Introduction
Economic corridors (ECs) are integrated networks of hard and soft infrastructure designed to spur economic growth. Introduced in Southeast Asia in 1998, they have proliferated globally and are currently under construction on nearly every continent of the planet. Trillions of dollars are being spent with significant implications for international politics, global and regional economic cooperation and integration, and ultimately, world order. However, despite emerging as a key concept guiding foreign policy and development initiatives worldwide there has been limited conceptual work on them to date.Footnote 1 This article contributes to this gap by arguing ECs should be understood as an essentially extractivist paradigm: a constellation of policy prescriptions advancing processes of valorisation and accumulation predicated on the subjugation of human and extra human nature to intensified exploitation. It argues EC development and operation is an essentially extractive process, whereby capital draws on its multiple outsides for sustenance and expansion while depleting the social bases of wealth.
The article contributes to critical approaches to international relations by: (1) extending historical materialist approaches to ‘the international’ to a consideration of ECs, an ascendant form of economic integration; (2) offering a critical theoretical framework for future research on the political, economic, and developmental outcomes of ECs; and (3) maintaining EC development is propelled not by concerns for poverty reduction or substantive development (the dominant rationale) but rather a structural drive inherent in capitalist social relations towards reproduction, expansion, and restructuring, animated by class conflicts over surplus appropriation.
The argument is pursued theoretically with empirical reference to ECs in mainland Southeast Asia. It draws on extensive research conducted by the author on ECs in the Greater Mekong Subregion between 2013 and 2019 and policy and scholarly oriented literatures from a range of disciplines. It argues that ECs play a crucial role in restructuring regional-global social relations, led by multilateral banks utilising the ‘conventional rationale’ to convince dominated states and classes of their utility as a means to inclusive and sustainable development. In response, the article advances a conceptualisation of ECs as an essentially extractivist paradigm to lend support to struggles against them. This counter-hegemonic proposal revolves around four theses: (1) ECs are a ‘fix’ for crises of capitalism; (2) ECs exacerbate class struggle; (3) ECs are tools for exploitation; (4) ECs facilitate financial extraction. These should be understood as mutually reinforcing relational dynamics, focal points for a broader holistic conceptual prism to shed light on the role of ECs in processes of valorisation and accumulation under contemporary capitalism. The article aims to offer a modest contribution towards: (1) undermining epistemic justification for EC development and (2) intellectual and political empowerment of social forces opposing them. It outlines a predominantly Marxist-inspired account of the global political economy of corridor building that aims towards generalisability, and to this end calls for further empirical work on ECs worldwide to substantiate, refine, or refute the framework.
Section one introduces the concept of ECs and explains their conventional rationale. Section two outlines a historical materialist approach to ‘the international’, elaborating concepts of uneven and combined development, extractivism, and extractivist infrastructure. Section three challenges the dominant approach to ECs framed around the four theses above. The last section concludes.
1. The corridors paradigm
From the Mekong to the world
Economic corridors are an emerging and fluid concept with no clear definition.Footnote 2 In essence they are geographically targeted initiatives designed to spur trade, industrialisation, and development through construction of integrated networks of trans-boundary infrastructure typically including transportation links, industrial centres, power generation and supply lines, telecommunications, ports, and cities.Footnote 3 They may develop in stages: (1) basic transportation infrastructure; (2) transport and trade facilitation corridor; (3) logistics corridor; (4) urban development corridor; and (5) fully-fledged economic corridor.Footnote 4 Although stages 1–4 contrive a spine, ECs are distinguished by accompanying ‘soft infrastructure’ such as business-friendly policies, regulations, and institutional frameworks to facilitate trade and investment.Footnote 5 Since most ECs traverse international borders, states are inclined towards internalising interests of capital domestically and regulatory harmonisation at the supranational level, further expanding scope for capital accumulation by transmuting variegated state forms.
The EC concept was introduced in mainland Southeast Asia at the Greater Mekong Subregion – Economic Cooperation Program (hereafter GMS) Eighth Ministerial Meeting in 1998, with the GMS corridor programme recognised as the first and one of ‘the most ambitious economic corridor initiatives worldwide’.Footnote 6 An intergovernmental forum established in 1992 by Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam, it is led by the Asian Development Bank, which coordinates, provides strategic planning and technical assistance, and promotes financing for subregional economic integration. The hegemony of multilateral banks such as the ADB in regional programmes allow them to promote the EC paradigm as economic ‘common sense’, a means towards what Paul Cammack argues is their core mission: purposive reorganisation of regional states and societies in accordance with the logic of global capital, advanced through ‘sustained advocacy of increased engagement in the world market, the pursuit of global competitiveness, and the transformation of social relations in order to make an exploitable proletariat available to capital’.Footnote 7
Since the end of the Cold War, the bank has pursued this mission by vigorously supporting initiatives crossing national frontiers to capitalise on endowments of raw materials and labour, and encouraged governments to revise legal frameworks and offer incentives to induce private investment.Footnote 8 In addition to and congruent with ECs, this includes transport corridors, ‘growth zones’, and special economic zones (SEZs). The latter are emblematic of ECs because they combine hard and soft infrastructure to facilitate trade and investment by providing access to raw materials, natural resources, industrial land, energy, water, transport connectivity to ports and harbours, population centres and cheap labour, supported by capital-friendly and dependable laws and institutions.Footnote 9 Both SEZs and ECs play extractive roles, albeit with functional differentiation: SEZs principally act as nodes, ECs as vectors. SEZ's nodal function may be delineated in two key ways: firstly, as connective hubs for EC-related infrastructure such as at ports and border crossings; secondly, as sites of intensive extraction in their own right as locations for (1) processing natural resources and (2) exacerbating exploitation in labour intensive manufacturing.Footnote 10 ECs provide direction to extractive flows and are endowed with their own distinctive extractive attributes, outlined in section three.
The GMS has undertaken more than US $21 billion investment projects since 1992 with ECs providing scaffolding for successive strategic frameworks.Footnote 11 In 2016 a review of EC configuration was conducted, with Myanmar and Laos assimilated further. GMS leaders called for significant EC expansion in March 2018, announcing a pipeline of 227 projects at an indicative cost of $66 billion.Footnote 12 EC development is affected by geopolitical considerations, with Japan targeting support for east-west ECs and China the north-south EC. China has identified the subregion as a pivot for integration with South and Southeast Asia and an ‘early stage harvest’ for the Belt and Road Initiative.Footnote 13 To this end, the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Mechanism was launched in November 2015 to ‘upgrade’ the GMS scheme and augment ADB assistance.Footnote 14 Several core documents state a key objective is to ‘vigorously develop infrastructure’ and develop an EC in the region.Footnote 15 Conciliatory language and endorsing the EC approach suggests the mechanism will not challenge ADB/GMS regional hegemony. Yet divergent geographical and political interests of major donors nonetheless imply these programmes will become sites of contestation over the arrangement of regional-global social relations.
