Wilderness”: Environmental Governance along China’s Northeastern Borderland Martin Fromm - Worcester State University, United States With its history as a zone of Chinese and Russian state expansion, migrations, and competing claims to natural resources, China’s northeastern borderland with Russia is an important site for assessing the possibilities of integrating development with environmental conservation in cross-border economic zones. While China’s ethnically restive northwest and southwest borderlands have captured attention in regard to the intersections between state-driven exploitation of natural resources and neo-colonial policies, the northeastern borderland formerly known as northern Manchuria has largely gone unnoticed, in part due to a successful project of rewriting this region’s history and culture as undisputedly Chinese. Yet how do the more complicated realities of Manchuria’s past identities figure into on-the-ground ideas about the politics and significance of nature conservation and exploitation? This paper will examine this question through the lenses of local government reports, conservation activist writings, and regional forestry officials’ assessment of the theory and practice of forest protection and development. It will evaluate these stakeholders’ evolving concepts of nature as a site of cross-border competition and collaboration, new neo-colonial dynamics of resource extraction and exploitation, and ongoing projects of modernization and social engineering. Border town officials have reconceived of “greenification” as integrally tied to new technologies of industrialization and new cross-border dynamics of neo-colonialism with its Russian neighbors. This expansive and developmentally focused perspective on the environment has also grown out of historical associations of the region with the “Great Northern Wilderness,” a term that invoked frontier ideals of limitless natural abundance for the construction of a socialist society. At the same time, the extensive publications of Yao Zhongyin, a regionally well-known writer/forestry official, and nature enthusiast, reveal another more nationalist interpretation of borderland-centered nature conservation. These entangled views speak to the historical legacies of colonialism, migration, and competing modernization projects in informing borderland-centered views of the environment.

STRUCTURE, ANTI-STRUCTURE, INFRASTRUCTURE: THE (IM)MATERIALS OF PLANETARY TRANSFORMATION

Convenor: Jolynna Sinanan - University of Sydney, Australia Chair: Roger Norum - LMU Munich, Germany Technological infrastructures create not just our planet, but our world: they define and form it, delimit and forge it (Nielsen and Pedersen, 2015; Norum and Rippa forthcoming). Borderlands all over Asia are undergoing shifts and intensifications in the mobility of people, goods, capital, data and thoughts owing to broader geopolitical changes and state-led infrastructure projects. This panel examines the interplay between infrastructure, ecologies and the social – processes through which

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material infrastructure constructs the planet and in which aspirations of individuals and communities are shaped by such regional transformations. In what ways do infrastructures influence socio-cultural relations? How do they reinforce and contest individual and collective imaginations? And how do infrastructures speak to, reflect or determine environmental practices and discourses? In particular, we seek to draw attention to the emerging role of media flows in their various forms and to how they are being created, worked and reworked, facilitated by new infrastructures, imaginaries and epistemologies. These flows frequently cross, circumvent and conflict with domestic and international borders, where media organisations are often owned by government entities and/ or large companies. This panel explores these changing circuits of technological infrastructures and seeks to determine how they influence the ways in which nature becomes environment across Asian borderlands. “Alexa, Was Buddha Born in Nepal?” Microcelebrity and Digital Diaspora on YouTube Dannah Dennis - Hamilton College, United States In prior work (Dennis 2017), I have written about the ambivalent political tensions surrounding the claim that “Buddha was Born in Nepal,” which is pervasive in political discourses about Nepali national identity. In this paper, I focus on the ways in which the claim to Buddha’s birthplace is deployed by some Nepalis living beyond Nepal as both a means of maintaining a connection to Nepal as a diasporic homeland and as a means of building their own online celebrity. In particular, I am interested in the ways in which the claim is communicated online by Nepali Youtubers such as Lex Limbu, James Shrestha, and Sagar Tamang, whose videos embed the claim to Buddha’s birthplace within recognizable memes and narratives that are part of the Internet’s shared culture. For example, James Shrestha made a video of himself unboxing an Amazon Echo Dot in which he asked Amazon’s Alexa whether Buddha was born in Nepal, and then dabbed in celebration when Alexa confirmed that Buddha was born in Nepal. I argue that the makers of these videos are not only reaffirming their own sense of connection to Nepal as their diasporic homeland, but are also developing themselves as global citizens who have something important to say to global audiences. Moreover, they are building their own personal brands by linking their own reputations as digital microcelebrities with the Buddha’s global name recognition. Through this case study, I aim to theorize how, within the context of a digital diaspora, microcelebrity can be a form of practicing citizenship at a distance. Livestreaming for Selling Jade in China-Myanmar Borderlands Shaohua Xiang - VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands This talk will focus on the operational dynamic of livestreaming for selling jade practice in the China-Myanmar borderlands. My core aim is to question the impact of livestreaming technologies on the sustainability of cross-border trade. Sales through livestreaming typically involve a broadcaster demonstrating a product and answering real-time questions from a digital audience using mobile devices. Here, the broadcasters are not celebrities but borderland jade traders, and as a result the venue cannot be anywhere other than the jade markets near the borders themselves. Typically, the vendors are Burmese, while the broadcasters, buyers, and technical infrastructures (e.g. livestreaming devices, internet connections) are from China. For each piece of jade sold, the broadcaster will take a commission of ten percent of the final price agreed between the Burmese vendor and Chinese buyer. My talk will argue that while on one hand, livestreaming makes “temporary” or “one-time” cooperation (rather than long-term partnership or more trustful cooperation) more popular, allowing deals to be finished quickly. On the other hand, however, though traders try to adjust to one another’s methods in a timely manner, the limits imposed by institutional regulations and stereotypes still exist, for example, “Burmese”, symbolizing "the first-hand source” of jade, is always being used as a label for absorbing more buyers in online chatting rooms.

