On behalf of Mr. Koichiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNESCO, it is my great pleasure to welcome you all to this international scientific conference. Drylands are often considered fragile ecosystems, yet they have a remarkable resilience to stress. They are home to unique and well-adapted plant and animal species that we need to conserve. Some of the world’s greatest cultures and belief systems have originated in drylands. On the other hand, desertification and land degradation in drylands often result in poverty and cause environmental refugees to abandon their homes. These problems can only be addressed in a holistic manner, based on sound scientific research and findings. Solutions to the problems of dryland degradation need to be communicated as widely as possible through education at all levels. These are many reasons why UNESCO – within its mandate of science, education, culture and communication – took the intiative to organize this conference. And we are glad that so many partners have responded to our call. UNESCO considers this conference as its main contribution to the observance of the International Year of Deserts and Desertification in 2006. We have deliberately chosen the title ‘The Future of Drylands’ as we feel it is time to redefine our priorities for science, education and governance in the drylands based on 50 years of scientific research in arid and semi-arid zones. In fact UNESCO has one of the longest traditions, within the UN system, of addressing dryland problems from an interdisciplinary, scientific point of view. In 1955, the ‘International Arid Land Meetings’ were held in Socorro, New Mexico (USA). They were organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), sponsored by UNESCO and supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. One important output of the International Arid Land Meetings was a book entitled The Future of Drylands, edited by Gilbert F. White and published in

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)

Borderland regions in Southeast Asia have increasingly been reimagined as resource-rich, unexploited ‘wastelands’ targeted for large-scale development schemes for economic integration and control. Common and overlapping features of these regions are processes of resource extraction, agricultural expansion, population resettlement and securitization, and the confluence of these dynamic processes creates special frontier constellations. Through the case of the Indonesian-Malaysian borderlands, I explore how processes of frontier colonization through agricultural expansion have been a recurrent product of Indonesian development and security policies since the early 1960s. I argue that frontier development accelerates and intensifies when national discourses of security and sovereignty and state-led agrarian expansion intersect along national borders. The study generates new insights into how contemporary state-capitalist processes of agricultural expansion in the borderlands of Indonesia and other parts of S...

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Frontier constellations: agrarian expansion and sovereignty on the Indonesian-Malaysian border

Part 1 List of Illustrations Part 2 Editor's Foreword Part 3 Preface Part 4 Acknowledgments Part 5 Reader's Note Part 6 Acronyms and Abbreviations Part 7 Chronology Part 8 Maps Part 9 Introduction Part 10 THE DICTIONARY Part 11 Bibliography Part 12 About the Author

Historical dictionary of the peoples of the Southeast Asian massif

The highlands of mainland Southeast Asia have famously been the locus of "Zomia," polities resistant to control by lowland nation-states, but this relative resilience has been due to their marginality. However, as even remote orderlands connect to the market economies of what has been labeled the "Greater Mekong Subregion," these semi-independent polities are trying to transform themselves from isolated drug enclaves into regional paragons of economic modernity labeled "Special Economic Zones." The main actors in this transformation are ethnic Chinese migrant capitalists who embrace the economic rhetoric of mainland China's "growth model" to create respectability and to evoke images of a cosmopolitan future as they build casinos in the rainforest. The zones' claim to be the vanguard of modernity rests on two mutually contradictory sets of symbols: a mimicry of Chinese state paraphernalia designed to conjure up the efficacy of a strong developmental state, and the discourse of freedom from state control. This article examines the transformation of zones of political and criminal resistance into zones of economic development from a historical perspective of changing practices of sovereignty and shifting understandings of development. © 2012 Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History.

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Enclaves of improvement: Sovereignty and developmentalism in the special zones of the China-Lao borderlands

This article explores the cross-border trading networks and practices of highland residents in north-west Vietnam. It reveals how such individuals, of highland minority and majority Kinh ethnicities, negotiate the political reality of an international border in highly pragmatic ways as they augment their livelihoods by trading commodities with inhabitants in south-west China. We follow four particular commodities, traded across different political tiers of border crossing (each with specific rules, regulations and negotiations), by a diverse range of traders. In doing so we argue that border access is mediated by a complex and multifaceted set of social and structural components including not only state policy, but ethnically-embedded social relations and specific geographic variables that, in turn, are engendering disparate economic opportunities.

Negotiating Remote Borderland Access: Small-Scale Trade on the Vietnam–China Border

The Legend of the Golden Boat: Regulation, Trade, and Traders in the Borderlands of Laos, China, Thailand and Burma

Growing recognition of the contested nature of heritage has prompted critical reassessments of official heritage discourses and the demand for more inclusive heritage processes. Field research in Surin, Thailand, reveals the challenges of implementing participatory approaches in a context in which the concept of cultural heritage is employed to domesticate the nation’s ethnic Others. The history of state-sponsored, folklorized performances of the ethnic Khmer genre of kantruem demonstrates the ways in which the recent listing of kantruem on Thailand’s national registry of “intangible culture” elides histories of cross-border linkage with Cambodia and meanings of kantruem as a site of memory and affect.

Alexandra Denes

Papers

The Legend of the Golden Boat: Regulation, Trade, and Traders in the Borderlands of Laos, China, Thailand and Burma

Folklorizing Northern Khmer Identity in Thailand: Intangible Cultural Heritage and the Production of "Good Culture"