ABOUT THIS BOOKDevelopment Zones in Asian Borderlands maps the nexus between global capital flows, national economic policies, infrastructural connectivity, migration, and aspirations for modernity in the borderlands of South and South-East Asia. In doing so, it demonstrates how these are transforming borderlands from remote, peripheral backyards to front-yards of economic development and state-building. Development zones encapsulate the networks, institutions, politics and processes specific to enclave development, and offer a new analytical framework for thinking about borderlands; namely, as sites of capital accumulation, territorialisation and socio-spatial changes.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHYMona Chettri is a Next Generation Network Scholar at the Australia-India Institute, University of Western Australia. She is the author of Constructing Democracy. Ethnicity and Democracy in the Eastern Himalayan Borderland (Amsterdam University Press, 2017). Her current research focuses on infrastructure, urbanisation and gender in the Sikkim-Darjeeling Himalaya.
Michael Eilenberg is an 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).