Re‐thinking frontiers in Southeast Asia

The frontier has a long tradition in geographical study. Exploration, conquest and the colonial project were all about pushing back the frontier of civilisation, and seeking riches at and beyond the resource frontier. Turner's thesis put frontiers as geographical peripheries at the heart of what defines the national character (Turner 1920). In another sense, frontiers define the national ‘geobody’ (Winichakul 1994), so that cores are delimited and partly characterised by perimeters and peripheries. The frontier is thus in part a metaphor for national development in its material and ideological senses, as well as in terms of spatial expansion and delimitation. In Southeast Asia, a region historically viewed as underpopulated in comparison with its giant neighbours to the north and west, the population and agricultural frontiers have been a subject of study for some time. The frontier has been theorised in various ways, including as a safety valve, in a political sense, or as a ‘vent for surplus’ in terms of its economic function (Booth 2007, 35–40). Historically, it has also been the basis of development programmes, most notably transmigrasi in Indonesia (Hardjono 1989) and similar sponsored settlement schemes in Mindanao in the southern Philippines, in the New Economic Zones of Vietnam's Central Highlands (De Koninck and Dery 1997), in FELDA programmes in Malaysia (De Koninck and McTaggart 1987) and in Thailand's hinterland, in the form of ‘self-help cooperatives’ and state-facilitated spontaneous land settlement (Uhlig 1984). Almost always, frontier settlement has been associated with larger political agendas driven from the centre, based on ethnicity and nation, as well as ideologies of developmentalism. It has been closely associated with development discourses and the civilising mission inherent therein. Furthermore, the frontier as an assimilative space has built on a resonance with prevailing cultural notions, such as muang (city, or civilised space) and pa (forest, or uncivilised space) in Thailand (Stott 1991). The frontier can thus be seen as a kind of ‘in-between space’, what Jin Sato refers to in the context of Thailand's occupied forest reserve areas as ‘lands in-between’ (Sato 2002), occupied by ‘people in-between’ (Sato 2000). These are places of spatial and temporal transitions – with all the contestations and tensions inherent therein. Yet, the character and locus of this in-between space is itself a changing and shifting entity. With the changes manifest in the conventional frontier (the zone of transition between agricultural land and forest), combined with the enhanced significance of new in-between spaces, there are both metaphoric analogies and more substantive similarities in the ways in which the frontier as a place and time of transition can be employed as an heuristic to understand the shifting geographies of hegemonic development in a variety of contexts. The papers in this special issue seek to reconceptualise the frontier as a space of multifaceted development trajectories. Frontiers are constituted by multiple sites in which specific and localised socioeconomic and environmental parameters condition the shape of concrete development outcomes. But they are also connected spaces, begging a relational analysis that looks to linkages with supra-local influences and processes. These processes, moreover, are not one way: they help to understand the reshaping of frontier society, environment and economy, but they also reflect on the continuing significance and legacy of frontiers in national development. There is an ephemeral, temporally and place-specific element to frontiers, but they also have a lasting and pervasive significance beyond the time and place of transition. Dynamics within particular agricultural frontiers are shaped by fluctuations in world market demand and prices of key commodities that serve to initiate the territorial expansion of ‘civilised’ spaces into ‘nature’. Most of the papers in this collection deal with frontiers based on key ‘boom crops’ that in recent times have been decisive for the world market incorporation of Southeast Asian agriculture, notably palm oil (Malaysia, Indonesia and PNG) and coffee (Vietnam). The impacts of world markets constitute the underlying logics for frontier expansion and consolidation, and decisive changes of frontier dynamics are related to temporal shifts –‘rupture points’– characterised by both economic and political junctures, due, for example, to changes in global demand or new forms of state regulation. Frontiers have been generated when prices fluctuate dramatically, while, at the same time, possibilities for territorial expansion are not exhausted in the sense that ‘empty’ space is still available. Spontaneous settlement of the Central Highlands in Vietnam accelerated in periods immediately after prices of coffee increased on the world market, but stagnated in periods that followed. The ‘vent for surplus’ logics were seriously interrupted when prices declined, while massive production and territorial expansion of the frontier became manifest