ECs have proliferated across the globe since 1998 at the behest of powerful states, multilateral banks, and supranational institutions, using the conventional rationale to convince dominated states and classes of their utility as a means towards sustainable development. The ADB promotes development of ECs across Southeast AsiaFootnote 16 and South and Central Asia,Footnote 17 while Japan, India, and the United States have announced plans to use ECs to connect Asia, Africa, and the ‘Indo-Pacific’.Footnote 18 ECs are also being adopted by the European Union and China, with the Belt and Road Initiative comprising six land ECs and a maritime EC.Footnote 19 The power and interests of dominant states and class fractions will shape their specific characteristics, but all will draw epistemic support from the conventional rationale outlined below.
The conventional rationale
The conventional rationale for ECs builds on classical and neoclassical economic principles in economic policy and planning. ECs are an extension of development axes and growth poles developed in Africa in the mid-twentieth century,Footnote 20 differentiated by their ‘soft infrastructure’. A key contention is that connectivity will stimulate economic performance of underdeveloped ‘backward’ regions by offsetting remoteness and peripherality with transnational infrastructure.Footnote 21 By facilitating integration of relative factor endowments and mobile and immobile capital, ECs allow countries to ‘tap’ development potential and unleash productive forces. Integrating into national, regional, and global circuits of trade and investment helps develop comparative advantage and capitalise on economies of scale.Footnote 22 Comparative advantage is emphasised in the so-called ‘old trade theory’, where free trade allows countries to specialise in productive niches based on specific factor endowments and international differences to engage in intersectoral trade, while integration into global value chains is emphasised by the ‘new trade theory’, where profitability is secured not just through specialisation in comparative advantage but also extension of markets and economies of scale: that is, intrasectoral rather than intersectoral trade.Footnote 23 Relative emphases are neither incompatible nor mutually exclusive, the new builds on the old.Footnote 24
The conventional rationale also draws on the ‘new economic geography’, an attempt to respond to geographical concentration of economic activity by incorporating spatial considerations into economic modelling.Footnote 25 Emphasising increasing returns to economies of scale encourages industrial clustering due to the prohibitive cost of transacting across distance, incentivising producers to concentrate production geographically to minimise costs, leading to industrial agglomeration. Reducing transportation and other transaction costs is supposed to counteract centrifugal economic forces with centripetal forces towards geographical dispersion of production. Ergo, building transportation corridors and revising policy, regulatory, and institutional frameworks to better serve investors’ interests will help disperse the industrial base and counteract an emergent core-periphery structure. Key assumptions include optimality of free trade, with international economic integration leading to long-term equilibrium and conditional convergence. Liberal international trade regimes are supposed to empower market forces to marshal efficient allocation of resources, boosting aggregate productivity and leading to equalisation of goods and factor prices over time, including real wages: that is, conditional convergence with shared prosperity.Footnote 26
The conventional rationale thus presents ECs as investments in peripheries that broaden opportunities for ‘catch up’ industrialisation by enhancing transnational connectivity, improving access to resources and markets, catalysing trade, and creating jobs. This is presented as a mutually beneficial equilibrium seeking process where ECs act as instruments for development, encouraging inclusive and sustainable growth, and ultimately contributing to the ‘great convergence’.Footnote 27 If left uncontested, it helps buttress the hegemony of multilateral banks such as the ADB in their wider global project of securing the ascendancy of capital over labour and completion of the world market.Footnote 28 Having introduced the concept of ECs and their conventional rationale, the following section lays the theoretical groundwork for understanding ECs as an essentially extractive paradigm.
2. Prelude to a counterhegemonic view
Historical materialism
Historical materialist approaches to the international have been resurgent in recent years. Defining characteristics include a radically historicist and relational approach to world politics situating international relations within a context of capitalist social relations. From this follows a holistic approach emphasising classes, ideological movements, and economic market forces in addition to nation-state units and the international systems of (neo-)realist and (neo-)liberal analyses.Footnote 29 One of the most compelling accounts is provided by Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton, a neo-Gramscian approach that builds on humanistic Marxism to advance a relational ontology of the international based on a philosophy of internal relations. The most comprehensive exposition can be found in their 2018 book Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis, wherein both global capitalism and the states system are conceptualised as internal relations of capitalist social relations of production set up around private ownership of the means of production and nominally free wage labour, thereby integrating both within a holistic theoretical framework of the international.Footnote 30 Capitalist social relations generate both agency and structure, with social class forces of capital and labour key collective agents interacting within a capitalist system of production and accumulation of surplus value, subjecting them in turn to certain structural dynamics.
