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What is the frontier? Where are Frontiers? And what can be learned about the world by focusing on frontiers today?
Popularly used to refer to borders, boundaries, or newly unexplored areas or new fields -- the term ‘frontier’ has meant many things at once. Over time, perhaps it lost some of its analytical value, as is often misunderstood. Yet, as one of our speakers, Conrad Shetter stated, “little attention is given to the notion of frontiers conceptually, even though violence is not only a by-product of frontiers, but its kernel.”
In our group (Political Geography), we focus on ‘frontiers’ and as a useful conceptual and spatial analytic to unpack spaces of violence and zones of exception across multiple political geographies in the world today. We see frontiers as spaces and processes that have always been and continue to be shaped by expansionist and exclusionist politics; often, and crucially, at the expense of local, gendered, racialised, and Indigenous lives and lands. As a group we are interested in unpacking the historical, and contemporary frontier-making dynamics (including the subtheme of resource frontiers). In our team’s projects in and across different political geographies -- whether in understanding critical minerals mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, pastoral and agrarian spaces in Ethiopia, political frontiers in Sri Lanka, in the resource frontiers and borderlands of India, China, Burma/Myanmar as well as in political and labour frontiers of Europe -- we have traced frontiers and frontier dynamics in spaces with long histories of large-scale extraction, commodification, colonialization, and territorialization.
In our work, we have also problematised frontier not just as zones of violence, but also opportunity and bricolage, not only for frontier agents and investors, but also for local inhabitants and indigenous people who live with the frontier. As such, we are equally interested in researching the intimate political geographies of frontier life. We often go to frontiers spaces in our research and encounter epistemic tensions from our interlocutors: ‘the tree is life, but the tree is also profit’; ‘jade mining will ruin our ecology, but it can also save my life and take me and my family out of the warzone.’ Hence, in our recent works as a team as well as in our individual research, we have been interested in exploring the agencies and memories of frontier societies in shaping frontier dynamics, and to deepen our understanding of what it means to live with frontiers where one must navigate regularly the epistemic tensions and complexities between the allure and suffering of frontier extractives and economies.
We do however recognize that frontiers have a long trajectory in critical theory, and we wanted to learn more from our colleagues working on frontier spaces elsewhere. In that spirit, we invited an exciting group of researchers and scholars who have worked with the concept and conceptualised frontiers from an interdisciplinary viewpoint and in different parts of the world. The workshop aimed to reimagine the frontier comparatively, analytically and empirically from scholars working on, writing about, and often witnessing violent frontier logic from multidisciplinary, experiential, comparative, and critical vantage points in various global and local contexts.
We began with a fantastic keynote lecture by Professor Michael Watts who expanded on his vast theoretical and empirical work on oil frontiers in Africa and drew on a wide range of conceptual literature of in the English language, to deepen and unpack the ways in which the spatial, temporal and geopolitical complexities of frontiers have taken shape and evolved in critical scholarship. Professor Watts specifically drew on ‘frontier’ literature from the American context in conversation (and contrast) to other frontier experiences, and noted, crucially, that the American experience (specially of the westward expansion) is but only one form of frontier politics, but not the only one.
Considering diverse frontier politics and geographies, the following panels brough empirical granularity to understand different kinds of frontiers, both emerging and historical. They brought in a range of ‘frontier’ spatiality and relationships --- borderlands, plantations, conservation sites, urban spaces, mining sites, dam projects, the oceans and in infrastructural sites. Several talks explored conceptual links between frontiers, violence, borderlands and ecologies.
Francesco Buscemi and Conrad Schetter’s talks explored the relationalities between frontiers and violence in two different contexts in Africa and Asia. Schetter argues that “frontier” became a decisive conceptual lens to understand socioecological contestations driven by external interference, but little attention is given to this topic in Peace and Conflict Research. Francesco Buscemi takes the production of military technologies at frontier sites as mechanisms that consolidate state power at the margins in Myanmar. He analyses the “frontier” as a politico-military device consubstantial to a political community with its biological body and political space. Michael Eilenberg and Arupjyoti Saikia’s talks explored the relationships between frontiers and the non-human. Eilenberg introduced his co-authored paper on “Feral Beasts and Frontier Making in Texas” introduces a new perspective to frontier literature. It highlights that not only frontier men/women and commodities are involved in frontier-making processes but also animals such as Feral beasts. On that same vein on multispecies frontier making, Arupjyoti Saikia discussed how the British colonial government, despite its overwhelming bureaucratic structures and military might, it resorted to multiple methods to keep the flow of commerce that it inherited in motion. The study states that by remaking Bengal’s eastern frontiers and Assam’s economy and polity, the colonial government continuously reproduced, sustained, and fortified these commercial flows. Jasnea Sarma and Shrey Kapoor raised critical questions on the relationship between frontiers and borders and why and where they converge when they do. Sarma asked “how and why certain borderlands become resource frontiers, or in other words, how extractible resource frontiers are produced on the borderspace, as well as where and when they produce and transform the borderland. Taking the case studies of border cities on the borderlands of Myanmar which are currently in a state of war but also undergoing transformation as ‘connectivity’ and ‘gateway’ cities as well as places of large scale extractive economies, Sarma askes what it means to make border gateways in a space of war, ethnic contestations and waves of historical extractivism. Shrey Kapoor poses the interesting questions about how new political frontiers produce borders and bordering politics. He does so with a case study of the creation of political Hindutva nationalism frontiers in the making of urban borders in Allahabad, India.
