ABSTRACT
Over time, society has become associated with a territorial state delimited by boundaries, and our everyday lives embroiled with state institutions and governance. Accordingly, the state has emerged as the subject matter of numerous disciplines and as one of the most defined and discussed entities in social and political sciences. Two main features have been common to all definitions of state: exercising power through a set of political institutions and clearly delineated territory it governs (Agnew and Corbridge 1995). Alongside the shifting configurations within state power, increasingly seen as embroiled in assemblages of a widening assortment of political agents, dynamics, and scales, it is common to assert that territorial boundaries of states are no longer commensurate with political authority and absolute control. In a lot of the world this has never been the case as state boundaries and the subsequent invention of new nations were imposed onto places and people where the entire idea was baffling or unacceptable. The border worlds that emerged in many parts of Asia embroiled in multiple, competing, and contesting regimes of governance, state-making, and state-evading: the subject matter of this part. The “messy” realities, continuously adapting to and negotiating with ever changing conditions, opportunities, and relationships pinned down in this part, are those in Northern Myanmar (Dean and Viirand), Eastern Nepal (Bennike), the former Bangladesh–India enclaves (Ferdoush and Jones), the border worlds of the Thai–Myanmar land border (Saltsman), and littorals (Boutry and Ivanoff). What emerges as a common theme in all these complex realities is resistance to the governance of the nation state designed and imposed from faraway offices and thus confronted by various degrees and styles of state-evading, which objectives and outcomes, however, diverge.