Benefits of a historical materialist perspective on international politics include its emphasis on processes of valorisation, class struggles over relations of production and distribution of surplus, and inherent crisis tendencies of capitalism as structural drivers of social change over time. Virtues of Bieler and Morton's approach include: (1) advancing Coxian inspired critical international theory by drawing attention to counter-hegemonic struggles not just on the ideological terrain of global civil society but also material resistance to capitalist exploitation;Footnote 31 and (2) offering a sophisticated way of mediating holistic structuralist insights of world systems theory with the highly textured class analysis offered by the Murdoch School. The latter typically proceeds through an ‘inside-out’ approach, filtering international dynamics through domestic relations.Footnote 32 Despite emphasising human agency, proponents tend to downplay structural drivers foregrounded by Bieler and Morton.Footnote 33 The latter approach is nonetheless distinguished from other radical and structuralist accounts criticised for state-centrism (for example, Wallerstein) or a diremptive ‘two-logics’ approach (for example, Arrighi and Harvey), where geopolitics and geoeconomics are analysed according to distinct territorial and economic dynamics, rather than both subsumed to a unified logic integral to capitalism.Footnote 34 The geographical and political expression of this logic is captured in the notion of uneven and combined development, an important concept for understanding the geographical and political implications of EC development, incorporated in their approach to the international.Footnote 35
Uneven and combined development
The concept of uneven and combined development (UCD) has been deployed by historical materialists with a view to developing a social theory of the international that avoid the pitfalls of statism or globalism while remaining attentive to capitalism's contradictory tendencies.Footnote 36 The notion that capitalism develops through processes of UCD is attributable to Trotsky, with the concept of ‘uneven development’ deployed in the 1970s and 1980s by critical geographers such as Smith, Harvey, and Massey to demonstrate the survival of capitalism depends on the relational production of space in its own image through ‘transformative processes of (primitive) accumulation, dependency, exploitation, struggle, dispossession, devaluation, domination, [and] resistance’.Footnote 37 As Jamie Peck defines it, UCD denotes ‘asymmetrical and exploitative relations between classes, companies, and countries, all of which are understood to be endemic, not transitory, features of capitalist development’.Footnote 38 The terms ‘uneven’ and ‘combined’ simultaneously signal ‘contradictory and countervailing tendencies, distinctive to processes of capitalist accumulation, for universalisation-cum-equalisation on the one hand and differentiation-cum-fragmentation on the other’.Footnote 39 As Neil Smith explains, UCD is the geographical expression of the more fundamental contradiction between use-value and exchange value under capitalism.Footnote 40 It is therefore produced by forces intrinsic to capitalism, the ‘moving contradictions’ of profit driven accumulation, integral to the logic and contradictions of the value-form and ‘acutely sensitive to the rhythm of expansion and crisis’.Footnote 41
While geographers have explored spatial dynamics of UCD, IR scholars have recognised it is also politically and world-historically momentous. UCD has thus been deployed to explain the geopolitical origins of capitalism,Footnote 42 emergence of norms of sovereignty and an international system of sovereign states,Footnote 43 development of a hierarchical international order in the nineteenth century,Footnote 44 state transformation,Footnote 45 and imperialism.Footnote 46 Yet recent debates have criticised its use for being abstract and preoccupied with metatheoretical questionsFootnote 47 and focusing on the longue durée rather than the present.Footnote 48 Calls have been made to apply UCD to contemporary restructuring, imperialism in the developing world,Footnote 49 while paying attention to processes at the supranational level; specifically, the ‘growing multiscalar interpenetrations of economic spaces’ and ‘re-scaling of state apparatuses and state power’.Footnote 50
Bieler and Morton make important contributions to understanding dialectical interaction between the outward expansion of capitalist social relations along UCD lines and the structuring conditions of the international. Extending UCD to an analysis of ECs below pushes them further while addressing shortcomings in the literature. Rather than contributing to developmental convergence and catch-up as liberal approaches contend, it argues expansion of capitalist social relations through ECs contributes instead to new forms of exploitation, marginalisation, and exclusion – between capital and labour, North and South – as countries are differentially integrated into the global economy. This is politically significant because extending markets through ECs brings new opportunities for accumulating power to those shaping EC development. Exploitation via extraction of surplus value from labour and extra human nature is one contributory process, but so too are other forms of marginalisation and exclusion operating nationally and internationally, including distinctive dynamics based on additional vectors of oppression such as gender, ethnicity, and citizenship overlaying and exacerbating the capital-labour relation.Footnote 51
Extractivism and extractivist infrastructure
The term ‘extractivism’ has been used to conceptualise exploitative dynamics of capitalist development in Africa and Latin America. Scholars have argued trade and investment policies of the neoliberal period represent merely an evolution rather than departure from direct plunder of the colonial period. Patrick Bond shows foreign investment in Africa has contributed to ‘looting’ and wealth depletion, with economic value appropriated through unequal exchange in South-North resource flows, primarily benefiting transnational corporations and undermining local reinvestment.Footnote 52 He deploys the notion of UCD to demonstrate ‘accumulation at one pole and poverty at another happen systematically, according to systems of exploitation that we must carefully analyse and document, but that can change, depending upon political processes’.Footnote 53 In Latin America, ‘neo-extractivism’ has been applied to denote a shift in the post-Washington Consensus era to Asia as the primary market for commodities and complicity of left-wing governments in re-primarisation of their economies.Footnote 54
Dovetailing with this has been a ‘turn to infrastructure’ in IR and cognate disciplines in recognition of its role facilitating extractivism and in attempts to offset capitalism's crisis tendencies in the wake of the 2007/8 global financial crisis. A push towards infrastructure-led growth was initiated by the World Bank in 2009, supported by the G20 in 2010, and reinforced by Chinese intellectuals of statecraft attempting to displace ‘triple bubbles’ of domestic overaccumulation and forge a new model for growth through the Belt and Road Initiative.Footnote 55 Japhy Wilson traces the role of the World Bank in his study of the Plan Puebla Panama, a transnational infrastructure project regarded as a potential prototype for the bank's ‘new spatial approach to development’, a policy application of the new economic geography.Footnote 56 Drawing on Harvey and Lefebvre, he analyses it as a spatial fix enabling colonisation of space by capital according to an imperialist logic of expansion premised on material transformation of an ‘underdeveloped’ region into a functional node of the global economy.Footnote 57
States play an increasingly important role in the post 2007/8 crisis period, transformed from custodians of markets in the neoliberal period to becoming actively engaged in the production of territory and infrastructure enabled connectivity to plug territories into global commodity chains.Footnote 58 For Morten Ougaard, this infrastructure push represents an attempt by the transnational power bloc to secure material conditions for capitalist expansion, reflecting an internal shift in power relations whereby industrial fractions have gained ascendance relative to financial fractions.Footnote 59 At a structural level, Nicholas Hildyard and Xavier Sol argue ‘mega-corridors’ are driven by two dynamics in the global political economy: (1) mobilisation of economies of scale to reconfigure the geographies of raw material extraction, production, and access to cheap labour required for capital expansion, and (2) hastening circulation of commodities between sites of extraction, production, and consumption to truncate what the World Bank calls ‘economic distance’: a measure of time and money.Footnote 60 Specific corridors have been conceptualised as technologies of nationhood (in Malaysia),Footnote 61 a form of ‘licenced larceny’ (in Africa),Footnote 62 tools of containment and enclosure to channel movement (in China),Footnote 63 and neoliberal institutions and new frontiers of capital based on expropriation and privatisation by a strong and powerful state forging new structural relations with dynamics of extraction, logistics, finance, and industrial operations (in India).Footnote 64
Literature on extractivism has roots in dependency theory, hitherto focusing on the political economy of natural resource extraction. Proponents argue this is the dominant factor in the creation and extraction of value in contemporary relations of unequal exchange.Footnote 65 Others argue this narrow focus obscures exploitation and the role of labour in the production of surplus value, proposing instead an expanded concept that more systematically defines fundamental features of contemporary capitalism.Footnote 66 As Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson conceptualise it, extractivism refers to ‘processes by which capital draws on its multiple outsides to sustain and perpetuate itself’.Footnote 67 Not limited to literal reference to plundering of the Earth and biosphere, extractivism extends to ‘any form of economic activity that relies on or benefits from resources or relations’ external to capital.Footnote 68 Those outsides are not just spaces and materials but also ‘forms and practices of human cooperation and sociality’ external to capitalist social relations.Footnote 69 Extractivism is therefore not only at work in processes of dispossession and appropriation but also social dimensions of exploitation, such as the reorganisation of production and social relations enabling production.Footnote 70 This enjoins extractivism onto contemporary debates involving geographers, postcolonial critics, and feminists about capital's relation with multiple outsidesFootnote 71 and helps track historical development of global relations of production. Focus on natural resource extraction may have been warranted during the 2000–14 commodity super-cycle but this peaked around 2010 with renewed emphasis on intensifying social dimensions of exploitation through austerity and expansion of global commodity chains in the post 2007/8 crisis period. This is not to deny the importance of primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession, or spatial fixes, rather to sublate them as components of an expanded concept of extractivism that better acknowledges social dimensions of exploitation.
