Unsettled Frontiers: Market Formation in the Cambodia-Vietnam Borderlands

Unsettled Frontiers provides a fresh view of how resource frontiers  evolve over time. Since the French colonial era, the Cambodia-Vietnam  borderlands have witnessed successive waves of market integration,  migration, and disruption. The region has been reinvented and depleted  as new commodities are exploited and transplanted: from vast French  rubber plantations to the enforced collectivization of the Khmer Rouge;  from intensive timber extraction to contemporary crop booms. The  volatility that follows these changes has often proved challenging to  govern.

Sango Mahanty explores the role of migration, land  claiming, and expansive social and material networks in these  transitions, which result in an unsettled frontier, always in flux,  where communities continually strive for security within ruptured  landscapes.