Development Zones in Asian Borderlands

Mona Chettri is a Next Generation Network Scholar at the Australia-India Institute, University of Western Australia. She is the author of Ethnicity and Democracy in the Eastern Himalayan Borderland: Constructing Democracy (Amsterdam University Press, 2017). Her current research focuses on infrastructure, urbanisation, and gender in the Sikkim-Darjeeling Himalaya. Michael Eilenberg is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research focuses on issues of state formation, sovereignty, autonomy, citizenship, and agrarian expansion in frontier regions of Southeast Asia. He is the author of At the Edges of States (KITLV Press/Brill Academic Publishers, 2012) and co-editor with Jason Cons of Frontier Assemblages: The Emergent Politics of Resource Frontiers in Asia (Wiley, 2019). Willem van Schendel, Professor of History, University of Amsterdam and International Institute of Social History, the Netherlands. He works with the history, anthropology and sociology of Asia. Recent works include A History of Bangladesh (2020), Embedding Agricultural Commodities (2017, ed.), The Camera as Witness (2015, with J. L. K. Pachuau). See uva.academia.edu/WillemVanSchendel.

"Simultaneously wide-ranging and focused, Development Zones in Asian Borderlands traces the transformation of borderlands in South and Southeast Asia into a diverse array of official, de facto, and informal development zones. The empirically rich and absorbing collection provides a compelling conceptual framework for such zones, and is particularly strong in its focus on their temporalities and affective qualities. It will be of great value for borderland and infrastructural studies, as well as for scholars of contemporary Asia."- Emily T. Yeh, Professor of Geography, University of Colorado Boulder "Theoretically ambitious and empirically rich, this volume shows how development zones are much more than sites of capital accumulation. As places of economic, spatial and military experimentation, of imagination and desire, they are also critical sites for interrogating how life itself is 'zoned' in contexts of shifting geopolitical fortunes. An original and important contribution to our understanding of borderland lives in South and Southeast Asia."- Madeleine Reeves, author of Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia

• Acknowledgements Introduction: "Enclave Development and Socio-spatial Transformations in Asian Borderlands" (Mona Chettri and Michael Eilenberg) Chapter 1. "Post-disaster Development Zones and Dry Ports as Geopolitical Infrastructures in Nepal" (Galen Murton) Chapter 2. "Onwards and Upwards: Aerial Development Zones in Nepal" (Tina Harris) Chapter 3. "Casinos as Special Zones: Speculative Development on Nation's Edge" (Juan Zhang) Chapter 4. "Thinking the Zone: Development, Climate, and Heterodystopia" (Jason Cons) Chapter 5. "From Shangri-La to De-facto SEZ: Land Grabs from 'Below' in Sikkim, India" (Mona Chettri) Chapter 6. "Development Zones in Conflict-affected Borderlands: The case of Muse, Northern Shan State, Myanmar" (Patrick Meehan, Sai Aung Hla and Sai Kham Phu) Chapter 7. "Smart Enclaves in the Borderland: Digital Obligations in Northeast India" (Duncan McDuie-Ra) Chapter 8. "Post-Disaster Economies at the Margins: Development, Profit, and Insecurities Across Nepal's Northern Borderlands" (Nadine Plachta) Chapter 9. "Development from the Margins: Failing Zones and Suspended Development in an Indonesian Border Village" (Sindhunata Hargyono) Chapter 10. "From Boom to Bust - to Boom Again? Infrastructural Suspension and the Making of a Development Zone at the China-Laos Borderlands" (Alessandro Rippa) Chapter 11. "Genealogies of Extraction: De Facto Development Zones in the Indonesian Borderlands" (Thomas Mikkelsen and Michael Eilenberg) Index