(Re)making resource frontiers through everyday violence and social movements in the uplands of mainland Southeast Asia

Abstract

In 2010, Myanmar began to transition from 48 years of military rule to a quasi-demilitarized and democratized government. This process attracted international attention to the country and increased investments in resource extraction. In this dissertation, I ask how historical relationships and present tensions between an assemblage of actors, resources, and spaces produce resource frontiers. To examine how state and non-state military-private partnerships and social movements co-constitute one another and resource frontiers, I developed a research approach using feminist collaborative methods. For three years (2015-2018) I worked with a team to conduct research with civil society organizations (CSOs) and in communities impacted by two sites of resource extraction: Tigyit Coal Mine and Power Plant and Mong Ton Hydropower Project. I argue that as a historical formation, resource frontiers intertwine with violence and capitalist extraction; and, as an unfolding process, they deeply affect everyday lives. To make this argument, I historicize resource frontiers and demonstrate how specific frontier projects dismantle and recreate property systems and nature-society relationships, often while leaving ongoing violence and exclusion in their wake. I highlight the interconnections between frontier-making, fragmented sovereignties, and conflict, while also demonstrating the everyday lived realities of frontiers. In this research, I conceptualize the way that globally-connected and historically-situated resource frontiers shape sovereignty, war, and access for localized frontier actors; and, in turn, how frontier actors remake nature, nation, and global trade. Through my focus of the everyday violence communities experience from resource frontiers and how fragmented sovereignties from an under-explored region interact with an under-explored actor (CSOs), I contribute to an expanded understanding of sovereignties, resource frontiers, and violence.