Research




 

My research is on borders, borderlands, urban spaces, and frontiers. Conceptually, my work sits in the interdisciplinary intersections of the humanities and social sciences, particularly Asian studies, human geography, anthropology, and feminist methods. My projects feature the voices of those dispossessed in and from borders and extractive spaces, such as minorities and refugees; as well as those who control and secure them, such as (para)militaries, private security personnel, members of autonomous armed or 'rebel' groups; and those who complicate and transcend the boundaries between these social relations. I also explore the political geographies and ecologies of new and expanding 'frontier economies', such as SEZs, plantations, and infrastructures over seemingly remote or contested border spaces in Asia. Explore a few of my projects below. 

Research Projects +

Seeing Like A Border: Resource Frontiers, Voices, and Visions on Myanmar's borderlands with India and China (Book Project) 


I am writing my first book from doctoral fieldwork conducted in Northern Myanmar (Shan, Kachin, and Chin states), Northeast India (Mizoram), and Southwest China (Yunnan) between 2016-19. The book offers five ethnographies examining and narrating how extractive economies, resource frontiers, and connectivity infrastructures have transformed spaces, lives, ecology, mobility, and resistance in the borderlands Myanmar shares with two of its biggest resource-hungry and securitizing neighbors, India and China. 

The book highlights voices and visions from and moving across the borderworlds of Myanmar, in tracing how people (ethnic groups, displaced peoples, refugees, rebels); ideologies (self-determination, ethnonationalism, indigenous land rights); commodities (weapons, wildlife, smuggled, contraband, and extracted goods) flow in and out of unlikely places on an everyday basis. 

For this project, I traveled, lived, and spoke to men, women and children on the borders of Myanmar - farmers, ethnic leaders/armies, local officials, border guards, smugglers, residents, ethnic armed groups, militias, children (including former soldiers), laborers, refugees, displaced people, border crossers, and local civil society activists, among others. I allow these voices from the periphery to ‘see’, narrate, and stitch together stories of survival, negotiation, positioning, and clever calibrations around the violent and extractive spatial transformations befalling their communities by focusing on their anti-spectacular lives. I posit that hopes for peace, access, and conservation in such spaces come from within the knowledge and practices among communities, something that institutions linked to governments or international development ought to keep in mind. 

The doctoral thesis, based on which I am working on the book, won the 2021/22 Wang Gungwu Medal and Prize for the best thesis in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore (NUS). 

'IDP' (Internally displaced persons) camp on the Northern Myanmar-China borderlands in Kachin state. Photo by Jasnea Sarma 2017.

The Children Of 'Zomia' (between India, China, and Myanmar) (An Oral History Archiving Project) 

This project is a work of non-fiction that explores a hitherto undocumented history of migration and escape among a lost generation of Kachin children from childhood to adulthood in a multi-format archival project which will produce both a digital archive as well as a vernacular book project. 

This group of children dangerously crossed many borders from Kachin state, into China, then crossed back through Northern Myanmar and into various parts of northeast India in the late 1980s. These children were selected and smuggled across the border for safekeeping and education to both China and India by the KIA (Kachin Independence Army.) They made perilous journeys across dangerous routes, dodging border guards, police, and militia of three countries, with the help of a network of ethnic ‘brotherhood’ connections between faith-based ethnic churches at the China side, and declared ‘insurgent’ groups like the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) and NSIM (Naga Socialist Council) among others in Northeast India. Many died en-route or were scrambled from border to border as their guardians were killed in Indian government and army-led counter-insurgency crackdowns in Northeast India, where a draconian colonial-era law, ASFPA (armed forces special powers act) continues to wreck and sustain a culture of militarized violence. Others assimilated so well that they joined the very forces that killed those guardians and could only communicate with their real parents years later through translators. This project is based on long-form oral narratives documented over five years in Northeast India (Assam, Nagaland, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh), Burma (Shan State, Kachin state, Yangon and Chin state) and, China (Yunnan). It also triangulated these oral narratives through historical and, newspaper-based archival work. 

Please get in touch to know more, or if you know something helpful. 

A group of young KIA (Kachin independence army) soldiers in Myanmar raising a make-shift tree-bridge to the jungle on the China border. Source: Photo by (named removed), an ex-KIA officer, 1979. It was kindly provided by a family member of the photographer based in Laiza, Myanmar.

Wild Lives: An intimate ethnography of animal smuggling across a trans-Asian Borderworld (New Research Project)

In this project, I build on my previous work on borders and mobilities to develop a new Inter-Asia demand-supply and route ethnographic project that traces illicit demand and supply routes of illegal wildlife products primarily from Northeast India (rhino horn and ivory)  to China and Vietnam through Myanmar.

Northeast India, and Assam - a colonial (tea and oil) frontier and (highly militarized) post-colonial border state in Northeast India - and one of the most lucrative places from which to supply endangered wildlife products. In my own (short) lifetime (of  30+ years), large portions of these Himalayan foothills, once green and rich in biodiversity have turned into black, ash, rat-hole coal, and oil wells - and the populations have tripled. Wildlife forced out of these same hills is caught and tranquilized in human habitation areas, or worse, found as dead animal products in pan Asian demand and supply markets, rotating, along with other goods, from little known borders (like Tamuh, Baho, Mongla, Zokathar, Muse) to well-known metropolitan cities. Growing up in the Kaziranga national park in Assam and having spent formative years in a wildlife sanctuary, I find it sickening to find ivory and horn powder from poached wildlife from my homelands - in the markets of Asia. 

