Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to understand variations in the dynamics of violent conflict and development at the margins of the state. It looks at how and why market expansion and state consolidation can lead to diverging developmental outcomes in peripheral zones.

Paper long abstract:

Borderland and frontier regions demonstrate vast disparities in their levels of (in)stability, violence, the embeddedness of state institutions and market dynamics. Attempts to account for this unevenness often embrace a 'diffusionist narrative' (Harvey 2006) whereby peripheral regions that continue to experience violence, poverty and illegality are portrayed as residual or marginalized spaces left behind by the uneven diffusion of capitalism and statebuilding. The antidote to such borderland 'pathologies' has been to fashion more 'effective' state institutions and market practices to 'develop' and integrate these regions

This paper presents an alternative conceptualisation; rather than seeing frontiers and borderlands as 'lagging' zones, they are viewed as places of opportunity, laboratories of rapid (and contested) political and economic change. Variation in the political economy of such regions can be explained, less in terms of the degree of political and economical integration - the assumption underpinning official development efforts to 'thin' borders, build infrastructure, create development corridors and so forth - than the different ways in which state practices and market dynamics are imposed, resisted and brokered by states and peripheral elites.

In developing this argument, the paper interrogates how and why processes of political and economic integration result in the formalisation and stabilisation of border practices in some areas while facilitating continued instability in others. It examines who benefits and who loses out from the formalisation and liminality of border regions and the different kinds of political settlements, violence and development outcomes that coalesce around these dynamics.