Geoffrey Aung

Along Asia’s capitalist frontiers, major infrastructure projects promise a new era of connectivity premised on the smooth flow of goods, capital, and labor. Yet Myanmar, China, and Syria all present port, highway, and economic zone projects that capture and contain displaced people in striking ways - labor camps, refugee camps, resettlement villages, and more. Some displaced people find themselves spatially enclosed to provide steady sources of labor for new infrastructure projects. Others compose emergent surplus populations, facing conditions more marginal to circuits of production and accumulation. This spectrum of differential inclusion centers Asia qua inter-Asia as a shifting assemblage of connections and disconnections, mobilities and immobilities. Three cases ground this inquiry: (1) port development in coastal Myanmar, including Rohingya areas; (2) Uyghur encampment in Xinjiang, China; and (3) economic zone projects in the Turkey-Syria border area.