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School of Culture History and Language · ANU College of Asia and the Pacific
Many courses assume the nation-state as the initial unit of analysis and inquiry, but this course asks: What happens when we turn our focus to borders and borderlands? This course shifts to look at margins and borders in order to understand the broader (sub) and (supra) state historic, economic, cultural, and political processes throughout the region of Mainland Southeast Asia, including narcotics production and transfer, and other illicit economies. This course is divided into two major parts: first, we will examine transnational historic processes which are themselves transgressive of state boundaries, and second, we will look at the ways in which borders themselves are mobilized as part of the state's assertion of sovereignty over geography, however incomplete this might be.
Discussion, Participation and Reading Presentations
Learning outcomes 1, 2, 3, 4
Short Essay 1 (1,000 words)
Learning outcomes 1, 2
Essay 2 (1,500words)
Learning outcomes 1, 3
Independent Research Paper (2,500 words)
Learning outcomes 1, 2, 3, 5
This course requires a total of 130 hrs of work on the following activities: attending, lectures, tutorial, preparing in-class presentations, reviewing, and independent study.
n/a Preliminary Reading 1. Pinkaew Luangaramsri. 2003. "Ethnicity and the politics of ethnic classification in Thailand" in Mackerras, Colin, ed. Ethnicity in Asia. London: Routledge. pp. 157-173. 2. Niti Pawakapan. 2006. "Once were Burmese Shans: Reinventing Ethnic Identity in Northwestern Thailand" in Horstmann and Wadley. Centering the Margin: Agency and Narrative in Southeast Asian Borderlands. New York: Berghahn. pp 27-52. 3. Tagliacozzo, Eric. 2001. “Border Permeability and the State in Southeast Asia: Contraband and Regional Security” Contemporary Southeast Asia. 23 (2) pp 254- 274. 4. Chang, Wen-Chin. 2013. “The everyday politics of the underground trade in Burma by the Yunnanese Chinese since the Burmese socialist era.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. 44(2) 292-314. june 5. McCoy, Alfred W. 2000. “Coercion and its unintended consequences: A study of heroin trafficking in Southeast and South West Asia,” Crime Law and Social Change.33(3): 191-224. 6. Seltzer, Alexandra. 2013. “Human trafficking: the case of Burmese refugees in Thailand” International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice. 37(4) 7. Farzana, Kazi Fahmida. 2015. “Boundaries in Shaping the Rohingya Identity and the Shifting Context of Borderland Politics” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism. 15 (2): 292-314. 8. Malkki, Liisa H. 1995. “Refugees and Exile: From “Refugee Studies” to the National Order of Things.” Annual Review of Anthropology. 24. 9. Star, Heather Marie. 2015. “Hiding Behind the Humanitarian Label: Refugees, Repatriates, and the Rebuilding of America’s Benevolent Image After the Vietnam War”Diplomatic History. 39(2). 10. Roszko, Edyta. 2015. “Maritime territorialisation as performance of sovereignty and nationhood in the South China Sea” Nations and Nationalism. 21(2): 230-249. 11. Sasges, Gerard. 2016. “Absent Maps, Marine Science, and the Reimagination of the South China Sea, 1922 - 1939.” The Journal of Asian Studies. 75(1)