Introduction

In recent years, Asian borderlands are often seen as spaces pregnant with extractive and productive potential and have become prime targets for intensified and accelerated development (Cons and Eilenberg 2019). Thus, the contemporary proliferation of development zones across Asian borderlands is relevant to this edited volume. In this chapter, I refer to development zones mainly as a mobile state technology imbued with promises of optimisation, productivity, and accelerated development in economically underutilised spatial milieus such as marginal borderlands. As these development zones proliferate in delineated borderland locations, their promises become appropriable. That is, the development zones interact with existing, or catalyse new, aspirations for the future in the populations living within them. In this chapter, I seek to foreground the impact of the promises that emerge within a development zone that may potentially incite social transformation.

The ubiquity of development zone proliferation in Asian borderlands subjects these areas to a high potential for drastic social transformation. In contemporary Asia, the famous Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is perhaps the prime example of such transformation. The Chinese project embodies an ambitious dream of transcontinental economic integration while simultaneously modernising its underdeveloped western border area (Rippa 2017, 3). BRI, however, is not the only high-modern fantasy of increased economic productivity that is changing the face of Asian borderlands. Largely unaffected by the BRI, development zones also proliferate in terrestrial borderlands in Southeast Asia as a consequence of the Indonesian state’s recent pro-border development policy.