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Who Owns the Mountains? How Media Representations Permeate Vertical Cosmologies Anna-Maria Walter - LMU Munich, Germany Be it for tourism or development reports, promotional material from Pakistan typically features lavish shots of Gilgit-Baltistan’s high peaks. Although the disputed region does not have constitutional rights, government offices readily use its natural beauty to showcase the country’s hospitality, tolerance and attraction. Consequently, Gilgit-Baltistan has recently seen an increase of domestic tourism coming. Although the mountainous terrain is an obstacle to technological infrastructure, mobile phone signals nowadays reach almost every village. Having become aware of their environment’s asset, local people have begun to ‘consume’ the landscape themselves. By going on family outings to serene picnic spots, celebrating media ads and movie clips online, and uploading photos of men dancing in front of Rakaposhi, they eagerly contribute to, even accelerate, the mediate discourse. People’s lines of movement commonly – but not always – stay in accordance with a vertical axis of purity, an anti-structure to the human world that places humans at the bottom of a cosmological pyramid and fairies on the glaciated mountain tops. Reflecting a ‘nature’-‘culture’-hierarchy, ‘impure’ women are often banned from higher altitudes. Female attempts to conquer the mountains, both by tourist as well as local climbers (i.e. Samina Baig), increasingly perforate such conceptions of gender. Through a juxtaposition of contemporary media discourses over a contested domestic border and local practices along vertical zones, this paper seeks to investigate changing modes of relating to an animate environment. Appropriating Cashlessness: Global North Solutions for a Global South? Ivan Small - Central Connecticut State University, United States Remittances have been a topic of development policy focus since 2001. However in the last decade there has been heightened attention to domestic remittances along urban-rural corridors, including the introduction of technological interventions to harness and bank them. This paper examines how the topic of “remittances”, as a site of development intervention, has shifted over the last generation. This includes the expansion of attention from international to domestic remittances, but also to the emergence of “cashlessness” as a mode of remittance transfer, including mobile money applications. Cashlessness, although conceptually and practically recognized as preferable by migrants as well as migration policy makers, has been explored variably by a variety of stakeholders, many of whom have been already advancing cashless ecology agendas in the Global North. Among those, there has been a convergence of interests by development policy analysts and entrepreneurs around cashlessness in the form of mobile money as a solution for financial inclusion in the Global South. In the process conceptions of cashless ecologies have evolved to represent a particular type of financial technology solution requiring intervention, modeling and oversight. This paper considers the growth of interest in cashlessness as a generalized concept across the global North (drawing on selected case studies from Scandinavia and Singapore) and South (drawing on selected case studies from Southeast Asia and Albania), and then turns to its manifestations in the developing world. It demonstrates how a comparative ethnographic lens highlights the limits of its applicability, but also the tremendous transformations to monetary behavior and symbolism that have accompanied its introduction. It considers how global financial infrastructures and intersections of for-profit and non-profit agendas and expertise have contributed to the production of an “unbanked” subject in need of poverty alleviation solutions via technology and on-ramps into the formal economy. Imago Dei: The making of Nepal through images, imaginaries and im/mobilities Roger Norum - LMU Munich, Germany Jolynna Sinanan - University of Sydney, Australia

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Anthropologists and geographers of tourism and migration to Nepal have described the country as one of contradictory global imaginaries (Norum 2015, Norum, 2016, Leichty, 2017). Early visitors to the country were drawn to the region for the images it evoked of solitude, spiritualism and heroic mountain narratives, materialised through a lack of infrastructures, then-modern amenities and semaphores of underdevelopedness. More recently, scholars have shown that the global mediatisation of Everest plays a key role in drawing visitors to the region (Mazzolini, 2015; Mu and Nepal, 2016, Ortner, 1999). Mobile phones and internet connectivity have grown exponentially in regions outside the conurbation of Kathmandu since 2005 (Parajuli and Haynes, 2018; Pradhan and Bajracharya, 2015). And since the 2014 and 2015 earthquakes and subsequent Everest avalanches, Nepal’s government has made a committed effort to increasing mobile phone connectivity in underdeveloped and rural regions in the north Himalaya. Drawing on two ethnographic case studies, this paper explores the multiple ways in which mobile media are transforming socialities, imaginaries and mobility practices in Nepal. We examine 1) the quotidian mediation of spatio-temporal transience among Kathmandu-based expatriates and 2) how the circulation of mobile visual media surrounding treks and summit expeditions shape how Everest is seen, understood and consumed. In doing so, we will explain the ways in which emerging digital infrastructures and patterns of usage are intensifying and transforming and reproducing in new ways the substance and processes of imaginary-making that have long “made” Nepal for the West.

ZONES, CONNECTIVITY, CONFLICT Convenor and Chair: Lynn Thiesmeyer - Keio University, Japan/Yangon International University, Myanmar This panel will address the impacts of China’s Belt and Road (BRI)-related projects and Russia’s Greater Eurasia Partnership (GEP) on the states and communities they traverse in Asia. Rather than think only in terms of “opened” borders having led to regional development, we also consider how, and to what effect, recent infrastructure development has “opened” some conventional borders, and thus re-created political and economic spaces. We take up questions of these re-configured regional "zones," of those who fear losing economic and political spaces in the new connectivity, and of the strategies they seek and resources they utilize in the rapidly changing environment. The entities discussed here range from national governments to local communities and workers responding to the economic connectivities and political linkages brought in by the BRI and the GEP. China's BRI and Russia’s GEP, with their related industrial, processing, and trade installations, are based in large-scale connectivity projects bringing fundamental changes to the regional communities of each state through which they pass. Despite their benefits, these are also proving to underlie sporadic local and regional unrest, and are now pushing conflicts that accompany land conversions for project use, domestic economic contraction and livelihood loss, and dissatisfaction with the regional decision-making and jurisdictional shifts that accompany outside-investor projects. Hence conditions exist to create or reinforce political and economic instability among the impacted populations. This panel will address the questions of the re-configured regional "zones," of those state actors and local populations who contemplate losing economic and political space, and of the strategies they seek to utilize in the newly insecure environment. These include local and national resistance, licit and illicit migration, and engagement in or spreading of conflict based on resource loss in the construction and operation of large-scale projects. Each paper on the panel will address these overarching issues with particular cases from the cutting-edge research they have pursued on-site within the last year. Areas of research discussed here are the Upper Mekong region of Eastern Myanmar and Northern Laos, the Chinese investment areas in Cambodia, the new SEZs of Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia, and the overlapping BRI and GEP areas of Central Asia. Local Responses to BRI-Clustered Projects in Remote Borderlands of Southeast Asia

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Lynn Thiesmeyer - Keio University, Japan/Yangon International University, Myanmar Large-scale, transborder development projects are typically “clustered” along the Connectivity projects of roads and pipelines being constructed by China, India and Russia. Because of their somewhat new ways of configuring the local economy, politics, and communities, such clusters defy conventional notions of border zones, of livelihoods, and of self-determination. I focus on the impacts of projects that are built in borderlands in mainland Southeast Asia, those that have been geographically, politically, and economically remote from the center. Now that there are multiple “actors” in this region, particularly foreign investors in infrastructure and industry, large projects locate upon large, previously used spaces, and thus benefit some but remove access to resources for the local population. The repercussions upon these local populations are immediately both economic and political, in terms of land loss, rapid warming and environmental degradation from deforestation, and the undermining of autonomy. Among local responses to the deprivation of land and traditional livelihoods are mobility, participation in a shadow economy, and local resistance. The notions of unregulated mobilities and shadow economies put forth at this conference have until recently centered around borders construed as geographical conduits that bring in mobile and shadow entities. Here, however, borders are presumed to be in the process of being newly configured. If this is so, it is often without regard to geography or its academic discipline; rather, it includes the non-physical space of livelihood strategies and of local resistance. Finally, this paper questions the following: For whom and in what way are the current border zones now presumably “open,” and to whom and what are they closed? Local Impacts of Russia’s Actions to Counter China’s BRI in Eurasia Yoko Hirose - Keio University, Japan China has its ongoing Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and Russia has its own connectivity projects for its regional Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). Local and national populations in their overlapping project areas, however, are caught in a web of competing political and economic initiatives and conflicting directives, and project areas are increasingly the basis for local conflicts within and across the nations involved. This “competing connectivity” issue risks growing into a threat to regional cooperation and security in the Eurasian mega-region. These projects connect very distant places across borders, while also constructing new spaces of production, resource extraction, resistance, and large-scale migration within specific national and local territories. The resulting security concerns make projects and their transboundary spaces into political sites as well. The bases of confrontations, the established patterns of land use, and the scope of self-determination are being reconsidered on national and regional levels. The areas of Chinese - Russian project overlap continue to experience conflict and large-scale displacement related to the regional connectivity development sites. The aim of this paper is to make clear the impacts on both local and national-level conflict-risk areas and on the local populations that have reacted, or may in future react unfavorably to the impacts of large new connectivity projects. Chinese Investment and Cambodia as Borderland Veasna Var - University of New South Wales, Australia For the last ten years, China has been Cambodia’s largest trading partner, investment partner and aid donor. Cambodia was also one of the first Southeast Asian countries to sign on to the Belt and Road Initiative. Both the Cambodian and Chinese governments emphasise the many economic benefits that Cambodia derives from engagement with China. Despite Cambodia’s not sharing a border with China, the Belt and Road can also potentially make Cambodia a borderland, the hinterland of China. There is also a possible debt trap Cambodia may face by accepting Chinese loans. Terms like debt diplomacy and neo-colonialism are widely used in critical western media and political discourses. The implication for Cambodia is that it could wind up with long term debt and loss of sovereignty. Certain

