Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. 283 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$120, cloth. ISBN 9789463726238.
Development Zones in Asian Borderlands is an edited volume of essays that provides a conceptual framework to understand and analyze transforming borderlands in Asia as development zones. Editors Mona Chettri and Michael Eilenberg, in the Introduction, lay the foundations of conceptualizing development zones as unbounded spaces that render borderlands as productive, where aspirations of different scales come at play, political exceptions are made, and economic activities intensified. The essays in this volume are empirically based in the South and Southeast Asian borderlands that will help readers think about different relationships, institutions, and networks that emerge out of and connect such borderlands to those in other places. The chapters are organized around three sections: “Making the Development Zone,” “Disciplining the Development Zone,” and “Zones of Ruination and Abandonment.”
The book starts with a critical geopolitical analysis by Galen Murton in the first chapter, in which he examines import-export dry ports in Larcha and Rasuwa at the Nepal-China border to understand how infrastructure projects contribute to the reconfiguration of geopolitical relationships and reshape social relations, and how borderland development zones become a space where geopolitical and economic interests converge. In the second chapter, Tina Harris uses a volumetric approach to expand the conceptualization of development zones to include aerial space. Based on ethnographic work, she shows how airspaces can act as development zones, arguing that aerial development zones are spatially and temporally malleable by networks and relationships that emerge from territorial claims on the ground. Next, Juan Zhang explores how casino hotels are made into new zones of development in borderland areas as new frontiers ideal for investment, connecting these peripheral places to global networks of capital and technology. These spaces skirt ambiguous lines of morality through legitimization from the state that allows for political exceptions and concessions, while creating new subjects and biopolitics in new productive sites.
Jason Cons investigates the logic of experimental development intervention in the face of a climate crisis in the India-Bangladesh border. Cons pushes the concept of development zones by understanding these spaces as not only bounded by promises of economic growth, but also by material manifestations of managing a crisis-laden future. These interventions take the form of securitization and planning based on individualizing visions, leaving no space for community while imagining resilience. This breaking down of community is also highlighted in Mona Chettri’s chapter. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Setipool slum of east Sikkim, Chettri focuses on land grabs with the increase in pharmaceutical companies. The fact that Sikkim does not have designated zones for industries, opens the whole state to become, as Chettri articulates, a “backyard for private finance” and a de facto Special Economic Zone (SEZ) (171). This comes at the cost of land grabbed from both top and down, leading to an unequal distribution of these opportunities and what Chettri calls “intimate exclusion” (117) of kin and neighbours.
The book eases into the second theme of disciplining the borderlands, with Patrick Meehan, Sai Aung Hla, and Sai Kham Phu’s framing of development zones from the perspective of conflict-affected borderlands in the China-Myanmar border town of Muse, which is a recognized SEZ. While geopolitical relations and regional connectivity shape the transformation of borderlands into economic zones, they argue that the growth of border cities does not displace pre-existing forms of informal governance and illegal practices, but depends on them for making development zones and connecting them with other sites of extraction, infrastructures, and cities. In the seventh chapter, Duncan McDuie-Ra analyzes Imphal, Manipur’s Smart Cities Mission (SCM), India’s central government initiative to promote infrastructures and economic development in select cities. SCM in Imphal engages in zone-making to bring the borderland city into the larger state building and territorial integration project through technology. Nadine Plachta, in the eighth chapter, focuses on the borderlands of Nepal and China through the category of informal development zones that emerged in the form of newer markets after the earthquake of 2015. These zones are conducive to change along with geopolitical and regional priorities. She centres local narratives of success and failure to show how flow and accumulation of capital is unevenly distributed and entrenches already existing inequalities.
Development in borderlands is also prone to boom-and-bust cycles, anticipation, waiting, and hopes for the future. Sindhunata Hargyono investigates the impact of the promises and hope that emerge in Long Nawang, a border village in Indonesia. Despite delays in the materialization of promises of better connectivity and infrastructure, hope persists, making development zones a future-making project. Hope turns into “waiting” for development after the boom of a development zone turns to bust for those living in Boten SEZ in the China-Laos border, as noted by Alessandro Rippa in chapter 10. Rippa focuses on infrastructural ambitions that persisted in the bust, and the waiting, desire, and anticipation that make development zones affective spaces. He argues that development zones like Boten must be understood as by-products of economic development originating elsewhere. The volume closes with Thomas Mikkelsen and Michael Eilenberg’s essay on de facto development zones in the borderlands of Indonesia. They argue that the proposed SEZ in Tarakan, which failed to materialize, would have been prone to government anxieties around the sensitivity of border areas, unlike how SEZs are conceptualized as being an exceptional space. Development in development zones is genealogical and multigenerational in the sense that boom and bust of development leave behind effects on landscapes layering on top of each other. This planned but unmaterialized SEZ added another layer into this genealogy of development in Tarakan, which has seen generations of extraction after another.
This book is a must read for scholars, especially for geographers who are interested in development and borderlands in Asia. The chapters complement each other and are structured so that each flows into the next with ease. The colonial logic of “wastelands” and “peripheries” being open to interventions is a strong one, and prominent in the discourses and imaginations based on which these forms of development are carried out and justified; this is something that is not explicitly addressed but emerges as an unmissable theme in almost all the essays. This imagination is important to highlight because development discourses and practices engage and act upon them and have material implications in the newer forms of spatialization that occur in these so-called peripheral areas. One does leave with the question, however, of what makes development zones in the borderlands of South and Southeast Asia different or similar to other borderland development zones? And how are some borderlands in South and Southeast Asia, and consequently the development zones within them, more significant than others?
Anudeep Dewan
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver