Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how drug cultivation and drug use have become embedded in processes of extractivist development in the Myanmar-China borderlands.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the intersections between two phenomena that have shaped eastern Kachin State in Myanmar’s northern borderlands with China since the late 1980s: the transformation of once-remote spaces into major resource frontiers shaped by overlapping and cumulative forms of export-oriented resource extraction, and the upsurge of opium cultivation and drug use. Through the analytic of extractivism, we examine how the specific modalities surrounding logging and plantations in the Myanmar-China borderland offer critical insights into how drugs have become entrenched in the region’s political economy and in the everyday lives of people ‘living with’ the destruction, violence and insecurity wrought by extractive development.