Akio Tanabe

Noboru Ishikawa

P. N. Abinales

As much of the world turns its attention to questions of the role and even survival of the nation-state formation in an increasingly globalized world, the authors of this interdisciplinary volume shift the focus of the debate by examining various sites of social action where the nation-state is still in a formative stage even as it is increasingly under threat. Challenges to emergent nation-building arise both from within multi-ethnic "states" as well as from without, e.g., through pressure from international human rights organizations and the global capitalist marketplace. The authors demonstrate, too, that this betwixt and between situation is neither entirely new nor unique to the globalized world system; parallel tensions already existed between locals and migrants of regional trading networks before the European colonizers arrived on the scene to further complicate matters. Including micro level ethnographies, local histories and a macro-theoretical overview of the world-system, this volume directly engages with the complexities of globalization in marginal and troubled states, complexities that are themselves typically marginalized in debates all too often obsessed with the plight of the most powerful and developed nations.

Globalization in Asia and Africa

Dislocating Nation-states

Wil de Jong

Denyse Snelder

Natural resources often stretch across borders that separate modern nation states. This can create conflict and limit opportunities for regulated consumption of their goods and services, but also provide opportunities for joint multinational efforts that exceed single country capabilities. This book illustrates the diversity of transborder natural resources, the pressures that they experience or the opportunities that exist for multinational regulatory regimes, monitoring and enforcement. It presents ten case studies of transborder natural resources that are of interest to two or more neighboring countries, and that are subject to, or in need of bilateral or multinational coordinated management. The case studies include the exploitation of specific marine resources in international waters, rivers that travel through several countries and contiguous tropical forests across national borders, and where commodities, nature conservation or even territorial integrity are at stake. They are drawn from across the globe, including flood management in Western Europe, tropical forests in the Western Amazon, hydropower development in the Mekong region of South-east Asia, forest conservation in Central Africa and marine resource and fisheries exploitation in the waters of Japan, South-east Asia and Australia. Together the chapters provide a review of a wide range of transborder natural resource examples, and the diverse regulatory regimes that need to be devised to achieve successful management. An introductory chapter provides a conceptual and theoretical underpinning that can guide future research efforts on similar cases and a concluding chapter draws major conclusions and implications for related concepts and theories.

Transborder Governance of Forests, Rivers and Seas

Ryoji Soda

The studies in this volume provide an ethnography of a plantation frontier in central Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. Drawing on the expertise of both natural scientists and social scientists, the key focus is the process of commodification of nature that has turned the local landscape into anthropogenic tropical forests. Analysing the transformation of the space of mixed landscapes and multiethnic communities—driven by trade in forest products, logging and the cultivation of oil palm—the contributors explore the changing nature of the environment, multispecies interactions, and the metabolism between capitalism and nature. The project involved the collaboration of researchers specialising in anthropology, geography, Southeast Asian history, global history, area studies, political ecology, environmental economics, plant ecology, animal ecology, forest ecology, hydrology, ichthyology, geomorphology and life-cycle assessment. Collectively, the transdisciplinary research addresses a number of vital questions. How are material cycles and food webs altered as a result of large-scale land-use change? How have new commodity chains emerged while older ones have disappeared? What changes are associated with such shifts? What are the relationships among these three elements—commodity chains, material cycles and food webs? Attempts to answer these questions led the team to go beyond the dichotomy of society and nature as well as human and non-human. Rather, the research highlights complex relational entanglements of the two worlds, abruptly and forcibly connected by human-induced changes in an emergent and compelling resource frontier in maritime Southeast Asia. Chapters ‘Commodification of Nature on the Plantation Frontier’ and ‘Into a New Epoch: The Plantationocene’ are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Noboru Ishikawa

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