Having grounded our approach in the structuring dynamics of capitalist social relations, UCD, extractivism and extractivist infrastructure, the next section advances a conceptualisation of ECs as an essentially extractivist paradigm. It analyses ECs in light of this theoretical backdrop, extending consideration of processes of UCD to imperialism in the developing world according to an expanded understanding of extractivism, of which UCD is its geographical and political expression.
3. The corridors paradigm as extractivism
Thesis 1: Corridors are a ‘fix’ for crises of capitalism
Critical scholars have noted a pervasive tendency of capitalism towards crises of overaccumulation characterised by surpluses of labour power and capital and a falling rate of profit.Footnote 72 Surpluses must be absorbed productively to avoid system-wide devaluation or destruction of capital or labour, leading to a series of ‘fixes’ to secure profitability. This includes a technological fix characterised by drastic innovation in production processes at the capital-intensive end, combined with a spatial fix where labour-intensive parts of the production process are transferred to cheaper labour locations.Footnote 73 Both rely on a temporal fix, because they often require long-term investments in physical infrastructure mediated by financial and/or state institutions through generation of credit, deferring consumption by directing capital towards future-oriented projects.Footnote 74 Some regard this process itself as facilitating another, financial, fix, referred to as financialisation.Footnote 75 Such ‘fixes’ secure conditions for capital accumulation through extractivist dynamics whereby capital draws on multiple outsides, including through primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession.Footnote 76
The conventional EC paradigm presents corridors principally as investments in underdeveloped regions. This article contends ECs should instead be understood as tools to offset crises of overaccumulation through extractivist dynamics that secure corporate profitability amid stagnation and decline in relatively dominant capitalist states. Just as an overaccumulation crisis in the 1970s was ‘fixed’ through global restructuring and outward expansion, similar crises in Japan, Thailand, and China have driven development of ECs across Southeast Asia.
‘Growth zones’ such as the GMS were established in the wake of the 1985 Plaza Accord. Subsequent appreciation of the yen encouraged Japan to develop a plan to use the ADB as a conduit for recycling its huge surplus and a ‘catalyst’ for attracting Japanese capital to Southeast Asia, with part of the US $30 billion surplus Japan planned to recycle in 1987–90 allocated to the ADB to facilitate development of infrastructure to attract private investment to the region.Footnote 77 Coupled with sluggish domestic growth and inflation, Japanese conglomerates began relocating production networks to Southeast Asia in search of cheap labour to compensate for declining profitability.Footnote 78 The EC framework itself was introduced to reinvigorate the GMS stalled as a result of the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 by ‘upgrading’ transport corridors and stimulating economic activity by constructing industrial zones, telecommunication and electricity transmission cables, and gas pipelines.Footnote 79
Thailand's Internal Rate of Return, a proxy for profitability, peaked at 0.2025 in 1990 before declining propitiously during the 1990s to a low of 0.1090 in 1998 when the EC programme was launched, climbing since.Footnote 80 Thai overseas investment has been driven by objectives of expanding markets, accessing natural resources, circumventing domestic resistance to extractive and environmentally damaging industries, and eluding rising wages and forced labour in domestic industries. Thailand's economic diplomacy since the late 1980s has aimed towards establishing the country as a regional economic hub, linking poorer neighbours to the global economy.Footnote 81 The ‘Quadripartite Economic Cooperation Plan’ was launched in 1993 to facilitate cooperation between Thailand, China, Lao PDR, and Myanmar to develop the Mekong basin, superseded by the Ayeyawady-Chao Phraya-Mekong Economic Cooperation Strategy in 2003, incorporating Vietnam. According to Weatherbee ‘this Thai-centred, core–periphery geoeconomic structure ostensibly would promote mutual benefits through cross-border cooperation and enterprise. A darker view was one of Thai exploitation of weaker partners.’Footnote 82 Investments in neighbouring countries have increased significantly since. Between 2006–15 accumulated value of Thai outward foreign direct investment globally was THB 1.1 trillion ($36 billion), approximately 50 per cent in resources (energy and utilities and mining), followed by industrials, agribusiness, and food.Footnote 83 Overseas operations are now a major source of profit for Thai-based firms, with recorded revenue from abroad at THB 2.67 trillion (US $87 billion) in 2017, the ratio of foreign to total revenue increasing from 36 per cent in 2006 to 46 per cent. This has contributed to a compound annual growth rate of 8 per cent for foreign investments compared to 3 per cent for domestic.Footnote 84 Thailand's Eastern Economic Corridor and border SEZs extend this policy, aiming to upgrade Thailand's economy by concentrating capital-intensive production processes in the central eastern region and relocating less profitable parts of the production process to neighbouring countries, made possible by improved transnational connectivity through subregional ECs and public debt.Footnote 85
China displaced Japan as leader of East Asian economic expansion in the 1990s and 2000s, launching the Great Western Development campaign in 1999/2000 to develop trade and investment ties with neighbouring states. Yunnan province attracted US $79.4 billion central government funding – much of it spent on transboundary infrastructure – and developed as a base for hydroelectric companies and other extractive industries such as logging, mining, and agribusiness to expand into neighbouring countries such as Myanmar and Laos.Footnote 86 The Belt and Road Initiative ramps up construction of transnational infrastructure, driven by long-term fallout from the 2007/8 global financial crisis. A US $586 billion stimulus package carried China through but led to excess capacity, falling profits, and over accumulated foreign exchange reserves. Coupled with an export-led growth model based on low wages and low domestic consumption, high savings rates and trade surpluses, the Belt and Road Initiative attempts to provide a fix for these imbalances by exporting capital.Footnote 87 China engages bilaterally and multilaterally with Mekong states to establish SEZs to facilitate relocation of low value-added parts of production to cheaper locations, partly in response to rising wages and industrial conflict in industrial zones like Shenzhen and elsewhere nationwide.Footnote 88 In 2017, more than 45 per cent of Foreign Direct Investment from China to Least Developed Countries was located in three GMS economies: Laos ($6.7 billion), Myanmar ($5.5 billion), and Cambodia ($5.4 billion).Footnote 89
Thesis 2: Corridors exacerbate class struggle
The internal relationship between the states system and changing configuration of global capitalism is leading to the ‘internalisation within different state forms new configurations of social forces expressed by class struggles between different (national and transnational) fractions of capital and labour’.Footnote 90 Class struggle under current conditions assumes multiple forms, including ‘over land, ownership of natural resources and improved access to the global commons, as well as opposition to the model used to organise production’.Footnote 91 One such model is ‘large-scale corporate capitalist production, large-scale foreign investment in land, natural resource extraction, and formation of joint venture partnerships between private sector and the state’.Footnote 92 Internalisation of capitalist class interests in the protection and reproduction of capitalist social relations has contributed to the consolidation of authoritarian state forms worldwide.Footnote 93
