Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Ishikawa, Noboru
• Rippa, Alessandro
• Saxer, Martin
• Horstmann, Alexander

Titel

Genesis of state space: Frontier commodification in Malaysian Borneo

Ist Teil von

• Routledge Handbook of Asian Borderlands, 2018, p.168-179

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This chapter examines the genesis of state space by looking at historical trajectories of the frontier commodification (jungle produce, timber, rubber, and pepper) in the maritime borderland of southwestern Sarawak, Malaysia. The nonstate space is a region immersed in a dense web of commodity chains, while the organizational power of the state is nominal. In such a borderland, how does a border come into existence in the mental mapping of local peoples? This chapter concludes with the following findings. Both the state and local society contribute to the making of the state boundary in a type of call and response resonance rather than an antithetical relationship. The more illicit flows of goods and people intensify, the clearer the state boundary becomes. This seemingly paradoxical relation illustrates that the state and the borderland communities are more symbiotic, rather than two separate and dichotomous, or conflicting entities. The borderland under study also differs from counterparts in mainland Southeast Asia, where distance and elevation separate hills (highland) and plains (lowland), and such geographical and geomorphological factors therefore matter far less in the process of boundary making. Rather, global market forces play the transformational role in establishing a marker that separates identities of people and commodities on both sides of the porous border. These forces, for instance, include the imperial quota system for the production of rubber in the 1930s and the widening economic gap between Malaysia and Indonesia manifested in the monetary crisis in the 1990s. The structural forces enabling the genesis of the boundary have not been the expansion of state power, but the connectivity between the borderlands and commodity markets. This illustrates that where the state machinery is weak, global forces of capitalism are instrumental in making state space. This chapter finds that the jatropha plantations exemplify state-backed development experiments that foster a wide range of policy objectives in the borderlands, including energy security and bringing the borderlands and their populations in the realm of the state. The 'green gold of the desert' rhetoric failed to acknowledge that farming jatropha is a water-, work-, and chemical input-intensive venture. The chapter argues that the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands have become a laboratory for development experiments that the state permits, subsidises, and promotes as long as they are framed as fostering specific state priorities, including some that do not relate to the targeted borderlands whatsoever. Jatropha development in Honghe indeed occurred due to converging government policies that encouraged and subsidised a specific market niche in a specific setting inhabited by a specific category of Chinese citizens. The chapter ignores the wide-ranging livelihood consequences that arise from one such rapid plantation failure.