after a time lag corresponding to maturation of planted coffee trees. Ironically, the ‘recoil’ effect of the expansions enforced the structural oversupply on world markets due to the sheer scope of frontier expansion in Vietnam. The different consequences for income generation and livelihood diversification among settler households are patterned spatially according to the timing of settlement and coffee plantings. However, world market dynamics are mediated by national and local institutions – in some cases over extended periods of time. At the national level, shifts in state policies and governance influence both the design of settlement programmes, particularly the ways in which land and labour (indigenous groups as well as settlers) are incorporated, and the role of private capital. The neoliberal wave that started in the 1980s flushed out direct state involvement in Malaysian and Indonesian settlement schemes, giving way to corporate dominance. At the same time, indigenous land owners and settlers became ‘shareholders’ by entrusting their land to the plantation companies, who then solved their need for workers via migrants from surplus labour regions, primarily in Indonesia. While the papers on Malaysia and Indonesia document the erosion of local control over resources – albeit contested to different degrees according to local conditions – the study of PNG reveals that the State's power to dictate land use and transformation of property rights is close to being insignificant. Here, the ‘rupture points’ are made up of generational shifts (among settlers and indigenous landholders) and cultivation cycles (about 25 years for oil palms); corporate interests are so far contained in specifically allocated areas. The strength of local institutions regulating access to and use of land makes a pronounced impact on frontier dynamics, and the fluidity with which ‘traditions’ regulate the territorial expansion results in a far less predictable outcome than in Malaysia and Indonesia. The land tenure issue, in particular, seems to set up effective barriers for the commodification of resources – a situation with parallels in Africa. The papers also extend the frontier as an analytical device. Firstly, the concept of frontier can be dealt with on a national scale, when whole countries are constructed discursively as unexploited ‘resource frontier’ by governments and multilateral organisations like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. This is the case for Laos, whose territory is described by interested parties as largely unoccupied and as having enormous potential for the extraction of natural resources. The resulting scramble by various assemblages of state and capital for access to nature's riches squeezes the traditional livelihoods of neglected rural communities by setting up access barriers to resources – or undermining them by environmental devastation. At the same time, new dynamics of social differentiation are implanted in these societies when individual farmers respond to opportunities for agricultural diversification created by the general commercialisation process within their territory. In this case, improved infrastructure, increased mobility and new income opportunities for migrating (younger) household members have catapulted ‘capital’ back into frontier areas and transformed subsistence-oriented production. Secondly, the concept of frontier can also be applied to socioeconomic spaces that are outside the traditional realm of commercial agriculture. While most of the papers in this special issue deal with places where recent encounters between farm and forest, migrants and longer-term indigenous farmers define the environmental and social relations and manifestations of the frontier, the collection also moves beyond this context. The very notion of considering the discursive framing of an entire national space as frontier, in the case of Laos, suggests that rescaling is part of the reconceptualisation. At another level, there are both metaphorical and substantive resonances of frontier as transitional spaces in locations other than the forest-farm fringe. Peri-urban spaces are one such zone of transition. Increasingly, too, the permeable national frontier is a zone of encounter, with its own environmental and social effects as the brittleness of difference from one side to another gives way to a fluidity of goods, people and capital in ways that shape border regions as zones of transition. Ultimately, however, we are not looking to reconceptualise frontiers into an alternative unitary twenty-first century schema to replace Turner's nineteenth century frontier thesis. On the contrary, it is the ‘archipelago’-like manifestation of the frontier, defying, even in a single country, a unitary political-economic rationality that perhaps best defines the frontier as an amalgam of spaces of newly emerging social and environmental relations. The transitional aspects of such spaces find their momentary significance, not in the sense of being ephemeral, but rather as moments of redefined relations in the spread of capitalist relations inherent in development.