The conventional EC paradigm rests on a view of globalisation as a benign equilibrium-seeking process where market forces freed from state interference work to benefit all. The reality in mainland Southeast Asia is more conflictual. This article proposes EC development should be understood instead as a process that is precipitated by and exacerbates class struggle; one that empowers fractions of capital over those of labour, the environment, and the public. Driven by competition between diverse social forces with divergent and sometimes conflicting class interests, construction of ECs generates novel social forces such as new proletariat classes and anti-democratic alliances of business elites and agents harnessing state power to accumulate wealth, leading to new forms of exploitation, dispossession, marginalisation, and exclusion.
The expansion of capitalist social relations through EC development has exacerbated social conflicts and empowered anti-democratic forces, including local and transnational business elites and well-connected officials. Jim Glassman's study of the GMS finds it animated by struggles between class fractions and ‘dominated by the interests of the most geographically mobile capitalists, the most privileged middle classes, and the most powerful state actors’.Footnote 94 Relative losers are Myanmar migrant workers, dam-displaced Chinese and Laotian villagers, and economically stressed Thai farmers and small businesses.Footnote 95 Lee Jones and Jinghan Zeng show that the Belt and Road Initiative has been driven by competing domestic Chinese interests, particularly state capitalist interests, whose struggle over power and resources shapes its design and implementation.Footnote 96 In border areas bisected by ECs, Caroline Hughes finds they have contributed to violent contestations over land and resources and a pattern of ‘convergence and “connectivity” between security forces and business elites at the expense of poor settlers, marginalised migrants and ethnic minorities’.Footnote 97 Cross-border investments in Myanmar's border areas have ‘empowered illiberal elites while fuelling land grabs and marginalisation of small farmers’.Footnote 98
Yunnan's engagement with the GMS has contributed to decentralisation and internationalisation of the Chinese state, leading to extra-territorial governance and interference in states’ internal affairs, including meddling in Myanmar's peace process to protect interests in territory bisected by the China-Myanmar EC.Footnote 99 Cambodia's subregional economic integration since the early 2000s has strengthened its patronage system and an increasingly authoritarian state committed to capital accumulation, heightening exposure of Cambodian citizens to corruption and violence.Footnote 100 Foreign investment in Myanmar has empowered a narrow oligarchy and deepened disparities between the poor and the military, businesses, and new political elites rapidly consolidating wealth.Footnote 101 Thailand's ten border SEZs and Eastern Economic Corridor were established under martial law by a military junta attempting to revive a stagnant economy after seizing power in a coup. They have been linked to systematic land grabbing and attempts to stimulate capital accumulation at the expense of local citizens, labour, and the environment, deepening economic dependence on cheap labour and depletion of natural resources,Footnote 102 strengthening corporatist relations between the Thai military and Sino-Thai conglomerates, and contributing to the militarisation of the cabinet, parliament, and state-owned enterprises.Footnote 103 SEZs in Myanmar and Cambodia have contributed to fragmentation, centralisation, and ‘capture’ of state power by officials, developers, and investors, accompanied by dispossession and marginalisation of local communities, the environment, and workers.Footnote 104
Capitalist social relations depend not only on accumulation of capital in the form of money derived from the commodification of nature, but also class formation of a proletariat dispossessed from the means of production and thus available for hire.Footnote 105 This process of class formation accompanies EC development as direct producers are separated from the land and compelled into wage-labour. ECs have contributed to agrarian transformation pursued through a model of accumulation based on commodification and privatisation of land, accompanied by occasionally violent dispossession and marginalisation of rural communities.Footnote 106 Peasants and smallholders riven from the means of subsistence to make way for development projects have been forced to migrate, filling factories in newly established industrial zones. While agrarian and industrial transformation has led to massive expansion of economic output, capitalist transitions have been uneven, as former farmers now ‘toil on the fringes of the subregion's capitalist transformation, struggling to maintain precarious employment in growing informal economies’.Footnote 107 Resistance is routinely met with physical violence and intimidation, judicial harassment, and enforced disappearances.Footnote 108
Thesis 3: Corridors are tools for exploitation
Transnationalisation of production and finance has been the dominant trend in the global economy since the 1970s, intensifying from the late 1990s as states and supranational institutions aimed towards elimination of all transaction costs associated with movement of goods, services, capital, and finance across international borders. The introduction of ECs coincided with and contributes to this process of ‘hyper-globalisation’,Footnote 109 facilitating extractivism in the traditional sense of expropriating natural resources, and in the expanded sense of reorganising social relations as a means towards profit. Studies of labour exploitation in global commodity chains help substantiate emphasis on social dimensions of exploitation as a crucial feature of contemporary extractivism.Footnote 110 Disaggregation of commodity chains has empowered transnational corporations to increase profitability through geographical disbursal and subdivision of production.Footnote 111 Relatively unprofitable or environmentally or socially damaging parts of the process have been offshored to cheaper locations, less regulated markets, and more capital friendly states, while labour has been forced to accept new forms of specialisation as it has been integrated into hierarchically organised chains of production. Private ownership of key inputs allows corporations to exercise power in these chains, leveraging competition to pursue a form of global labour arbitrage and increase the rate of exploitation through downward pressure on the market value of labour power.Footnote 112 This is a quest for valorisation, ‘a strategy for both reducing socially necessary labour costs and maximising the appropriation of surplus value’.Footnote 113 Extractive relations of unequal exchange are intensified based on differences in productive specialisation and labour and capital incomes between countries because: (1) high-value and capital intensive inputs tend to be based in technologically advanced centres of the global economy and (2) wage differentials between North and South are greater than the difference in labour productivity.Footnote 114 This has proceeded along UCD lines. While it has secured corporate profitability, this has been predicated on the generation of environmental despoilation and socioeconomic consequences at points of extraction, including poverty creation through enclosure, dispossession, assaults on livelihoods, health, communities, displacement, and migration, with impacts disproportionately affecting subaltern class fractions, particularly female and migrant workers.
