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Not merely a border: borderland governance, development and transborder relations in Asia

Borderlands are geographical places demarcated and defined by state-designed boundaries. Borderland communities, lying on the margin of more than one state, are thus existing in different development modes and terms of governance. Often, they are (physically) closer to a foreign regime and farther away from the central power of their own governments. People living in the borderlands are acquainted with different regimes of power, and may be skillful users of more than one language and currency for daily interaction and exchange. Anthropologists have been actively studying borders and borderlands, not only because many borderlands have been neglected in research, but also because they are where anthropologists find concentrated marginalized groups (such as refugees) and minorities, intriguing cross-border state relations and human interactions and mixed and blurred identities. Borderland ethnographies also often provide interesting stories of alternative voices and views of state relations, history, culture, and identity that deviate from what has been defined by the state (Chang 2014; Chan 2013; Harris 2013; van Schendel 2005). The borderland is indeed a spatial variance of international relations (Chan 2013, 123). While borders are themselves defining and delimiting state power and sovereignty, they are at the same time sites that constantly challenge and negotiate such power. Borders and boundaries are often imagined as hard and enclosing frontiers, yet many of them are, in reality, porous (Horstmann and Wadley 2006; Tagliacozzo 2005; Walker 1999; Wilson and Donnan 1999, 1998). Borderlanders can be active “border-crossers” who make use of such skills to challenge state control and discourses on “boundaries” in order to work on the improvement of life chances and livelihoods. In the unstable war-torn border zone in northern Myanmar, for example, borderlanders are quick to exploit short-term peace and transborder differences. Even in the worst cases of hostile and militarized borders, such as the island of Quemoy in the Taiwan Strait during the Cold War, daily reality is defined by being on the edge of the state and residents are suspect because of their transborder ties (Szonyi 2008). The anthropology of borderlands