This article focuses on the British annexation of the Dai territories in the border zone of Qing China and Burma in the late nineteenth century. It investigates the coercive force used by the British to secure control of the territory and its people, which was asserted on the basis of having had tributary relations with the earlier kingdom of Burma. In this case, I argue that the use of violence as a means to an end is better understood when separated into the mutually reinforcing forms of armed and bureaucratic violence. In these two forms, violent force shaped a practice—a mode of operation—that facilitated and secured British governance in the large territories separating the Chinese Qing state from British Burma. The article is part of a larger investigation that connects British operations on the empire’s much-varied northeastern frontier from the Brahmaputra eastwards into Yunnan, in two periods of its expansion in the early and late nineteenth century.

This article argues that nostalgia forms a crucial part of the imaginary that drives frontier economies—not in contradiction but alongside the future-oriented imaginaries of speculation, anticipation, and appearances. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted across three key locales—Pianma, Mong La, and the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone—this study introduces the concept of “frontier nostalgia” to analyze how these spaces function as sites of both economic opportunity and memory. While aspirations for prosperity drive individuals to engage with these dynamic zones, their lived experiences are marked by significant historical residue, creating a poignant longing for past vibrancy—and particularly for a form of hypersociality that characterize(d) frontier spaces. By examining the lived realities of Chinese migrants, the paper argues that nostalgia is not merely a counterpoint to forward-looking anticipation. Instead, it complements future-making practices and imaginaries by highlighting the complex emotional landscapes that characterize frontier encounters, hence constituting particular frontier subjectivities. In Pianma, remnants of a timber boom evoke a sense of melancholic yearning for lost sociality; in Mong La, vibrant social interactions coexist with developmentalist dynamics; and in the burgeoning Golden Triangle SEZ, rapid transformation echoes and actively resemble past experiences. Ultimately, this comparative analysis emphasizes how nostalgia shapes both individual identities and collective memories within these transient spaces, shedding further light on the experience of life on the frontier.

In the final decades of its existence, the Qing imperial state sought to unify and standardize policies of frontier management. In this context, mapping and surveying practices developed as socio-technological discourses that transformed how Qing authorities asserted their territorial claims in the Eastern Himalayas. Most scholarship on the history of Qing-era frontier management has tended to focus on Chinese nation-building practices. However, this article foregrounds the deconstruction of the epistemic regime governing the production of geo-knowledge about the Eastern Himalayas by investigating the appropriation and rejection of the interlocutors of local and indigenous knowledge, networks, and actors.

How did military surveyors establish authoritative ideas about their own expertise? This article focuses on the late-Qing surveys of the Dzayul river basin commissioned by Zhao Erfeng and carried out by his subordinate officials Cheng Fengxian, Duan Pengrui, and Xia Hu. Between 1910 and 1911, Zhao Erfeng ordered new surveys of the regions located at the north-easternmost tip of modern-day Arunachal Pradesh, to demarcate the Qing Tibetan dominions and Chinese territory from that of British India. The surveyors Cheng Fengxian, Duan Pengrui, and Xia Hu, mapped the route of the Dzayul River which flowed into British Indian territory through the Mishmi hills into Assam as the Lohit. These surveys largely claimed that natural features marked the “natural” or “traditional” boundaries of the imperial state, against local knowledge productions that framed those same topographical features as connectors rather than dividers. By dissembling the various strands that informed this archive of Qing colonial knowledge, I investigate the processes by which state-produced narratives created new kinds of citational practices to designate who could be recognized as an “expert” of the mountainous geography of Tibet and the trans-Himalayan regions.

The establishment of state authority over the movement of people and goods across borders became a key marker of statehood after decolonization. In South Asia, India and Pakistan gradually and unevenly asserted territorial and fiscal sovereignty along their new borders. This article examines how the early Pakistani state confronted border anxieties through the bureaucratic practices and discourses of local officials, who embodied state authority at the frontier. This article further explores how the state attempted to regulate and classify cross-border movement and how borderland communities responded—sometimes complying, sometimes negotiating, and at times subverting these controls. Using archival sources and oral histories, the article argues that categories such as “regional” and “national,” “self” and “other” were not fixed or natural, but were produced through contingent interactions between state functionaries and local populations. In doing so, this article highlights the complex and negotiated nature of sovereignty in Pakistan’s borderlands.