The conventional approach presents ECs as instruments for development, stimulating growth, and industrialisation through enhanced physical connectivity. By addressing deficiencies in ground infrastructure and power generation, ECs literally pave the way for investments in natural resources and industrial sectors.Footnote 115 Building ECs and using them to integrate into global commodity chains is supposed to widen opportunities for inclusive development and industrialisation by allowing developing countries to participate in the global economy ‘on a shoestring’ by engaging in low technology and labour intensive manufacturing for global markets.Footnote 116 This article proposes ECs should instead be understood as tools that exacerbate exploitation of human and non-human nature, facilitating extraction of wealth through unequal exchange, driven by a quest for valorisation. Rather than leading to convergence and shared prosperity, ECs are likely contributing instead to divergence and polarisation along new geographical and class-based lines.
ECs facilitate this quest for valorisation and the drain of social wealth on which it depends. The lure of foreign investment encourages states to internalise and protect the interests of capital through expanded protection for property rights, deregulation, and financial incentives, enabling extraction firstly by providing resource-seeking investment access to non-human nature. In the GMS this includes access to natural resources, such as commodification of land in transition economies like Cambodia and Laos,Footnote 117 mining, agriculture, and marine resources in Myanmar's borderlands,Footnote 118 and hydroelectric dams along rivers in Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia. ECs also enable relocation of manufacturing from areas with higher wages to cheaper locations. As wages have risen in China, firms have offshored labour-intensive processes to industrial zones and SEZs in Cambodia, Myanmar, and on the border with Vietnam, where predominantly female workforces toil.Footnote 119 As wages rise in Thailand, Japanese automobile and electronics firms have pursued a Thailand ‘Plus One’ strategy to shift production to Cambodia and Laos.Footnote 120 By enhancing capital mobility, ECs further exacerbate labour exploitation by encouraging extra-economic means to secure profitability such as repressive regimes and techniques of control, authoritarian work environments, informalisation, and state-enforced bans on unionisation.Footnote 121 These have a disproportionate effect on women and those engaged in care work, with obstacles imposed on accessing maternity leave, undermining conditions of social reproduction. Bargaining power of corporations is enhanced by expanding the available pool of labour though provision of hard infrastructure such as roads and industrial zones connecting population centres. Proliferation of SEZs across national jurisdictions and construction of transboundary ECs connecting them induces even greater competition between governance regimes to retain investment from firms wielding the increasingly credible threat of relocation if national social and environmental protections impinge on profitability.
H. P. Brunner argues ECs ‘have to be analysed as part of integrated economic networks, such as global and regional value chains and production networks’.Footnote 122 Metrics of perceived success include trade cost efficiencies, increased rates of foreign direct investment, employment, output, and GDP growth. Yet these remain blind to power asymmetries ECs exacerbate and the uneven shifts in opportunities for appropriation of surplus that ensue.Footnote 123 Rather than contributing to convergence, ECs appear to be contributing to divergence along new geographical and class-based lines. Evaluating the impact of production and trade in global commodity chains is challenging due to the complexity of their flows but recently developed decomposition techniques shed light on their distributional effects on value-added up and down the chain and their impact on power relations between producers, management, and labour within firms, and between governments and firms. The data is bleak for dominated workers and states.Footnote 124
UNCTAD finds global restructuring has contributed to increasing levels of income polarisation in both the developing and developed world. Between 1995–2008, owners of capital in the global North and South benefited by 6.5 per cent, while the share for low-skilled workers declined sharply by 6.3 per cent, challenging the general equilibrium assumption that commodity chains are vehicles for reducing inequality as represented by the Heckscher-Ohlin model.Footnote 125 Jayant Menon suggests similar dynamics pertain in the GMS, stating: ‘while rapid growth in the CLMV countries has reduced per capita income differentials with other ASEAN members, distribution of these gains has been uneven and income inequality within these countries has worsened’.Footnote 126 EC exponents tout job creation along ECs, yet many fail to pay living wages and are accompanied by abusive labour practices,Footnote 127 partly because supplier firms are under ‘enormous pressure to keep wages and labour standards low’,Footnote 128 leading to reliance on short term contracts, quotas, union busting, and whipsawing tactics to dampen demands for better wages and conditions. Industrialisation of border areas along ECs and SEZs have been leveraged to bypass or weaken enforcement of labour protection provisions, exacerbating exploitative labour regimes based on racial vectors of oppression. In Mae Sot on the Thai-Myanmar border for instance, a town bisected by the East-West EC, workers are registered by the Thai state as illegal immigrants with temporary permission to remain, enabling them to work but imposing obstacles on their ability to assert rights to freedom of movement, assembly, and collective bargaining.Footnote 129
Global commodity chains have predominantly benefited consumers and corporations based in the North able to sustain cheap prices and profitability through a global search for lower unit labour costs, not workers in the South. An ILO report found participation in commodity chains has positively affected firm productivity and profitability but not wages,Footnote 130 while Ricci estimates value transfer from the Global South to the North through relations of unequal exchange in international trade at US $865 billion in 2007 alone, increasing from $453 billion in 1995 and $511 billion in 2000. North America, the North European Monetary Union, North Europe, and North East Asia persistently had inflow transfers, while East Europe, Latin America, China, India, and Other Asia had persistent outflows. Differences in international monetary wages explained around 70 per cent of these value transfers, the other 30 per cent profit differential. Other mechanisms of unequal economic relations were not included, such as those relating to the functioning of financial markets, discussed below. Unequal exchange in international trade reinforces enormous gaps between GDP of different countries, contributing to reproduction of uneven development in the international economy and unequal relations between nation states.Footnote 131
Thesis 4: Corridors facilitate financial extraction
Financialisation refers to the ‘increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies’.Footnote 132 This is a countertendency to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, a familiar response to periods of weak profitability and a recurrent feature of capitalism.Footnote 133 As profitability in the productive base of the economy declines, capital is redirected to financial sectors, leading to financial crises when speculative bubbles burst.Footnote 134 The heart of finance is fictitious capital, ‘an accumulation of rights on wealth that is yet to be produced, taking the form of private and public indebtedness, stock market capitalisation and various financial products’.Footnote 135 Finance facilitates surplus extraction through direct power relations and indirect economic mechanisms, part of broader processes of valorisation and accumulation under contemporary capitalism, taking on a characteristically extractive character in relation to ‘wealth to be produced in the future through social cooperation that finance does not itself directly organise’.Footnote 136 Finance plays an increasingly important role in the development of ECs, a key component of the global infrastructure push led by G20 countries and their development finance institutions, including major multilateral banks, based on the claim there is a huge infrastructure financing gap of $50–70 trillion that needs to be filled by 2030, with approximately 60 per cent earmarked for peripheral states.Footnote 137
While the conventional EC paradigm frames financialisation of infrastructure associated with ECs as mobilising private finance for sustainable development, this article argues it should instead be understood as an additional mechanism for value extraction. This echoes Hildyard's argument that infrastructure mega-corridors are tools for developing finance, not financing development.Footnote 138 Tensions are growing over modes of financial extraction in the post 2007/8 crisis period, reflecting geopolitical power shifts within the international that will extend and exacerbate processes of UCD.