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local industries would be incapable of competing with the Chinese, resulting in negative economic impact on workers. On the one hand, China’s development assistance and investment in the infrastructure sector, such as roads, bridges and railways, and in the energy sector (mainly hydropower) have played a significant role in accelerating Cambodia’s domestic socio-economic development. On the other hand it is argued that China’s foreign policy and economic interests in Cambodia have been advanced at the expense of the interests of the Cambodian populace. China’s growing strategic interests in Cambodia may be seen as a blessing or as a curse which can be classified as Chinese neo-colonialism in the kingdom. This paper makes a critical evaluative analysis of the bilateral relations between China and Cambodia to determine whether they should be defined as neo-imperialist/neo-colonialist, or as neo-liberal. How Do Border Special Economic Zones Create and Limit Opportunities for Migrant Workers in the Mekong Region? Kyoko Kusakabe - Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand In the countries of the Mekong region, Special Economic Zones (SEZ) are increasingly been established, especially along the border regions. They are to attract investors through abundant labor and good infrastructure and connectivity. There are arguments both critical and supportive of SEZs. The visibility of SEZs can force factories to abide by the law – paying minimum wages and providing fringe benefits, as well as good facilities. On the other hand, SEZs can prohibit labor union and collective action, and enforce strict labor regulations. This paper compares SEZs at the borderland and at the capital in order to discuss whether SEZs contribute to improvement in working condition for migrant workers, and if so how. It is based on case studies from SEZs in Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia. It aims to discuss how border as a location creates opportunities and danger for improvement of both migrant workers’ rights as workers and their life options as human beings with family and community.

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INDIVIDUAL PAPERS

DYNAMICS OF PARTITION AND CO-EXISTENCE ACROSS THE INDIA-PAKISTAN BORDERLANDS Syapa as Geographies of Irreplaceable Loss: Reimagining the India-Pakistan Border through Memories of Violence of the Displaced North Indian Punjabis Alka Sabharwal - University of Western Australia, Australia Following the idea that borders need to be understood as social and historical processes (Paasi 1999), this paper examines the role of the ‘memories of violence’ that do not follow a clear-cut territorial logic to understand the nature of Sir Cyril Radcliffe boundary line that separated India and Pakistan in 1947. Contemporary Indian state that seeks to define its identity through Hindutva ideology ignores the historical sociocultural relationship between India and Pakistan and glorify the India-Pakistan border as ‘holy’ entities. Instead of looking at the India-Pakistan as a visible territory through this working of the state, the paper uses the symbol of syapa or disintegration of cultural identities, to understand the significance of the invisibility of territories. The syapa reading of the India-Pakistan border through memories of everyday violence reconfigures it as a condition that creates losses on a mass scale as ongoing. By reframing border as acts of mourning can sometimes be a source of democracy's struggle as well as generators of new forums that defy territorial constraints. Therefore, by not overloading syapa or irreplaceable loss politically, but rather seeing it as a source of inspiration for human historicity, the paper uses primary and secondary data on memories of violence to reconstruct the India and Pakistan border as a chaotic mess lived by the displaced Punjabis in Northern India through continuing use of violence in the making of self, community and the nation. Such kind of alternative border imaginations suggest that the key issues are not the view of the borders as ‘lines’ or ‘edges’ themselves, but it is the social practices and discourses where borders as sets of sociocultural practices are produced, reproduced, and transcended (Gellner 2013) Contentious Borderlands? Reflections on Co-existence, Belonging, and Shared Histories at the India-Pakistan Border Srishtee Sethi - Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India Philipp Zehmisch - Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan The partition of British India in 1947 implied the institutionalization of a distinct mode of geography, landscape, and ideational force – ‘The Borderlands of Northern South Asia’ (Gellner, 2013). As a result, previously corresponding, often hybridized socio-cultural and religious traditions, as well as shared ethnic and linguistic features gradually transformed into means of ideological contestation and conflict; negotiations of citizenship and belonging came to be heavily influenced by hegemonic ethics of nationalism as well as religious conformism and indoctrination. Against these odds, our fieldwork on both sides of the Indo-Pak border (Sethi in India, Zehmisch on both sides) found subdued, silenced, and subaltern voices and practices challenging hegemonic discourse: interlocutors cling to notions of peaceful co-existence, fluid forms of hybrid religious practice, and, by and large, reject chauvinist ultranationalist politics and rhetoric of hate. Instead, they continue to act according to an ethics of collaboration and solidarity across semantic and physical borders that includes a sense longing for lost and undivided homelands and landscapes, places of worship and ritual, and the cultivation of relationships on the other side of the border – both through social media communication and travel to visit relatives or sites of pilgrimage and worship. Investigating such dialectics between hegemony and counter-hegemony, our presentation draws a comparative, ethnographic perspective including two adjacent borderlands: Cholistan in South Punjab, Pakistan and Rajasthan in India. Our analysis centres on the experiences of both contested

