Introduction

Dramatic transformations are currently underway throughout Asia’s borderlands, as states attempt to assert a dominant spatial imagination on these frontiers, transforming them from supposedly disconnected, marginal, and remote places into efficient economic corridors and booming cross-border trading zones. Investments in large-scale infrastructural projects geared at overcoming the frictions of distance and terrain abound (Scott 2009). With state support, domestic and international private investors race to cash in on the ever more accessible frontier resource bounty by enclosing these spaces and moving them swiftly towards new forms of market-based production, with often deleterious effects on local livelihoods. Within such challenging and rapidly changing environments, how do individuals, households, and communities residing across Asia’s borderlands work to support their own efforts to build resilient and meaningful livelihoods? In what ways do cross-border mobilities and flows contribute to sustaining these livelihood endeavours? In this part, we shift the lens towards the lived spaces of Asia’s borderlands in order to explore how these places are being reshaped not only through the efforts of powerful state and market actors, but also through the everyday struggles, activities, and pursuits of borderland residents. Through careful ethnographic studies of different segments of these borderlands and their cross-border dynamics, the contributors to this part add to recent case studies that look at how frontier people strive to make a living (Sturgeon 2005; Forsyth and Michaud 2011; Harris 2013; Turner et al. 2015).