The role of private finance in ECs has grown significantly in the post-2007/8 crisis period. Part of broader global shifts beginning in the 1980s from states as providers of services to enablers of private investment in service provision and the surge in importance of finance in the macro economy, trends accelerated after the 1997 and 2007/8 financial crises. Institutional investors are now the dominant source of liquidity globally, with assets under management billowing from $30 trillion in 2007 to over $75 trillion in 2016, roughly equal to global GDP that year.Footnote 139 Investors want increased exposure to infrastructure and MFIs and private consultancies have called for private funds to fill an annual financing gap of $4.6–7.9 trillion.Footnote 140 Infrastructure is thus no longer simply a public good but has been reconfigured as a globally traded asset class.Footnote 141 This trend has been driven by availability of capital, not concern for the needs of the poor.Footnote 142 As Hildyard argues, ‘dominant forms of industrial capital cannot easily expand without massive expenditure on these corridors’.Footnote 143
Since the neoliberal period, states have been encouraged to make a range of regulatory, policy, and institutional reforms to ‘tap’ institutional investors in financial markets for liquidity and ‘crowd-in’ private investments along ECs in energy, industry, mining, agriculture, and megaprojects such as ports, industrial estates, and SEZs. Reforms often assure investors at the expense of protections for subaltern classes.Footnote 144 Accompanying ‘soft infrastructure’ distinctive of fully-fledged ECs includes tax breaks, reliable institutions (for investors), free trade agreements, investor-state dispute resolution mechanisms, and public-private partnerships. Investment opportunities are packaged and presented with assistance from multilateral banks through project pipelines that ‘identify and prepare attractive, sound and bankable projects, which meet the requirements of the private sector’.Footnote 145 A project is deemed bankable if adequate returns and repayment of loans are assured, and public-private partnerships commonly guarantee investors rights to sue governments if they introduce legislation affecting profitability of investments.Footnote 146 An April 2019 review of the GMS's project pipeline consolidated a total of 247 medium-term projects soliciting $80.9 billion in financing.Footnote 147 Investors may expect a minimum 16.9 per cent return on investment on equity investments in emerging markets, meaning a $5 billion investment in an EC-related megaproject could balloon to $23.83 billion over ten years, yielding $18.83 billion for financial fractions of capital.Footnote 148
Powerful states play an important role setting the rules for the global economy, trade, and finance, positioning them propitiously within circuits of capital accumulation.Footnote 149 Relative power imbalances mean dominated states, crucial for expanded reproduction of the financial world market and ongoing capital accumulation, occupy subordinate positions vis-á-vis financial centres as regards distribution of financial risks, gains, and vulnerabilities. This in turn contributes to reproduction of imperial-hierarchical spaces across the world market and value extraction.Footnote 150
South-South relations such as those between China, Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos are also increasingly characterised by subordinate financial positionality, exploitation, and ‘proximate dependency’.Footnote 151 Ignobly promoted as a ‘bridge’ and a ‘battery’ for the GMS, Laos's experience is instructive. While investors profit, social and environmental impacts result in impoverishment and sometimes catastrophe for local communities. Twelve SEZs were established between 2003–18 covering 29,453 hectares and attracting $3.27 billion investments, including $50 million from the Laos government. Yet from 2013–17 they contributed merely $28.4 million to the national budget, less than 1 per cent annually.Footnote 152 Despite 46 operational dams, hydropower contributed less than 1 per cent to GDP in 2017.Footnote 153 An independent cost-benefit analysis concluded that if all 11 dams planned for the Mekong proceed, Thailand would be the main beneficiary, with negative economic impact for Laos over the concession period. The economy of the lower Mekong, heavily reliant on fisheries and agriculture dependent on the river, would be set back an estimated US $7.3 billion over fifty years.Footnote 154 When an auxiliary dam of $1.2 billion Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy Hydropower Project collapsed in 2018, at least forty people died and up to one thousand went missing. Close to five thousand made homeless by the disaster remained in camps on the 2019 anniversary, surviving hand to mouth on scant rations because locals struggled to access a $50 million insurance fund due to difficulties holding a multinational joint venture accountable.Footnote 155
While states socialise risk in the early stages of design and construction of EC supporting infrastructure, investors extract revenues from successful projects for decades.Footnote 156 Coupled with a lack of global regulations on capital flows, tax avoidance, and evasion, financialisation has weakened governments in developed and developing countries alike, contributing to a spiral of dis-investment and de-accumulation worldwide, threatening the very reproduction of capitalist societies.Footnote 157 Thus despite immediate gains in foreign direct investment, output, and employment, using ECs to facilitate integration into commodity chains may secure profitability for shareholders and cheaper prices for consumers, but possibly at the expense of condemning dominated states and workers to dependency and ‘immiserating specialisation’.Footnote 158
The Chinese state has emerged as an important actor in the post-2007/8 crisis period of accumulation, representing and reinforcing power shifts in the international, reflected in growing tensions over modes of financial extraction. Interests of transnational capital were promoted during the neoliberal period through market building, regulatory regionalism, and internal transformation of the state, supported by development banks providing technical assistance, coordinating programmes like the GMS, and mitigating risk by funding and guaranteeing projects.Footnote 159 Chinese firms and state actors have been internationalising through EC-related investments, overlapping and contesting dominant elements of the transnational power bloc, establishing their own governance mechanisms and supporting authoritarian governments marginalised by dominant powers. As Johannes Petry has noted, the Chinese state has taken a distinctive approach to financialisation, not necessarily tied to promotion of neoliberalism or driven primarily by profit, rather subservient to state power and therefore potentially a tool of statecraft.Footnote 160 Ngai-Ling Sum has argued this represents a shift in the mode of accumulation from conditionality to loan-debt contractuality under the BRI. Whereas financialisation in the neoliberal period was tied to structural adjustment and governance conditionalities, the BRI promotes a mixture of concessionary and commercial loans tied to resource, asset, and energy acquisitions, yielding political influence. Debt-for-equity agreements shift debt burdens abroad while securing strategic resources and leverage to extract geopolitical/geoeconomic concessions when recipient states face debt distress.Footnote 161