This article studies the aftermath of the Second World and decolonization (1945–1960) in the Indo-Burmese highlands, challenging predominant notions of state-building. Using the ‘Zomia’ heuristic, it argues how trans-border Naga tribal communities residing in so-called ‘No-Man’s-Lands’ between British India’s Assam province and Burma neither entirely resisted states, nor attracted uniform state interest. This dual refusal of states and social actors reveals negotiated sovereignty practices, using violence. The article illustrates the Naga tribes’ agency in negotiating with colonial and post-colonial states by using mimetic discourses of primitive violence, represented by headhunting. Violence served as a significant means of communication between communities and state agents, amounting to shifting cultural and territorial boundaries. Such practices selectively securitized colonial frontiers that became international borders post-decolonization. Gradually, violence and the desire for development invited state extension here. The article reveals that uneven state-building and developmental exclusions by bordering created conditions for violence to emerge. It engages scholarship on ‘Blank Spaces’ to analyse the varying sovereignty arrangements that produced ‘checkered’ zones. It highlights the relationship between spatial history and violence to explain the persistence of coercive development and demands for more borders and states today across highland Asia. It uncovers the embeddedness of violence in creating and challenging developmental and democratic exclusions in post-colonial nation-building projects. The analysis complicates imperial legacies of producing territorial enclosures within democracies, allowing exceptional violence to occur. More broadly, it complicates contemporary geopolitical cartographic contests and stakes of state-possession, using historical methods with approaches from anthropology and political geography.

The article is concerned with contemporary changes in the spatialization of the Russian-Finnish borderland as an example of re-bordering politics. The main material is a long-term ethnographic study in the territory of former Finnish Karelia, ceded by Finland to the Soviet Union following World War II. By extending the historical context of bilateral relations between the USSR (later Russia) and Finland, the article questions the implications of changing international relations regimes for situational forms of borderwork. The article contributes to the debate on contemporary border practices and the contradictory effects of foreign diplomacy by combining institutional and situational approaches to border territoriality and by focusing on border memory and heritage as resources of local identity and instruments of soft power. Examining the successive shifts of de- and re-bordering regimes in the Russian-Finnish borderlands from the late Soviet period to the present, the article demonstrates the unforeseen impact of foreign relations on local life and memory.

This article examines the fantasies and fuckeries that shape Mexican nationals’ sanctioned border-crossing experiences between Mexicali, Baja California, and Calexico, California. Drawing on ethnographic research (2017–21) at four ports of entry, I employ a Žižekian critique of ideological fantasy to reveal how the border’s power operates beyond military force and physical barriers. I argue that border communities must recognise, internalise and negotiate the border’s power before experiencing it as either threatening (fuckeries) or desirable (fantasies). These fantasies – from escaping everyday Mexican life to achieving higher social status through US consumption – demonstrate how ideology materialises through the ways border-crossers find meaning in their journeys. Through intimate attachments to ‘tours’ of the other side, changing behaviours between countries, and social hierarchies tied to border access, Mexican nationals both question and ultimately reproduce the border’s power, offering insight into how geopolitical boundaries become internalised as lived experience.

This article explores the path of the microscopic phylloxera insect as it made its way from the United States to the Eastern Mediterranean in the late nineteenth century. As the pest devastated vineyards in Western Europe it also catalyzed grape production in the western Ottoman Empire around Izmir, before this region, too, succumbed. One response to the outbreak was the first legal code controlling plant traffic across nations, and another was an effort to plant American rootstocks, which were relatively resistant. The Ottoman response to phylloxera offers another example of the ways in which the alleged “sick man of Europe” was actually much more dynamic than its detractors insisted. The invocation of phylloxera moreover became a way for post-Ottoman states like Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia to protect their national grape economies. The article’s broader analysis explains how the shared environment of the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean incubated both the spread of phylloxera and—in the protectionist legal regimes formed in response—the architecture of the region’s peculiarly integrated disconnection. The article closes by considering the agriculture of displacement amidst the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange, and how it further entrenched these dynamics as migrants took vines with them and planted them in the remarkably similar environments of their new national homes.

During the Third Indochina War (1979-1991), the ideological alignments of involved parties differed from those during the Second Indochina War, also known as the Vietnam War. Whereas the Second Indochina War pitted communists squarely against non-communists and anti-communists, the Third Indochina War was more complicated and less ideological or political, with communists often fighting against other communists due to the Sino-Soviet ideological split. The enemy of one's enemy was frequently viewed as a friend, often leading to unlikely alliances not rooted in ideological or political similarities. In this article, I argue that it is important to consider the unlikely alliances that emerged during the Third Indochina War by focusing on the particular cross-border interactions and conflicts between communists and non-communists that occurred in the Emerald Triangle, the tri-border region between Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. Focusing particularly on the Lao insurgent perspective, I consider how Lao anti-communist insurgents, the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party of Thailand, other armed groups, and the Thai military participated in transnational collaboration in this region during the Third Indochina War. In particular, based largely on Lao-language interviews with key figures in the Lao insurgency conducted for over a decade, I examine how Lao insurgents interacted with Khmer Rouge to oppose a common enemy, communist Vietnam and their allies, the People's Republic of Kampuchea and the Lao People's Democratic Republic, and how the Thai military supported them, but only insofar as it enabled them to maintain control over security inside Thailand.