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categories of “Hindus” and “Muslims”. Further, we aim to enable an understanding of borders as social and semantic spaces generating people’s histories and lifeworlds, and, thus, to represent this conflict-laden borderland from a non-hegemonic, cross-border perspective. Ladakh as a Borderland between India and Pakistan: Fluidities and Rigidities Zainab Akhter - Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis (IDSA), India In the modern geopolitical arrangement, borders represent a clear and distinct divide that literally mark boundaries and separate communities (in most cases of the same ethnicity). In an attempt to mark a territorial distinction, the state also inevitably create a borderland wherein people from both sides of the border deal with everyday accommodations, and in case of contested and impermeable borders negotiate with the harsh realities. In South Asia, the majority of the borderlands are porous or semi-permeable for movement of goods and people. Therefore much of the border studies literature in the region have mainly focused on the transborder people. Also, in the case of India-Pakistan, the border studies are limited to militarization and security and often remain focused on the Kashmir conflict. Despite the conflict, the border between India and Pakistan in Kashmir is open for limited trade and people to people movement (Srinagar-Muzaffarabadroute). However the border between India and Pakistan in Ladakh, despite its peaceful state remain rigid and impermeable. These cross border dwellers, the baltis[Muslims, mostly Shia's] form a unique set of borderland in both India (Ladakh) and Pakistan (Baltistan), co-existing peacefully since1948 when the permanent line of Control (LoC) was officially demarcated between India and Pakistan. Despite the rigidities of the border, of not being able to cross into each other’s territories, there is a sense of longing and belonging for the other side. It’s the collective historical memory of the place as one entity before division and sense of closeness (for example the river Sindh flowing from Ladakh to Baltistan, visibility of villages on the other side etc.) that converge on both sides of the border in Ladakh as well as Baltistan that keeps these borderlands connected and in a state of peace and tranquility. This study is an attempt to first bring in the Balti account from the borderland regions into the mainstream narrative and debate of India and Pakistan relations. Secondly, it makes a query into whether the peaceful co-existence of the Baltis based on collective memory and a strong longing for the other can potentially be used as a starting point to resolve outstanding disputes between India and Pakistan, especially in the Himalayan region? And additionally, as a result, increase the chances of fluidity across the border, thus opening up the cross border traditional Turtuk-Kaphlu and Kargil-Skarduroutes for trade and human movement, making it a transborder borderland. Comparing Partitions through the Prism of Gender Benjamin Joinau - Hongik University, South Korea Anne Castaing – CNRS, France Recent seminal work in the innovative field of Partition Studies has provided new insights into national partitions, perceived not only as historical events but also as processes with multiple long-term effects. Applied to Korea, India, Vietnam, former Yugoslavia, Sudan, etc., it has allowed to highlight the structural and contextual differences between partitions, but also the similarities that accompany their imagination, and consequently, their representations. The cases of Korea and India, whose partitions are both concomitant (respectively 1945/1948 and 1947) and motivated by very different issues, and whose post-partition histories are both quite similar (tensions between the new nations, diverse diasporas with strong agency) and singular, thus draw upon common patterns to bear witness to the experience of loss, nostalgia and fragmentation or the fantasy of reunification, thus developing a real aesthetics of partition. Beyond the representations themselves, this aesthetics participates in the constitution of an “habitus”, as a framework in which the social practices of partitioned nations are developed. In particular, it is in this context that counterfactual narratives invent possible futures and reinvent collective pasts.

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This co-authored paper, which exposes the results of the work we have carried out as part of the common project "Gender and Partitioned Nations" (2017-2019), aims to explore this aesthetics of partition by highlighting the significant role played by gender representations and sexual issues, which embody not only the nation, but also its duplication or fragmentation. We will focus on fictional representations in novels (India) and films (Korea) in order to question both the gendering of national partitions and the function of the motifs of love and couple in counterfactual narratives and utopian formulations of reunification.

MEDICINE, MOBILITIES AND MILITARIZATION Cross-border Medical Travel to India: Pattern, Factors, and Experiences Kapil Dahal - Tribhuvan University, Nepal There are extensive and increasing economic, social and cultural relations across the border between Nepal and India. Regulation of this border with security and administrative measures has not stopped large numbers of people to cross it to meet their everyday needs and other necessities. Though it is open, this national border inherently separates people politically and materially and also joins them in social, cultural and economic frontiers. Cross-border medical travel exists amidst these ties among the people from both sides of the border. The phenomena of cross-border medical travel have a long history, which basically overlaps with the development of biomedicine in this zone. This paper deals only will the medical travel of aspirant health seekers and patients from Nepalese side. It portrays the experience of these people, mainly the women from southern part of Nepal, which shares its boundary with India. As a common practice, embedded with local cultural realm, the visiting woman has to travel across the border with a guardian, often the male member of the family. In analyizing this phenomena, this paper examines some fundamental anthropological questions such as what does border crossing symbolizes to these women. Can this phenomenon be taken as an empowerment of women or the way they have been under surveillance and patronage of the accompanying guardian signifies the extension of gendered boundary? This paper also scrutinizes the factors that make these women go for health care seeking in the other side of the border. On top of being lured by availability of advanced medical technologies, it also interprets why do these health facilities effort hard in making their health facilities appealing for the patients from Nepal, mainly through impression management and typical projection of available specialized services. The Trans-Himalayan Trade of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants: A Geo-Historical Politics Lens Arjun Chapagain - City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R., China On September 4-6, 2018, the Third Consultation Meeting of Protocol of Nepal-China Transit and Transportation held in Kathmandu finalized a Protocol of Nepal-China Transit and Transportation. Being one of the inter-state level agreements after China’s promotion of Belt and Road Initiatives in 2013, the protocol testifies a bilateral action taken by both sides to formalize, scale up, and regulate the trans-Himalayan trade that is envisaged as far below than potential. Medicinal and Aromatic Plants (MAPs) is one of the goods involved in this trans-Himalayan trade. Picturing the historic and present the scenarios of MAP trade in the belt and road countries requires us to explore mobilities and encounters of a plethora of human and non-human things, which are embodied in the trans-border regime meanwhile constructing its power. Things on the move entail the knowledge of Tibetan, Chinese medicine, aromatic plants and their inhabiting eco-system, trading paths wielding through rocks, snow and glaciers of the Himalayan mountains, various ethnic tribes etc. Moreover, all of them encountered in various historical moments, which was featured with rise and fall of different regimes, demarcation, control and regulation of borders that

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was always in the change, the web of ever-changing trading paths that have been sensitive to geopolitical tensions, regulative systems on border control and economic calculations. Here, we aim to chart the trans-Himalayan trading of MAPS in history and in present, from a geopolitical and economic perspective to illustrate the trans-border trading regime to unravel the material consequence of assembled things. Following Tsing, assemblage does not merely allow heterogenous human and non-human things to encounter, but also to produce the conditions for happening. The geography of medical knowledge, trade, and modern medical industry are always intertwined, revealing capitalism in an alternative form. Beyond Sarawak's Frontier : The Road to Nationhood Raine Riman - Swinburne University Of Technology, Sarawak Campus, Malaysia What is the link between access, production, governance and collective identity of a community? Do boundaries materialise spaces of production and power? If so, how? And what roles, do such boundaries play in the definition of nationalist development policies and the formation of the collective identity of a Community-in-transition (from being isolated to accessible)? This Ph.D. research project, looks into how a society becomes isolated, affected by the marking of colonial frontiers and borderline and later, by the modern government infrastructure policies (in this case road access), and the formation of their collective identity; by interrogating their relationship with their past and understanding their everyday lived experience. This research attempts to answer the questions by looking into an anthropological case study in Sarawak, employing cultural studies and critical analysis methodological lens, in response to the recent development on postcoloniality of the “Other”. It places geopolitical history and development of mobility at the foreground of understanding the complexity of the sociopolitical process of change within communities-in-transition. The research will provide an alternative narrative to the historical events surrounding the complex identity formation of the border community in Tanjung Dato, Sarawak, that was isolated for 150 years, and is exacerbated by the recent infrastructure mega-project development: the Pan Borneo Highway into this borderzone settlements. The introduction of new access increases the possibility of territorial expansion and economic opportunities, but it also brings about concerns such as security threats, environmental degradations. These concerns may not necessarily be inflicted by the community themselves, rather it is the concern that external forces and global processes introduce to the previously isolated community. Militarization of Mountain Communities: Chiefiancy Construction and the Se Worship in Kokang since the 1760s Jianxiong Ma - The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong S.A.R., China The Qing-Burma wars opened the mountains area in the east of the Salween River for Han Chinese migrants and this region became a main area for settlers from Yunnan to Burma. Even though, this area was under the jurisdiction of the Dai Chieftain chieftain in Zhenkang in Yunnan. After the 1897 treaty between the Qing government and the British government was signed, Kokang was demarcated to become a district of the Mubang chieftain in Lashio. From the 1760s to the 1890s, the Yang family gradually became the military leader and was recognized by the Han Chinese communities as local chieftain, even if the Qing government did not appoint them. After the colonization of Burma in 1886, the Yang family shifted their political loyalty to the British government to search the benefit of being broker to import British goods into Yunnan through mule caravan trade. Based on historical anthropological perspective, this research focuses on the construction of Yang family as the chieftain since the 1760s and their role of shaping the Se worship in local communities. The author analyses the interpretive strategies manipulated by local elite and the layers of meaning related to “the official” in every life context in Kokang. Considering the authority over tax collection, military force and legal jurisdiction, local communities regard the Yang chieftain and their successors as “the officials”, the highest source of political power, while they ignore the

