Frontier Commoditisation in Mainland Southeast Asia: Special Issue of Asia Pacific Viewpoint

The articles in this special issue examine processes of commoditisation in the frontiers of post-socialist Southeast Asia. Focusing on livelihood transformations in the borderlands of Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand, the case studies reveal how relatively understudied actors, networks, flows and conjunctures initiate and shape commodity booms. Exploring how borderlanders engage, resist, cope with and survive commoditisation, the articles chart associated changes in values and in people's relations with each-other and their environment. This introductory article contextualises this new research and discusses the implications of the findings.