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The Borderlands of Southeast Asia - Geopolitics, Terrorism, and Globalization (Paperback)
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The Borderlands of Southeast Asia - Geopolitics, Terrorism, and Globalization (Paperback)
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FROM THE AUTHORS: As an academic field in its own right, the topic
of border studies is experiencing a revival in university geography
courses as well as in wider political commentary. Of course,
something about the postmodernist sensibility readily embraces the
ambiguity, impermanence, transience, and twilight nature of
bordered spaces among the planet's 192 territorially defined
states. But we have another motivation in assembling this book, one
rooted in contemporary rivalries sited in one of the world's most
open regions. Until recently, border studies in contemporary
Southeast Asia ap-peared as an afterthought at best to the politics
of interstate rivalry and national consolidation. The maps set out
all agreed postcolonial lines. Meanwhile, the physical demarcation
of these boundaries lagged. Large slices of territory, on land and
at sea, eluded definition or delineation. That comforting ambiguity
has disappeared. Both evolving tech-nologies and price levels
enable rapid resource extraction in places, and in volumes, once
scarcely imaginable. The old adage that God really does have a
sense of humor ("after all, look where He/She put the oil") holds
as true in Southeast Asia as in the Middle East. The beginning of
the 21st century's second decade is witnessing an intensifying
diplomacy, both state-to-state and commercial, over off-shore
petroleum. In particular, the South China Sea has moved from being
a rather arcane area of conflict studies to the status of a
bellwether issue. Along with other contested areas in the western
Pacific and south Asia, the problem increasingly defines China's
regional relationships in Asia-and with powers outside the region,
especially the United States. Yet intraregional territorial
differences also hobble multilat-eral diplomacy to counter Chinese
claims. For the region's national governments, the window for
submission and adjudication of maritime claims under the United
Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas marks a legal checkpoint,
but daily management of borders remains burdened by retrospective
baggage. The contributors to this book emphasize this mix of
heritage and history as the primary leitmotif for contemporary
border rivalries and dynamics. Whether the region's 11 states want
it or not, their bor-dered identity is falling into ever sharper
definition-if only because of pressure from extraregional states.
Chinese state and commercial power dovetails almost seamlessly with
Beijing's formal territorial demands. Yet subregional rivalries and
latent suspicions also remain firmly in place-as in those among
Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia, or between Thailand and those
states that encircle the kingdom. Tracing back to its history of
tributary states, the Chinese colossus has fixed views about all
states contiguous to its territory; in some Chinese dialects,
Vietnam is still referred to as a "renegade province." We chose to
organize the chapters by country to elicit a broad range of thought
and approach as much as for the specific areas or nation-states
examined in each chapter. For both Southeast Asia and the outside
world, the current era portends another unsettled period of border
disputes and contentious territorial claims. Complex claims also
have unsettled the Arctic and inland seas like the Caspian. The
precision we laud in global positioning and tracking systems has
also wreaked havoc on the apparent certainties bequeathed by all
the carefully surveyed (at least by 19th-century standards)
boundaries left behind by the departing colonial powers. Of course,
these new uncertainties about the place on the terrain of exact map
coordinates can probably remain safely unsettled for a long
time-but only so long as no resource discoveries emerge, which can
lift the problem from obscurity to prominence in the political
equivalent of a heartbeat. Institute for National Strategic Studies
(INSS) at the National Defense University (NDU).
General
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