Panel

Panel at the 6th EuroSEAS Conference
26-28 August 2010, Gothenburg, Sweden
 

Governance of borderlands and the resilience of ethnic minority trade networks in the Golden Economic Quadrangle
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This panel investigates processes of incorporating borderlands into national and regional geopolitical space, and the resilience of ethnic minority actors and the role of trade networks in shaping resource access and the accumulation of household wealth. We invite case studies from the northern region of montane mainland Southeast Asia (Burma, Laos, Thailand and China) also known as the Golden Economic Quadrangle to examine the historical importance of the region’s commodity trade based on networks of exchange across borders and ethnic groups. Examples include trade in tea, opium, timber, and gems. Despite the tremendous vicissitudes of history that affected the region for the last century (i.e. colonization, border settlement and conflicts, decolonization, war, socialist reforms, East-West confrontation, decollectivization, globalization), cross-border exchanges have endured and even expanded. In this panel, we seek to trace how the efforts of state agencies to incorporate and regulate borderlands, minority peoples, and the flow of goods in colonial and post-colonial eras have both enhanced and curtailed trade networks. We also invite exploration of how recent regional economic integration and globalization have reconfigured ethnic minority trade networks and enhanced the mobility of information, capital, goods, and people. New kinds of networks involve trade in rubber, non-timber forest products, and major grains. Our focus is on how reworked and newly emerging trade and cross-border exchanges have affected household wealth and created new forms of resource access, including cross-border investment and share-cropping, in this region that has been remade from the Golden Triangle to the Golden Economic Quadrangle.

Key words: Montane Mainland Southeast Asia, transboundary trade and network, commodity production, landscape, livelihood

Panel members:
Janet Sturgeon (Simon Fraser University) sturgeon@sfu.ca
Olivier Ducourtieux (Agro Paris Tech) olivier.ducourtieux@laposte.net
Yayoi Fujita Lagerqvist (University of Chicago) yayoi@uchicago.edu
Antonella Diana (Australian National University) antonella.diana@anu.edu.au
Sai Latt (Simon Fraser University) sailatt@gmail.com
Gaetan Reuse (Simon Fraser University) gva.gaetan@yahoo.com

Proposing aditional papers please contact: Yayoi Fujita Lagerqvist (University of Chicago) yayoi@uchicago.edu