Speakers covered a wide range of geographical scope from Asia, East Africa, North America and Latin America juxtaposing empirical and conceptual debates around the frontiers. For instance, we were lucky to have several interventions deepening our understanding of frontiers in diverse Asian Context. For instance, in East Asia, Jonas Rüegg’s analysis brought a historical perspective into the debates by taking the Japanese archipelago as frontier spaces. Rüergg argues that the Japanese archipelago is intimately entangled with the Pacific as an ecosystem, an economic space, and a contested frontier. In South Asia, Aditi Saraf discussed the relationship between frontier marketplaces. By taking the Kashmir Valley as a critical ethnographic and social space that has historically held together power and resistance in the region. She calls such encounters “Frontier Signatures” --- to signify unfulfilled aspirations for self-determination and violent militarism by the Indian state in which exchange and trade serve as central elements in the changing nature of sovereignty and the dynamics of settler-colonialism in late capitalism. Majed Akhter’s talk, “Racializing the agrarian frontier: British land law in colonial Punjab and Malaya” highlighted how the colonial land act (the Punjab Land Alienation Act) led to land appropriation and unequal access to resources. Akhter shows how the Land Alienation Act was a racializing law created at the agrarian frontier of British India.
In Southeast Asia, Annisa Sabrina Hartoto spoke on the gendered dimensions of frontier agency and actors by building on an intervention of “gender friction”. He highlighted women’s interaction, contestation and negotiation with the masculine elements of agrarian politics in an Indonesian resource frontier. Aditya Kiran Kakati presented his forthcoming article titled "Keeping the Edges Near: Re-making Remoteness in the Indo-Burmese Highland Frontiers After Global War and Decolonization.” He explored the concept of "remoteness" in the Indo-Burmese highlands, especially during and after World War II, highlighting how this idea was used to shape frontier governance and intellectual histories of frontiers. Zali Fung built on her recent Ph.D. work on the Yuam River water diversion project in the Salween River Basin on the Thai Myanmar border to investigate environmental civil society actors and the knowledge frontiers they create. She is interested in understanding how the coup and authoritarian rule in Myanmar is (re)shaping ongoing cross-border environmental movements by diverse civil society actors–non-government organization (NGO) staff, environmental activists, and academics–and community members in the transboundary Salween River Basin.
In the African context, Asebe Regassa takes the case of settler colonial history in Ethiopia and how it imagined and produces frontiers historically. He then lets the past speak to the future by juxtaposing how frontiers produced in the settler colonial past produces new frontier of development in the present. Gabriel Kamundala takes the case of Artisanal Gold Mining Spaces in Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo to explore frontier production by unpacking the nexus of property rights over land and underground, specifically the artisanal mining exploitation, where state laws, customary laws, and local actors' agencies intersect. Kamundala’s work shows how the presence of gold deposit and the regulation pertaining to its access as a frontier dynamic that reconfigures space.
Nitin Bathla brings a geographical focus less discussed in frontier literature – Europe’s agrarian frontiers and their reliance on global south labour. In his co-authored paper on “Unsettling the Commodity Frontier: Climate Anxieties and New Rural Ecologies at the Europe’s Agrarian Peripheries” Bathla argues that "internal" frontiers within Italy’s sovereign territory gained momentum as part of Italy’s “ruralization” policies during the interwar period. This process is now intensified for plantations that are built through the extraction of migrant labour from South Asia.
Finally, Benedikt Korf took stock of all the empirical case studies to bring back home the important point – if frontier is used analytically to mean so many things, what does the frontier finally mean? One possible answer, Korf noted, is to rethink the frontier as a zone of exception around the world where violence and profit take precedence over all else, and one which continue to be produced over marginal societies, even though their space and temporality may change. Hence, the frontier’s everlasting relevance.
The panels were followed by an interesting final panel discussion of what really produces knowledge and theories on frontier spaces. Whose theories, books and works on frontiers get cited the most? What gets left behind analytically, and why? There was a general recognition that there is perhaps not much value in in one ‘theory’ of the frontier when so much for the frontier is experienced differently across time and space. There was a general understanding that more voices from frontier spaces themselves are important to highlight along with theories that are or were made about frontiers in the Euro-American and Global North context. We also recognise that many conceptualizations and theories on frontiers continue to be produced from highly elite universities and institutions from the Global North, while those writing from frontier spaces are often relegated as ‘empirical’ examples to fit these often-cited theories. Instead, it was suggested that a more diverse and linguistically emplaced understanding of frontier spaces would be productive in reimagining frontier spaces in the future. How could we reimage frontiers in various linguistic and political vantage points? With that question going forward, we discussed future collaborations. We welcome future collaborations on rethinking and reimagining frontiers globally form diverse scholarship and invite readers to be in touch with us.
Acknowledgements: We thank the Political Geography Group (PGG), the UZH GRC funding, and the UZH Alumni who generously funded this workshop. We are indebted to our colleagues – Corinne Wyss, Benedikt Korf, Shona Loong, and Gabriel Kamundala – for their invaluable support and labour for this workshop.