These shifts within the international are rooted in geographical capitalist restructuring and have been accompanied by heightened geopolitical tensions. They reflect broader trends towards the rise of state capitalism – the growing importance of the state as promoter, supervisor, and owner of capital – and that of the South; specifically, China.Footnote 162 These have contributed to intensified internal contradictions in the global accumulation process tied to contested arrangements of social relations, especially at national and regional-global levels. Chinese EC-related projects have elicited a range of responses across the Mekong: from selective accommodation to outright hostility if seen as enabling relations of exploitation, expropriation, or subjugation. Political and economic elites have sought to capitalise on investment opportunities while resisting exploitative contractual obligations, particularly related to costs and financing, as with the Kyaukphyu SEZ and the Sino-Thai Railway Project. Others have been subject to anti-China backlash, including nationalist demonstrations across Vietnam in 2018 against a proposed SEZ law viewed as relinquishing land to China, and threats to blow up Sino-Myanmar pipelines in 2021 in response to what was regarded as Beijing's support for a coup. Protestors pointedly asked if this would also be treated as merely a matter of Myanmar's ‘internal affairs’. Chinese loan-debt contractuality has been decried as a form of ‘debt trap diplomacy’, countered by promotion of a ‘free and open’ approach by Japan and the United States. Yet it would be a mistake to regard the latter's emphasis on ‘quality’ infrastructure and market forces as advancing a non-extractive approach, different in essence rather than form. Whether private or state-owned, ECs promote ascendance of capital over labour and extra-human nature. China is not the problem; the essentially extractive nature of capital is. Counter hegemonic struggles must avoid the red herring and oppose the EC paradigm tout court.
Conclusions
This article has argued economic corridors should be understood as an essentially extractivist paradigm, whereby extractivism is understood as the process by which capital draws on its multiple outsides for sustenance and expansion while depleting the social bases of wealth. Four relational theses are made in support of this proposition: (1) ECs are a fix for crises of capitalism; (2) ECs exacerbate class struggle; (3) ECs are tools for exploitation; and (4) ECs facilitate financial extraction. Each one challenges a key contention of the conventional rationale used to convince dominated states and classes of their utility as a tool for sustainable development and thereby obtain their consent to exploitation and expropriation. By unmasking the dominant rationale as ideological cover for valorisation and accumulation, the article aims to facilitate a pivot to a conceptualisation of ECs as essentially inimical to the interests of dominated states and classes.
The argument builds on social relational and historical materialist approaches to the international by situating an analysis of ECs within broader structuring conditions of capitalism, rooted in conditions of UCD. A key contention is that ECs extend and entrench processes of UCD by reinforcing power asymmetries between states and classes, contributing to new forms of exploitation, marginalisation, and exclusion, perpetuating inherent tendencies of capitalism towards social and ecological crises. It advances this literature by exploring the role of ECs in processes of valorisation, extraction, and accumulation under contemporary capitalism. Extractivism is understood as a systemic logic internal to capitalism, with UCD the geographical and political expression of this logic. Processes of UCD associated with ECs are politically significant because ECs provide those with influence over them opportunities to accumulate wealth and power based on relations of unequal exchange, thereby contributing to the reproduction of conditions of UCD in the international.
The argument is pursued theoretically and substantiated with empirical reference to ECs in mainland Southeast Asia. Further research to substantiate, refute, or refine the argument could be framed around the theses proposed herein. For example: (1) to what extent has EC development elsewhere been driven by attempts to offset capitalist crisis conditions through various extractivist ‘fixes’? Might ECs be transformed into investments that contribute to substantive development? If so, how? (2) How have subaltern classes beyond the Mekong been impacted by ECs? Are similar dynamics at play? What forms of struggle have been waged and how might they be strengthened? (3) How much wealth has been extracted through EC-related infrastructure? Can we quantify value transfers directly attributable to ECs to challenge mainstream metrics of success? (4) Might subaltern classes leverage emerging geopolitical tensions between modes of extraction to secure concessions and enhance their power in institutions influencing EC development and governance?
One advantage of social-relational approaches to IR is they avoid determinism and emphasise the importance of open-ended class struggle. While power is currently arrayed in the interests of capital, social forces across the world have valiantly resisted extractive processes associated with ECs and called for investments and policies that better serve human needs and substantive and sustainable development. Place-based indigenous struggles against dispossession tend to be the first line of defence against extractivism, such as those in Myanmar against three SEZs and the East-West EC road link in Karen State. Yet resisting ECs is more challenging due to the tranche of projects that accompany them, their diffuse nature, and the dominance of the conventional rationale. As Seth Schindler et al. note, although villagers may block a single megaproject, they are unlikely to hold back an ‘unrelenting tide’ of decentralised projects associated with ECs. As a result, a less visible but nonetheless important act of resistance is to undermine the epistemic justification for these initiatives.Footnote 163 This article aims to offer a modest contribution towards this end, thereby also the intellectual and political empowerment of social forces engaged in material struggles against extractivism worldwide.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to several anonymous peer reviewers and editors for probing and constructive engagement with the article, and participants at seminars at Thammasat University in February 2020 and the International Studies Association Asia-Pacific in Singapore July 2019 for feedback on earlier drafts. Thanks are also extended to Sophea Chrek, Shalmali Guttal, Walden Bello, and several labour rights and environmental activists across the Mekong for facilitating and providing feedback on earlier research that inspired this article. No specific funding was received for this article.