This project thus is a multi-bordered, multi-routed, multi-sited inter-Asian dilemma that requires inter-Asian approaches in locating political geographies of wildlife and smuggling. The project will combine mobile ethnographies/ GIS mapping of wildlife products (particularly between India-Burma-Bangladesh-Bhutan-China-Singapore and Vietnam) The project - while empirical, practical and, applied in its primary focus - will contribute to complicated lopsided understandings of anti-poaching policy across Asia, as lend critical insights into human-animal, political ecology, conservation and border studies.

The research problem emerges from my understanding that one can regulate, conserve and even incarcerate/ kill poachers on the ground, but as long as the demand psychologies and (desperate) supply economies exist (despite many efforts to educate), no policy can contain successfully contain the trade if it rooted in one location. It must then be captured and understood in movement, as empathetically (towards those in it) as possible. 

Kaziranga National Park, where a majority of Rhinos and other animals are poached in Northeast India. Assam. Photo by Jasnea Sarma, 2015.

Made in Ecuador bananas on a Chinese border, or being and becoming refugee-labor on a agri-frontier. (Research papers.)


One paper from this paper is forthcoming. 2023 Border Bananas: Chinese plantation expansion, land and life-worlds on the China-Myanmar borderlands. Forthcoming.  Eurasian Geography and Economics (With Rippa and Dean)

Abstract:

Over the past two decades, the Yunnan-Myanmar borderlands in Kachin State have become a major investment frontier for large-scale agribusiness. Chinese private capital, supported by state-led opium substitution programmes, has turned thousands of hectares of forests and smallholder farms into plantations. As in many such cases across Southeast Asia and beyond, this rapid development has come at the expense of local communities relying on these lands for their livelihoods. In Kachin State, such transformations are not merely economic, they are political: cutting through the local struggles for political autonomy, the (trans-)national performance of statehood(s), and the global geoeconomics. Caught between Chinese market expansion, and an ongoing war between the Myanmar Army and the Kachin Independence Army/Organization (KIA/KIO), plantations have become sites of often overlooked confrontations, compromise, and conflict operating behind the shadows of grand infrastructural Belt and Road (BRI) politics. This paper addresses this nexus drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on both sides of the Kachin-Yunnan borderlands conducted before the Covid-19 pandemic. Moving across banana plantations, armed bases, and border markets; and building on interviews with Chinese entrepreneurs, Kachin leaders, and local farmers and refugees, the paper traces transformations on land and life-worlds, where plantations, we argue, now perform b/ordering functions --- ordering not only national spaces but also the environmental, social and ethnic lifeworlds in Kachin State in ways that are more difficult to reverse than previous (and ongoing) forms of military territorialization.

Jade miners in Hpakant, Kachin state taking a 'banana' lunch break. Photo: Jasnea Sarma 2016

Bordering Infrastructures: Ethnographies of China and India's cross-border 'connectivity' infrastructures into Southeast Asia. (Published Research Papers)

A set of my ongoing papers traces the footprints of Chinese-funded projects in China’s southeast Asian backyards, particularly the borders of Myanmar. This research is based on ethnographic fieldwork in border trading zones, agri-business plantations, connectivity project sites (under the BRI), SEZs, and militia/EAO (ethnic armed groups) controlled areas. They offer insights into how Chinese infrastructures are met by local populations on the ground. As a comparative, I have also published ethnographic work on Indian-funded infrastructure and connectivity projects in Myanmar’s borderlands where new roads, although looked upon as aspirational promises by local ethnic populations, have nonetheless displaced refugees out of their safe-spaces. 

A scene of China urban and Muse SEZ infrastructure construction as seen from Ruili, Yunnan. Photo by Jasnea Sarma, Ruili, China 2018. 

The Intimate Political Geographies of Surveillance and Securityscapes (Published Research Papers.)


A set of ongoing and published projects examines how public and private security/surveillance providers (such as military, paramilitary, mercenary, and private security operatives; fences, biometrics, and citizenship determination infrastructures) become spatially entangled with sites of extraction, dispossession, violence, and disenfranchisement in borderlands and 'bordered' urban spaces. 

Papers linked to this project examined private security players in Myanmar's commercial capital, Yangon, or the narratives of state security forces on the India-Bangladesh borders. New papers continue to build on this work through comparative studies on security services from the ceasefire and active armed organizations in the context of Northern Myanmar and Northeast India.



Myanmar private security expo, advertised on the Sule Bridge in Yangon. A year later, this very bridge would become the site of major people's protests after the Feb 1st Myanmar coup in 2021. Photo by Jasnea Sarma, Yangon, 2020.

Collaborative GIS-Mapping (with Evan Centanni of PolGeoNow.com)

In an effort to combine the critical potential for visual GIS cartography with ethnographic research,  I have been working with PolGeoNow's brilliant cartographer Evan Centanni to develop a set of interactive GIS mapping project of Myanmar and its borders with northeast India, Bangladesh, Thailand, and China. We combine Evan's GIS skills with my ethnographic research to demonstrate such issues as:




We have made maps covering my field sites and we plan to publish them all online as an open-source website, with a set of short-form explainer articles for these as well. 

Please contact us for more information on this project or collaborate with us.