Limits of Sovereignty: Developing Blank Spaces in Asian ‘Bordered-Lands’ after the Second World War

This chapter illustrates the paradoxes of establishing state sovereignty in transnational borderzones against competition by insurgent armed groups. The costs of achieving authority in such situations were generally reckoned to be high due to the historically spasmodic presence of states in borderzones. Yet, we find that states did not always seek to establish sovereignty by traditional means such as administrative and legal structures. What emerges instead are continuities in colonial policies of fragmenting spaces, creating exceptional legal regimes and using coercion, all of which assumed new forms after the end of the Second World War in the China-India-Burma border-confluence. This conflict and subsequent decolonization disrupted existing patterns of state-making, and created ‘blank spaces’ at a time when new nation-states sought to claim more sharply defined international “bordered-lands”. Insurgencies emerged in these ‘blank spaces’ either in response to the forced nationalization of territory, or due to exclusions caused by such spatial policies. I argue that states did not seek to ‘fill’ the vacuum in these spaces through routinized administration and welfare-development, and instead oscillated between various modes of coercive control and power-sharing arrangements to coopt local populations. From that immediate post-war period, counter-insurgency and development-like activities have gone hand in hand in maintaining these geographies as ‘remote’ and ‘dangerous’ and have thus served to justify further securitization.