Changing spatialities and agency at Myanmar’s highest borderlands

Myanmar’s highest borderlands are defined by naturally connected but politically and geopolitically dissected vast mountainous spaces of the eastern Himalayas around the tri-junction of China, Myanmar and India. Their sweeping extent, but more so the politics and challenges of access allow us to produce knowledge of these places and their societies in tiny bits. The presentation provides a glimpse of the changing socio-political dynamics at the borderlands between Arunachal Pradesh and Kachin State through two key themes. One is the effects of space on theories and local actions, interactions and developments. The other is the community, livelihood and wider cultural resilience at and across Myanmar’s highest borderlands.
 

Karin Dean is a senior researcher at Tallinn University’s School of Humanities, trained in political geography. She currently heads the Eur-Asian Border Lab (https://borderlab.eu/), an active platform to foster trans-regional dialogue in border studies. Karin’s research interest revolves around borders—on how different actors construct, negotiate and cross physical, symbolic or virtual borders in their claiming of political space. Most of her research has focused on the contested spatialities at Myanmar’s borderlands and the Kachin connectivities across China and Myanmar, while most recently she has extended her research to the Indian ‘side’ at Arunachal Pradesh-Myanmar borderlands