Extracting Development : Extracting Development

Resource extraction is currently shaping Southeast Asian landscapes and people’s lives to an unprecedented degree. This volume explores old and new resource frontiers, their effect on local economies and social relations, and questions of (contested) resource control and governance. Case studies from Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, and Cambodia, illustrate the predicament of globalized extractivism processes in the region, particularly (but not only) with regard to China’s rising geopolitical and -economic influence, most prominently expressed by the Belt and Road Initiative. Discussing transboundary investments in land and water reserves, and localized commodification processes of agrarian resources, this volume not only investigates the competing actors and discourses of resource extraction in Southeast Asia. What is more, the different case studies shed light on the contingent outcomes on the ground of transregional economic dynamics and related socio-ecological transformations. Combining macro perspectives with fine-grained micro-scale studies, this volume offers a multi-faceted picture of extractivism in contemporary Southeast Asia. Contents Acknowledgements The Contributors 1. Contested Resource Frontiers in Mainland Southeast Asia: An Introduction 2. Ontological Politics of the Resource Frontier: A Hydrosocial Analysis of the Mekong River in Northern Thailand 3. Reassembling Frontiers for Middle-Income Peasants: Rubber Expansion and Livelihood Ecosystem Transformation in a Northeast Thai Village 4. “Only the Best Fruits for China!”: Local Productions of a ‘Fruit Frontier’ in the Borderlands of China, Laos and Thailand 5. Commodity Frontiers in Motion: Tracing the Maize Boom across the Lao-Vietnamese Borderlands 6. New Frontier Spaces: Complex Entanglements and Power Relations (Re)shaping Land Governance in Laos 7. Moving Away from the Margins? How a Chinese Hydropower Project Made a Lao Community Modern and Comfortable 8. Frontier Capitalism in Colonial and Contemporary Laos: The Case of Tin Mining 9. Chinese Investments and Resource Frontiers in Cambodia: Systemic Transformation 10. The Open Issues: Cases between Chinese Investment Companies and Local People in Myanmar 11. Internationalization of RMB and Tin Ore Trade in China-Myanmar Frontier Governance: Views from Yunnan Province Index Southeast Asian autocracies of Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam have politicized vague definitions of 'fake news' to justify diverse tactics of digital repression. In these countries, what constitutes falseness in 'fake news' has hardly been clearly articulated