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power of state in Burma largely. Hence, the idea of state becomes the outside layer in interpretation, regarding the chieftaincy as “the state” in local politics. Due to this interpretive framework about “the double-layers of the state authority” in Kokang, interpretations about the Se god worship becomes a significant mark to highlight the ethnic boundary of Kokang people on the borderlands between China and Burma.

MIGRATION, CO-EXISTENCE AND EXCLUSION Understanding the Creation of Borderland Geographies in New Delhi Shivangi Kaushik - University of Oxford, United Kingdom This paper is a part of my doctoral research project which seeks to understand how the racialized subjectivities of female migrant students from the Northeastern region of India (NER) construct different narratives of belongingness in the neighborhoods of New Delhi. Through their everyday practices of negotiating the city, I try to understand how borderland geographies unfold in the center of India i.e. New Delhi. It seeks to understand the experiences of female students from NER who migrate to New Delhi (Delhi University) for pursuing their undergraduate degrees and who by the virtue of their physical features resemble the people of the neighboring countries of Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, and China. By conducting an in-depth ethnography, the paper seeks to understand how they ‘world’ (Ong and Roy 2011) the neighborhoods of New Delhi through the creation of private hostels which cater to the female students from the region and where specific cuisines from NER are served. The paper then looks at the role of the churches (different branches like Catholic or Baptist churches) in Delhi in the lives of the migrant women from NER which address concerns of racial discrimination within Delhi and how it also mediates their access to hostels and colleges in the city. Do these institutions of accommodation and faith become ‘escape zones’ or do they become spaces of alienation in New Delhi? I am currently staying in one of the hostels which accommodates only female students from NER in a locality called Old Gupta Colony (near Delhi University) and from my ethnography, a story is emerging where it is obvious that not only they are stereotyped and excluded for their distinctive physical features but also for their behavioral patterns (they are assumed to be docile and obedient as well as licentious women), food choices and as well as their inability to converse fluently in Hindi are also ridiculed. This, then raises pertinent questions of belongingness where one can ask: if an individual requires to look ‘Indian’ enough, need to speak Hindi fluently or follow specific social practices to belong to New Delhi (McDuie Ra 2013)? How do race and gender then intersect for these women to constitute them as racialized subjectivities within the different neighborhoods of New Delhi? I also seek to understand the quality of access to institutions of higher education like that of colleges that these young women may have by understanding the nature of their classroom interactions with their teachers and students who are from different parts of India. How do instances of racial discrimination influence the way they consume the spaces of colleges in New Delhi, vis-à-vis migrant students from other parts of the country? Articulations of race and racialization in India have barely received ample academic attention, as often ‘mainstream’ India (the other geographic regions of the country which are not a part of Northeast India) has denied that the worst forms of racial discrimination have always been reserved for the people from NER and also experiences of racialization of Indians abroad often overshadow the experiences of racialization faced by the migrant students from the region within Indian cities. Based on my fieldwork study, I argue that race in the context of New Delhi is uniquely deployed: not only to create the racialized Other but also, to constitute boundaries between different communities and to make sure that people who possess different physical features and have different socio-cultural features do not belong to New Delhi. Even though some scholars have argued that race as a marker of physical differences is a futile concept, however, the importance of the epicanthic fold of the eye and the distinctiveness of the ‘Northeastern face’ (Wouters & Subba 2013) cannot be

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undermined in this particular study. The distinctiveness of this ethnographic paper it is hoped, will then lie in the way it is able to juxtapose the perspectives of these female migrants who move from a peripheral region to a city where they may be excluded from belonging and along with that of a person like myself who is also in the process of understanding where she herself belongs. Bianmin: Zones of Exception in China’s Immigration System Franziska Pluemmer – University of Vienna, Austria China’s immigration system only very selectively grants foreigners the opportunity to acquire Chinese citizenship. Foreigners entering the country for work or marriage cannot obtain Chinese citizenship unless they are descendent from Chinese parents or contribute to the Chinese society in an outstanding way, which in the past however only has led to ‘honorary citizenship’. In China’s border areas, however, border provinces have practiced for more than twenty years an additional form of citizenship that is exclusive and only locally valid in the border area: border residency bianmin. This paper analyses the ways in which citizenship is practices in the Chinese border area particularly in Yunnan province bordering Myanmar. It shows how border residency has evolved as a practice of inclusion for foreigners to integrate cross-border families and markets. Moreover, citizenship practices have become extended in a Special Border Zone such as in Ruili city where local governments provide locally valid marriage and working permits thereby creating a graduated system of legality. This paper argues that local governments deploy graduated forms of citizenship to selected groups of foreigners in order to make use of their work force. Originally, these special border zones were created to extend the Chinese market into neighboring countries and to extend the reach of regional trade. In order to supply these zones with labor, local governments had to become creative in attracting the foreign personnel. Creating these local citizenship categories is contradicting the national immigration system, yet since they only exist in few localities it shows how asymmetric and adaptive the immigration system is. The Myanmar Immigrants in China-Myanmar Borderland Cities: The Emerging Migrant-City Nexus? Tingshu Zhu - Mahidol University, Thailand The borderland between China and Myanmar are undergoing massive transformation. Especially since the early 2010s, both old and new political, economic and social dynamics registered on a variety of spatial scales (Brenner, 2004) are reshaping the transnational structures the borderland accommodates. China’s Belt and Road Initiative, its new immigration and border control regime, the nation-wide industrial relocation, and the developmental aspirations of the borderland region, namely Yunnan Province and its frontier cities, all contribute to the ascending momentum in the reconstruction of transnational mobility and connectivity in the borderland. On the other side of the territorial boundary, the Aung San Suu Kyi government’s reorientation towards China, Myanmar’s national peace progress and the country’s effort to bolster the economy in its Northern borderland induce not only new transnational economic opportunities but also nascent political and social trajectories that traverse the border. The borderland cities in China along the border are home to around 100,000 Myanmar migrants. The preponderance of them are locally settled for many years, leading to the formulation of strong local attachment and salient local emplacement. They contribute to various local economic sectors by connecting the resources and markets across the border, and enrich the cultural diversity of the multi-ethnic cities. However, the aforementioned occurrences are changing the the borderland political, economic and social landscape which these migrants are familiar with. This paper therefore investigates the difficulties faced by the Myanmar migrants in three borderland cities and the coping strategies they employ at present. Furthermore, it intends to see whether the chronological dialectics between the Myanmar migrants and local development generate the migrants-city nexus (Schiller & Çağlar, 2015), in which the transnational immigrants act as the agents of local

