Frontier constellations: agrarian expansion and sovereignty on the Indonesian-Malaysian border

Abstract

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.

Re-spacing African drylands: territorialization, sedentarization and indigenous commodification in the Ethiopian pastoral frontier

“…The questions asked above are pertinent for dryland Africa more broadly: the Ethiopian pastoral frontier represents a very specific configuration among a number of different 'frontier constellations' (Eilenberg 2014), one of significance beyond the immediate confines of the Horn of Africa. It provides complementary insights that complicate current debates about 896…”

“Ginger is a gamble”

“…Seasonal ginger cropping in Karnataka began in the 1990s with the decline of pepper, the fi rst smallholder boom crop in Wayanad. Th e fi rst frontier condition followed the pattern of migration of would-be smallholders, from lowland areas to the forest frontiers in the hills, that has been widely described in the literature across Asia (Eilenberg 2014). As Hall argues, crop booms in such frontiers are usually characterized by insecure land relations: "'Insecure' booms … take place in areas where the basic nature of pre-boom land relations is challenged as various actors use regulatory, market, forceful, and legitimating powers to make a play for control over newly valuable land" (2011: 839).…”

“…By focusing on this novel agrarian activity, I present a historically situated ethnographic account of small-scale growers' active participation in a crop boom and rush for land control. It is a case of transformations in tropical smallholder agriculture under neoliberal conditions yet in the absence of a new forest frontier, which characterized Wayanad in the past and informs processes and literatures in many parts of tropical Asia (Arnold 2001;Peluso and Lund 2011;Eilenberg 2014). Combining ethnographic perspectives on individual participants in this crop boom, a situated regional history, land and labor relations, planting technologies, and the socionatural properties of ginger as a plant, this account seeks to suggest an agricultural anthropology informed by both political economy and environmental history.…”

Environmental livelihood security in Southeast Asia and Oceania: a water-energy-food-livelihoods nexus approach for spatially assessing change. White paper

“…In the Thai uplands, the failure to recognize communities' rights and to delineate boundaries for community forests has left local people's hands tied in protecting their communal resources against encroachers and outside investors. In Lao PDR, Cambodia, Malaysia and Indonesia large concession projects that promote agro-industrial plantations and commercial timber extraction frequently come into conflict with indigenous approaches to forest management, despite the official recognition of community forestry in these countries (e.g., Kenney-Lazar 2012; Neef et al 2013;Eilenberg 2014). The only country in Southeast Asia that has formally adopted community-based forest management as a national strategy to achieve sustainable forestry is the Philippines.…”