Borderland regions in Southeast Asia have increasingly been reimagined as resource-rich, unexploited 'wastelands' targeted for large-scale development schemes for economic integration and control. Common and overlapping features of these regions are processes of resource extraction, agricultural expansion, population resettlement and securitization, and the confluence of these dynamic processes creates special frontier constellations. Through the case of the Indonesian-Malaysian borderlands, I explore how processes of frontier colonization through agricultural expansion have been a recurrent product of Indonesian development and security policies since the early 1960s. I argue that frontier development accelerates and intensifies when national discourses of security and sovereignty and state-led agrarian expansion intersect along national borders. The study generates new insights into how contemporary statecapitalist processes of agricultural expansion in the borderlands of Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia are justified through discourses of national sovereignty and notions of 'untamed' and 'wild' resource frontiers. I highlight the multiple meanings and notions associated with regions where resource frontiers and national borders interlock. The study offers an explanation of how frontiers as discursive constructs and material realities play out along national borders.

This paper explores cross-border ethnic relations as an important socio-economic strategy for the borderland Iban population in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Iban seeking more lucrative wage work have long used their ethnic identity to facilitate circular labour migration across the international border into Sarawak, Malaysia, a strategy which has also compromised their claims to Indonesian citizenship. Drawing on long-term field research among the West Kalimantan Iban, we examine the close interconnections among cross-border labour migration, ethnicity, identity, and citizenship, and how this plays into contemporary issues related to Indonesian political and economic change.

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In a time of increasing land enclosures sparked by large-scale environmental initiatives and agricultural expansion, this paper examines local and global contestations over the value of forest on an Indonesian forest frontier. Engaging with recent debates on carbon forestry, the paper problematises the emerging initiatives of 'Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation' known as REDD+ in the province of West Kalimantan, Indonesia. The paper argues that the general rush to implement REDD+ without intimate knowledge of the political landscape of resource struggle is in danger of generating new enclosures of land that may be easily appropriated by local elites, thus excluding less fortunate sections of local society. The paper shows how divergent interpretations of REDD+ are triggering land disputes, and how powerful actors readily appropriate REDD+ discourses as a tool to support divergent claims of land ownership. Government and villagers, through overlapping and contradictory engagements, negotiate REDD+ initiatives with global environmental actors and private plantation companies. The paper highlights the implications of these local realities for the successes of REDD+. The Kalimantan case highlights some of the dilemmas of carbon mitigation initiatives experienced in frontier regions throughout Southeast Asia, places that have become prime battlefronts of large-scale climate change initiatives and agrarian expansion.