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development. The Rise in Hostility against Migrants and the Possibility of Co-existence in Northeast India: Rethinking Citizenship in the South Asian Borderland Makiko Kimura - Tsuda University, Japan The opening of an India-Myanmar land border crossing has led to a rise in expectation of increased trade and transportation between India and Southeast Asia by road, creating a new economic zone in the borderland. Certain types of migration among local people in northeast India are also anticipated. The influx of Muslims of Bengal origin, or so-called “Bangladeshis,” has caused much fear among the local people of one day becoming minorities in their own lands. In Assam, in particular, the anti-migration movement led to an update of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in order to detect illegal foreigners, resulting in two million people being left off the list. New technologies, such as the digitization of old documents, were used In the NRC update process to verify the documents of millions of people. The use of biometric authentication has already been examined by the government of Assam to monitor border migration. The means for checking and controlling border migration flow is changing rapidly, and anticipated to create a new type of human rights infringement against migrants. On the other hand, it should be noted that Assam and other parts of northeast India have a long history of diverse communities co-existing. Even in Assam, violent persecutions, such as what befell the Rohingyas of Myanmar are unlikely. Although there have been instances of anti-migration agitation, co-existence is the norm rather than the exception. Based on fieldwork and historical analysis, this presentation attempts to present the kinds of human rights violations being perpetrated against migrants in Assam, and define the possibility of co-existence among different communities in the South Asian borderland.

POPULAR CULTURE AND ETHNICITY ALONG (NORTH-)EAST ASIA’S BORDERS

Karaoke Freedom: Cross-border Technologies and Political Imagination in the Borderlands Emily Hong - Haverford College, United States Above and Below the Ground (in production) is a feature-length ethnographic film produced in partnership with frontline environmental defenders in Kachinland, an unrecognized state in the borderlands of Myanmar, India, China, and Thailand. It tells the story of indigenous punk rock pastors who team up with women activists to protect a sacred river from a Chinese-built mega dam. When Aung San Suu Kyi breaks an election promise to cancel the dam, activists and musicians fight back the best way they know how—through protest, prayer, and Karaoke music videos. At ABRN, I would like to present scene selects (works-in-progress) contextualized by an artist talk which focuses on the role of music videos in sparking political and environmental movement-building during the height of Myanmar military rule. I will describe how cross-border genealogies of filmmaking and activism provided access to new technologies and ways of seeing which strengthened “underground” networks, challenging the state’s monopoly on the means of production, representation, and governance. While scholars have often focused on how media can serve as a tool of state domination, this film and research reveals that media can also serve as a fertile ground for political imagination that challenges state oppression. Repackaging China’s Ethnic Periphery in the Age of Creative Industries Yu Luo - City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R., China This paper examines an emerging zone of creative industries in Guizhou – a landlocked province

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without any international border, yet which has been iconic as peripheral over centuries of Chinese history and state-building. Situated in China’s southwestern frontier, Guizhou has long been striving for visibility and has witnessed a development frenzy in the past decade, seeking to tap into a wide range of resources and initiatives from big data to ethnic tourism. Focusing on a new urban zone specifically established by local government as an incubator for creative industries, this paper explores the process of incorporating cultural traditions of the province’s diverse ethnic populations into a context of creative use that stresses craftwork, design, and entertainment based on originality. In repackaging this zone as “Colorful Guizhou” through capital investment and infrastructure support, we see a co-existence of and reliance on both traditional cultures as treasured resources and modern technologies as design measures. This paper engages with a critical juncture of late-socialist China from three aspects: first, how the dramatic remodelling of urban zones that were built on the ruins of ethnic rural populations who had to relocate for the “greater good” transformed collective lives; second, how cultures, and especially ethnic minority traditions, are geared to shoring up a place in the context of creative transformation and development through the emergence of cultural enterprises; and third, how the expansion of "Colorful Guizhou" into the cultural markets of Shenzhen and Hong Kong – borderland of another sort – serves as an inter-regional platform for Guizhou's “going to the world.” By asking how various stakeholders and social actors find new meanings in this new frontier, this paper aims to understand its implication for the future of “borderland creativity.” Visual Ethnicization of Space in Sino-Russian Border Areas: A Comparative Analysis Ivan Zuenko - Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia There are enclaves of etnicized (at least visually) space both in Russian and Chinese areas across the common border. One can find plenty of signboards, street nameplates etc. in Chinese border towns Manzhouli, Heihe, Fuyuan, Suifenhe, Hunchin and even Khorgos on the border with Kazakhstan. Usually this phenomenon is interpreted as a tool for attracting tourists from neighbor country (see works of Ivan Peshkov, Yana Guzey). Remarkably, ethnicization of public space has commercial nature and supported by local authorities. The same process can be witnessed in Russia after 2014 where “China friendly” campaign was launched in efforts to help Chinese tourist to navigate in Russian cities. However, several contradictions to the usual interpretation were detected during analysis of ‘a la Russe in China’ case. First, most of tourist objects a la Russe in China are not attractive for Russians themselves – for example, ‘the biggest Matryoshka doll in the world’ or thematic park of Russian monumental architecture in Manzhouli. Secondly, in entertainment outfits “for Russians” (nightclubs, restaurants, art galleries) Chinese are the main audience. Thirdly, very often elements a la Russe (for example, signboards) have no meaning in Russian language. It gives us a possibility to conclude that elements of visual ethnicization in China historically appeared as a tool for attraction Russian traders and tourists now has the different nature. Ethnicization became the product but not for internal use exceptionally – for Chinese tourists and customers. Border towns started to self-present themselves as “Western-style areas” (architecture, cuisine, amusement) to attract tourists from other regions of China more than people from Russia. Local governments started to support ethnicization of public space a la Russe in efforts to raise incomes of local business and self-present their towns as “successful centers of international cooperation”, which is important in the eyes of Beijing.

SOCIAL CHANGE AND INFRASTRUCTURAL DEVELOPMENT IN UPLAND SOUTHEAST ASIA The Life of Infrastructures: State Concessions and State Strategies in the Borderlands of Southwest-China, Myanmar and Laos

