Burma's History from its Borderlands

• In Event: Burma in the World/Burma and the World: Celebrating the Career of Michael Adas - Sponsored by the Burma Studies Group

Abstract

The international academic community’s re-engagement with Burma/Myanmar in recent years has largely perpetuated the tendency to see the various ethnic and religious conflicts that have beleaguered the country as arising mainly from local problems of national integration, albeit exacerbated by cross-border influences particularly from China. This paper seeks to reconsider the so-called borderlands of Burma/Myanmar, where many of these conflicts appear embedded, as spaces of significance in international relations. The paper will focus on a case-study from the early 1930s to just before independence in 1948, during which time proposals were put forward by various officials in the governments of India and Burma for the creation of a zone of special economic and social development that would incorporate Scheduled Areas from both countries as a single political-economic and territorial unit. While possibly always destined to fail, the seriousness with which these plans were proposed and their persistence in the thinking of many ‘frontier’ officials over more than a decade reveals much about the place of these borderlands in an international system that was undergoing dramatic transformation. The extensive and detailed discussions about a nascent North Eastern Frontier Province to mirror that on the west, raised many questions still of relevance today about the significance of border regions in international relations; they also raise pertinent questions about the relationship between regionalism and development. In this way, we are challenged to understand the past, present and future condition of borderlands through much larger interpretive frameworks than that of ‘the nation’ alone.

Author

• Mandy Sadan, SOAS, University of London