Search

Border regions worldwide have gained prominence for how nation-states order, divide and understand the world. This is increasingly made explicit in the selective management of global commercial and human flows, leading to a paradoxical development and a major dilemma for the contemporary bordering practices in border regions: that of concurrently facilitating differentiated mobility while ensuring territorial integrity, securing both territories and flows. This paper argues that large-scale transnational infrastructures, by controlling, facilitating and channelizing cross-border mobilities, have emerged as a major instrument of b/ordering space in borderlands. This is especially relevant in Asia, where transnational, cross-border connectivity infrastructure projects have mushroomed, supported by political rhetoric, big budgets and diplomatic vigour. Grounded in long-term ethnographic research, the paper scrutinizes variegated infrastructure spaces in the seemingly remote and conflict-riddled borderlands between China’s Yunnan province and northern Myanmar’s Kachin state, subject to intensive Chinese infrastructure developments since the mid-1990s, further accelerated by the launch of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2015. The paper argues that infrastructures such as roads, plantations and special economic zones have started to regulate these volatile and contested borderlands more effectively than the official boundaries that delimit complex territorialities in the border region.

The Chinese government promotes the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a global strategy for regional integration and infrastructure investment. With a projected US$1 trillion commitment from Chinese financial institutions, and at least 138 countries participating, the BRI is attracting intense debate. Yet most analysis to date focuses on broad drivers, risks, and opportunities, largely considered to be emanating from a coherent policy imposed by Beijing. In this special issue, we instead examine the BRI as a relational, contested process - a bundle of intertwined discourses, policies, and projects that sometimes align but are sometimes contradictory. We move beyond policy-level, macro-economic, and classic geopolitical analysis to study China's global investments "from the ground". Our case studies reveal the BRI to be dynamic and unstable, rhetorically appropriated for different purposes that sometimes but do not always coalesce as a coherent geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy. The papers in this special issue provide one of the first collections of deep empirical work on the BRI and a useful approach for grounding China's role in globalization in the critical contexts of complex local realities.

On 20 September 2015, Nepal adopted a new constitution – the first ever drafted by a democratically elected constituent assembly. Hurriedly finalised in the aftermath of the major earthquakes that shook the Himalayas in spring 2015, the constitution did not meet the expectations of Nepal’s marginal population groups. Whereas many had looked at the past decade of prolonged constitutional negotiations with high hopes of a devolution of power in the centralised Himalayan state, the constitution failed to deliver. Widespread and contentious discussions of a future federal organisation of the state were silenced with a proposal that was widely regarded as centralistic and elitist. In the present chapter, I take a look at some of the conjunctural politics that emerged before this bitter end – at a time when federal restructuring of the Nepali nation was high on the political agenda and the country’s ‘social contract’ was to an unprecedented degree open for discussion. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2010 and 2011, I explore demands for a Limbuwan state in Nepal’s eastern borderland to Indian Darjeeling. I focus on the multiple ways in which the Limbuwan movement seeks to establish territorial authority of a Limbuwan state in the context of a major national transition. The movement, I argue, describes a balancing act of political mobilisation between an indigeneity-oriented politics of culture and a state-oriented and state-emulating culture of politics.These two dimensions operate at different scales. While the former connects the movement to pre-national histories and global narratives of ethnic belonging, the latter ties the movement thoroughly back into the territorialised politics of the Nepali nation state. Counterintuitively, the political practice of this movement for local autonomy ends up supporting a national territorialisation of the borderland., On 20 September 2015, Nepal adopted a new constitution – the first ever drafted by a democratically elected constituent assembly. Hurriedly finalised in the aftermath of the major earthquakes that shook the Himalayas in spring 2015, the constitution did not meet the expectations of Nepal’s marginal population groups. Whereas many had looked at the past decade of prolonged constitutional negotiations with high hopes of a devolution of power in the centralised Himalayan state, the constitution failed to deliver. Widespread and contentious discussions of a future federal organisation of the state were silenced with a proposal that was widely regarded as centralistic and elitist. In the present chapter, I take a look at some of the conjunctural politics that emerged before this bitter end – at a time when federal restructuring of the Nepali nation was high on the political agenda and the country’s ‘social contract’ was to an unprecedented degree open for discussion. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2010 and 2011, I explore demands for a Limbuwan state in Nepal’s eastern borderland to Indian Darjeeling. I focus on the multiple ways in which the Limbuwan movement seeks to establish territorial authority of a Limbuwan state in the context of a major national transition. The movement, I argue, describes a balancing act of political mobilisation between an indigeneity-oriented politics of culture and a state-oriented and state-emulating culture of politics.These two dimensions operate at different scales. While the former connects the movement to pre-national histories and global narratives of ethnic belonging, the latter ties the movement thoroughly back into the territorialised politics of the Nepali nation state. Counterintuitively, the political practice of this movement for local autonomy ends up supporting a national territorialisation of the borderland.