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Alexander Horstmann - Tallinn University, Estonia The aggressive push of Chinese infrastructure projects in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative, Special Economic Zones, Pipelines and Damns, Road- and Railway-building, Agribusiness and Casinos, have profoundly altered the landscapes of Northern Myanmar and Northwestern Laos. This initiative has been described as neo-liberal, creating spaces of capitalism, state of exception, resource extraction and exploitation of labor as well as neo-colonial extra-territoriality (Santasombat 2015, Nyiri 2012). This paper joins alternative explanations that emphasize the strategic interest of Myanmar and Lao government elites as well as militia in Myanmar to use business concessions to restructure a landscape that has been hitherto largely out of reach for the state as well as to generate revenue (Ait 2018, Diana 2017, Dwyer 2011). The paper looks at the manifold ways in which Lao and Myanmar elites actively participate and shape the infrastructures and business concessions by constantly intervening to produce revenue and to perpetuate its control over minority populations. Built on ethnographic fieldwork in Myanmar and Laos, this paper concentrates on specific case-studies in the Shan borderworlds of Northeastern Myanmar and the Hmong borderworlds of Northwestern Laos. The paper argues that China uses the infrastructure to push China’s influence and markets, and that the Lao and Myanmar elites test new ways of governance and accumulation. The thesis that the paper advances is that similar to previous and comparative attempts to modernize a borderland by infrastructure, the infrastructures become a sort of monsters on their own with independent lives that are not in the full control of either the Chinese, or the Lao/ Myanmar governments, and of the minorities, but are contested between them. Borders in Motion/Living In-Between: Everyday State-Public Encounters at Chong Chom, a Thai-Cambodian Border Pass Khathaleeya Liamdee - University of Washington, United States Border checkpoints are often seen as transit space for cross-border mobility controls or as the manifest of state territorialization where travelers to be inspected by the government authorities before leaving one country to entering another country. For the study of Chong Chom – O’Smach border pass between Thailand and Cambodia, the checkpoint can also exhibit the border in motion based on everyday experiences of those who live in between two countries through their daily routines and different kinds of state-public encounters at the checkpoints. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and the concepts of in-betweenness and kinopolitics (Nail 2016), this research reveals how this border area became one of the destinations for Cambodian migrants after the end of Cambodian civil war through their migration stories. My findings are about how mobility and works at the immigration checkpoints with a variety of travel documents and residence permits which impact one’s stay duration in the neighboring country. The analysis of the power relations between state officers and border crossers reflects how mobility and security controls function among state agents of one country and with its neighboring country; and how border crossers have negotiated with the authorities in order to live their lives and do businesses across the border. Furthermore, their border-crossing practices and encounters with state authorities shed lights on the bordering process and immigration policy especially on the Thai side that has been developed from its long-term involvement in allowing or blocking refugees and migrants from Cambodia since the Cold War period until the present. In other words, this research highlights the transformation of human flows, connections, and circulations at this border zone in the context of post-Cambodian civil war, ASEAN regional integration, and authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia. Behind Resistance: How Grassroots Movements Shape the Border Landscapes of Special Economic Zones Ratchada Arpornsilp - Australian National University, Australia Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have rapidly expanded as a spatial model and engine to promote

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industrial economic growth and development across the world. In the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), the promotion of SEZs is based upon the logic of regional integration and connectivity. Drawing from the collaborative frameworks of the ASEAN Economic Community, the GMS Economic Cooperation Program and the Ayeyarwady-Chao Phraya-Mekong Economic Cooperation Strategy, the border SEZs are extensively driven by the Asian Development Bank and “One Belt, One Road” Initiative. In 2014 the Thai military government directed the establishment of SEZs in 10 target border provinces. Chiang Khong (in translation as a town of Mekong), a Thai-Lao frontier territory of Mekong River located in Chiang Rai province of northern Thailand, is one of them. Through the authoritative imposition, parts of the Ing wetland forest in Chiang Khong were demarcated for SEZ development. Such an ambiguous process of public or communal land conversion is conducted without an informed engagement of primary stakeholders at the local level. Yet, these borderland communities have previously accessed and managed the designated lands and resources to sustain their livelihoods. The use of special economic zoning thence becomes the state’s governing technology to territorialize the borderland and integrate the borderlands in the global market economy. Applying a combined analytical lens of political ecology and social movements, this paper inquires how land and natural resource contestations around SEZs stimulate collective actions. Employing an ethnographic case-study approach in Chiang Khong, the paper specifically explores the strategic influence that grassroots movements exert over the development vision of border SEZs and how these forces result in re-contouring the shape and relationship of various actors in the border landscapes. This paper will contribute to the deliberation of border SEZ public policy in Thailand and its impacts on the borderland communities with implications to wider GMS. China's Road to Peace: Impact of Belt and Road Initiative on Myanmar's Conflicts Monalisa Adhikari - University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom In Myanmar, BRI-sponsored infrastructural development has been concurrent to the peace process which aims to resolve some of the world’s oldest insurgencies. The Myanmar government’s continued participation in BRI projects, many of which pass through territories contested by Ethnic Armed Groups(EAO), at a time when discussions on territorial and military powersharing remain unresolved, has a direct impact on the peace process. This article contends that BRI introduces new motivations, norms, and actors, all of which can lead to conflicting outcomes – with both conflict-inducing and conflict resolving characteristics, making it difficult to determine the impact of BRI on peace. On one hand, BRI has made it difficult for groups to continue fighting. China has used its leverage to get the groups to the peace talks, as well as strengthened the role of the state in economic development in areas where it has weak or no control. However, as discussions of the peace process are yet unresolved, such largesse infrastructure has enhanced the militarised presence of the state in ethnic areas, bypassed governance structures of EAOs, thereby eroding the trust of the EAOs in the peace as well as presents dangers of increased drugs and weapons transfer- evidencing BRI’s conflict inducing potential. Normatively, BRI lionises the ‘developmental peace’ norm seeing development as a pathway for peace which contrasts with the decades-long aspiration of EAOs and democratic oppositions where inclusion, democracy and human rights have been seen as pathways of development. Further, BRI bolsters the engagement of informal, non-state actors, as well as diverse state actors, which, given the pluralization of foreign policy in China will continue to bring contradicting pulls to the peace process in Myanmar. While how BRI impacts peace, might be indeterminate for now, a clear outcome is that BRI has enhanced Chinese dependency on Myanmar, and made is more vested in the dynamics of peace and conflict and its resolution in Myanmar.

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ROUNDTABLES

BORDERLANDS REDUX: KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION, NEW FORMS OF PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT, AND THE RE-SCALING OF BORDER SPACES IN ASIA

Convenor: Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi - University of Zurich, Switzerland Chair: Alessandro Rippa - Tallinn University, Estonia There is growing interest, in various scholarly fields and the general public, in what is happening across Asian borderlands. Part of this interest is drawn by China’s assertive foreign policy and the rhetoric surrounding its most ambitious global project to date: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). As part of the BRI, yet often within projects that preceded it, many roads at the interface of China and its Inner Asian, South Asian and Southeast Asian neighbours were asphalted and expanded, reflecting China’s augmented interest in paving the way for an increased (Sino-centric) circulation of commodities, labour, and investment. As tarmac expanded, imposing border checkpoints were built and brand-new Economic Zones set up, the borderlands underwent a significant re-scaling: from former ‘blind alleys’ and national edges governed to monitor and often block trans-border interactions, they have become a springboard for Chinese companies to expand globally. As social anthropologists conducting research across China’s border regions, we have witnessed our fieldsites experiencing this rescaling and the borderlands becoming the focus of increased state investment and international attention. As those developments occur, we also feel the need to become more visible in the global knowledge production on the region, which is currently dominated by large-scale geo-political and economic analyses. As we try to create a discursive space for scholarly exchanges, questions relating to its audiences, distribution and translation arise. For example, how can we, as fieldwork-based ‘slow science’ scholars become more visible and vocal in regard to knowledge production on China’s borderlands? How can we make the experience that we have accumulated matter for the way general knowledge is produced on these seemingly marginal – yet arguably central – regions of Asia? What is the value of an ethnographic perspective and how to make it understandable to non-academics and to more quantitatively oriented sciences? What is our potential audience? But also, what would we like this knowledge to be doing and who do we produce it for? The first aim of this roundtable is thus to reflect on the production of knowledge on Asian borderlands, its potential addressees, its power, and the challenges of cross-disciplinary communication. Secondly, this roundtable engages with the existing knowledge infrastructures. When discussing how to make the research that we produce available and how to reach the audiences that we consider important, the question of publishing and outreach is central. In the currently prevailing system where authors and reviewers provide their work and knowledge for free to large, profit-oriented publishing conglomerates that restrict access to it, we find it important to discuss the alternatives: open access (OA) initiatives situated at the edges of the established publishing landscape but also clearly attracting an increasing number of authors and readers. In this roundtable, scholars of Asian borderlands and the invited editors of innovative e-journals (Made in China, The South Asianist, Roadsides) and university press series, will discuss the challenges of knowledge production in the current political moment, the specificities of various publishing forms and the potential of OA to transform scientific communication. Participants Andrea Pia - London School of Economics, United Kingdom Tina Harris - University of Amsterdam, Netherlands Hassan Karrar - Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan Jolynna Sinanan - University of Sydney, Australia Michael Heneise - UiT – The Arctic University of Norway, Norway

