The new hinterlands: connection, suspension, and precarity in Southeast Asia

This paper explores the question of how people build a sense of place and community in the development zones and corridors that have become focal sites of Chinese investment in Southeast Asia. It develops a concept of ‘new hinterlands’ to describe and analyze infrastructure spaces like Thailand’s Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC). Here, infrastructural reconfigurations of space produce a new kind of hinterland, one where life is often suspended somewhere between the rural and urban, between the agricultural and industrial, and between the past and the future. In the new hinterlands, livelihoods subsist and ‘make do’ with the uncertain and temporary opportunities eked out at the margins of global supply chains. The paper asks: within spaces meant to facilitate movement, how do connective infrastructures produce interstitial and contingent landscapes of settling? Initial research results suggest a key role for local organizers and activists in rebuilding social connections among area youth.