The centrality of the margins: Borderlands, illicit economies and uneven development

‘Bringing development’ to ‘peripheral’ borderland regions has become a powerful trope in development policy across South and Southeast Asia, evident in strategies like India’s Look East policy and China’s Belt and Road Initiative. This approach exemplifies what David Harvey critically terms a “diffusionist narrative”, in which regions marked by violence, poverty, and illegality are framed as marginal spaces left behind by the uneven diffusion of capitalism and state institutions. Development, in this narrative, is equated with integrating ‘lagging regions’ into states and markets. This talk challenges that logic. Focusing on Myanmar’s borderlands with China, it explores how the persistence of poverty, violence, and illegality is a consequence of how this region has been integrated into national, regional, and global political economies, rather than a ‘lack of’ integration. Two broader themes frame this analysis. First, the ‘centrality of the margins’ rethinks borderlands as active sites shaping state power and capitalism, rather than passive zones awaiting intervention. Second, drawing on the literature on combined and uneven development, this talk explores how maintaining borderlands as zones of illegality and liminality can benefit political and economic elites and drive development in metropolitan centres, but in ways that further marginalise borderland populations. By exploring the drug trade and rare earth mining, this talk shows how poverty, violence, and illegality are not merely residual effects of conflict, state failure, and economic marginalisation, but are embedded in the DNA of state formation and capitalism in Myanmar’s borderlands, and in the spatially uneven dynamics of accumulation, precarity, and development across East and Southeast Asia.

Dr. Patrick Meehan is a Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies in the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester. His research addresses issues of violence, conflict and development. His work focuses particularly on Myanmar and the borderland and frontier regions of Southeast Asia, where he has conducted research for more than a decade.