Integrating the margins: conflict, development and the ‘politics of circulation’ in the Myanmar-China borderlands

Growing concerns over the vulnerability of global supply chains to conflict and disruption have drawn renewed attention to the politics of logistics and circulation. This paper contributes to the growing body of critical logistics scholarship through analysing the integration of northern Myanmar’s resource-rich conflict-affected borderlands into global markets since the late 1980s. It examines how the expansion of cross-border trade and integration of the region’s natural resources into Chinese supply chains interacted with armed conflict and the Myanmar state’s efforts to consolidate control over northern Myanmar. Existing scholarship emphasises the mutually reinforcing relationship between capitalist integration and military-state consolidation, showing how land and resource concessions helped extend state authority into territories historically governed by non-state armed actors. In contrast, this paper argues that a focus on circulation reveals a more ambiguous and contingent set of dynamics. Struggles over trade routes and border crossings have enabled non-state armed organisations to retain revenue, political leverage and organisational capacity even as they lost territory and control over resource-extraction sites, reconfiguring Myanmar’s borderlands in ways that have reinforced, rather than dismantled, longstanding systems of political authority beyond the state. Since the 2021 military coup, this circulation-based power has helped armed organisations reverse earlier territorial losses, while also exposing new vulnerabilities: dependence on Chinese markets, infrastructure and essential goods has enabled Beijing to restrict cross-border flows and pressure armed organisations to curtail military offensives. The paper therefore shows how economic integration can simultaneously sustain armed autonomy and generate new forms of external leverage over it.