Unsettled Frontiers

Abstract

The market is not guided by an invisible hand. It stems from tangled networks that bind the past with the present, human with nonhuman actors, and local with global processes. Like a rhizomic plant whose underground shoots constantly seek new terrain, these exchange networks continually expand, take root, and rupture to rework frontier lives and landscapes. This book explores these historical, social, and material relationships along the Cambodia-Vietnam border. It reveals the workings of these commodity networks and how they merge to drive frontier transformation. Since the mid-1800s, the upland regions of Cambodia and Vietnam have witnessed successive, intensifying waves of incorporation, migration, and rupture— from the vast rubber plantations of the French colonial period to the enforced collectivization of the Khmer Rouge era, which violently disrupted long-standing communities. In recent decades, global commodity booms have created an unrelenting drive to exploit the land and resources of these frontier regions, bringing lowland migrants with them. Along with the waves of migration and settlement brought by these market processes, the frontier remains an unsettled space where people seek secure lives as they grapple with dramatic environmental and social change and volatile engagements with diverse commodities Show more