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DEVELOPMENT ZONES IN ASIAN BORDERLANDS Convenor: Michael Eilenberg - Aarhus University, Denmark Chair: Duncan McDuie-Ra - University of Newcastle, Australia From remote, peripheral backyards to front-yards of economic development and state-building, borderlands are increasingly becoming dynamic spaces of capital accumulation, experimentation and dispossession. This transformation is best evinced by the rise of production and/or export-oriented spatial enclaves, speculative investment (especially real estate), exploitation and securitization of resources and populations in different parts of Asian borderlands. While ubiquitous in its proliferation, this transformation is not uniform in its spatial manifestations, neither the assemblages that emerge from it nor the direct/indirect socio-political impacts as a result of it. Although seemingly disparate and distinct from one another, when mapped together the processes, actors and their underlying motivations illustrate how Asian borderlands are being shaped by accelerated economic development. Cognizant of these processes, the roundtable uses ‘Development Zones’ as a new analytical framework for thinking about Asian borderlands. ‘Development Zones’ are socio-spatial manifestations of shifts in global and national economic/political policies towards greater economic productivity. ‘Development Zones’ encapsulate the entire gamut of economic, political and spatial changes as a cohesive whole, co-producing aspects of one another, within a designated area. Here economic activity is deeply embedded in international/national policies as well as local spatial, social and political dynamics. The impact of these changes is made more profound by their location in borderlands which have their own specific histories. As a result, ‘Development Zones’ in Asian borderlands often give rise to a more intense set of politics, imaginations and affect (hope, failure, anxiety, abandonment). This conceptualization, while privileging the capacity of local actors to define and shape the ‘Development Zone’ also brings to focus the dialectic relationship between people, institutions and resources in a fluid landscape of variegated sovereignty and contested belongings. The roundtable discussion will focus on the following themes: 1.  Making the Development Zone: What are the different financial, infrastructural and political networks that enable the creation of these development zones? How does such territorial planning shape and entice capital expansion and privatization? Has it also led to the ‘de-facto’ effect in regions officially not designated as ‘Development Zones’? 2. Disciplining the Development Zone: ‘Development Zones’ once created have to be maintained through the enforcement of rules, regulations and surveillance. What are the economic, infrastructural, political, social and regulatory mechanisms employed to discipline labour and/or the environment in Development Zones? How does culture and gender affect strategies of control and discipline? How are they employed, by whom and what contestations and solidarities might emerge as a result? How is this represented spatially? 3. Zones of Ruination and Abandonment: More often than not, development zones are harbingers of cycles of boom and bust that stress accelerated process of dispossession and resource exploitation. How do social relations transform during different stages of boom and bust? What happens when these hallmarks of developmentalism do not materialize as intended, when they collapse and are abandoned? What are the tangible ruins of development and how do people living in former development zones reconcile with their changed circumstance and spatial ambiguity?   Participants Mona Chettri - University of Western Australia, Australia Galen Murton - James Madison University, United States Nadine Plachta - Heidelberg University, Germany Tina Harris - University of Amsterdam, Netherlands Sindhunata Hargyono - Northwestern University, United States Jason Cons - The University of Texas at Austin, United States

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NATURE PROTECTION AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN THE INNER-KOREAN BORDER AREA – IS A COMPROMISE POSSIBLE?

Convenor and Chair: Bernhard Seliger - Hanns Seidel Foundation, Germany In the last 70 years, the DMZ became a unique refuge for fauna and flora rare elsewhere in South Korea. While the rest of the country rapidly developed, the border area was excluded from this development. This does not only apply to the DMZ proper, but also for the adjacent Civilian Control Zone (CCZ) and the larger border area. However, in the last years, attempts are increasing to create more value and development in the area. Eco-tourism programs, new bicycle and car roads, new pensions in formerly off-limit areas, are increasing. The reduction of the CCZ was an economic chance for people living the in area, but at the same time a challenge for nature protection, since immediately small agro-indutries (like hot houses) came up in mass. This panels assembles different perspectives to discuss, if there is a peaceful co-existence of humans and nature possible in the DMZ. Also, the chance to use the DMZ, formerly a sign of division and hostility, as a new border for peace, analogous to the change of the inter-German border from a death strip to a zone for life, the Green Belt. Participants Sang-Yong Park - Research Institute for Gangwon, South Korea Jae Kyong Chun - National Nature Trust of Korea, South Korea Hyun-Ah Choi - Hanns Seidel Foundation, South Korea

INDIGENOUS FUTURES AND CO-EXISTENCE IN TROUBLED TIMES Convenor: Mabel Gergan - Florida State University, United States Chair: Pasang Sherpa - Pacific Lutheran University, United States This roundtable takes up the conference theme of 'Co-existence' to think through Indigenous futures. In the current political conjuncture, we find a disturbing coalescence of heightened nationalism and an aggressive developmentalist agenda that is severely undermining indigenous territorial sovereignty in Asian borderlands. In India's Eastern Borderlands, indigenous and tribal groups have responded to these troubled times through a valorization of their ties to sacred ecologies, a move that has received both widespread support and critique from engaged academics. Scepticism and critique are perhaps a valid response, since this valorization of indigenous identity has also been weaponized by some indigenous groups calling for the curtailment of the rights of minorities and other marginalized groups such as Muslims and even tribes from other parts of India. With the Hindu Right gaining a foothold in India's Eastern borderlands, we are likely to see an intensification of this latter claim and a greater degree of collusion between tribal/indigenous elite with corporate state interests. Some would argue that modern notions of indigeneity will always be exclusionary since they are predicated on the 'politics of recognition' of colonial and state categories and we must therefore abandon the notion altogether. This roundtable brings together five tribal/indigenous women from Nepal and India with personal and political stakes in these sites, who study different pieces of this puzzle in their research. We are interested in thinking through this problematique together: Is it possible to think of Indigenous futures as co-existing in relationships of collaboration and reciprocity with other minority and marginalized identities? Can decolonization be a useful framework in the Asian Borderlands context to think through how indigeneity can be wrested from the strictures of legal-constitutional categories of recognition, tribal capitalism, and patriarchal norms of inheritance? What are the sites and spaces where such co-existences can be built or are already thriving?

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Participants Guangchunliu Gangmei - Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact, Thailand Gertrude Lamare - London School of Economics, United Kingdom Anudeep Dewan - University of Oregon, United States