Revisiting frontiers as transitional spaces in Thailand.(Report)

Introduction: the frontier in Thailand

In this paper, I examine three zones of transition under the rubric of frontier in Thailand. The first is the agricultural frontier, but one in which dynamics are significantly different to those I and others wrote about previously (Hirsch 1990 1992; Pinthong 1991). Agricultural frontiers, typically between farmland and forest, are defined by new relations of production and interplays between conservation, shifting modes of agriculture and natural resource use and management. The second is the peri-urban frontier, the zone of rural-urban intermeshing or interpenetration (Rigg 1998). Peri-urban frontiers, between countryside and city, extend beyond their desakota/chaan-meuang locations (McGee 1991; Greenberg 1997) to a more generic interplay between urbanity and rurality in defining livelihood and identity. The third is the national frontier, a zone where regional integration has created opportunities based around the spatial inequalities, complementarities and markedly different economic and political histories between neighbouring nation states that now spill into one another across national boundaries made quite impervious by colonial and Cold War geopolitical arrangements (Winichakul 1994). National frontiers are transcended from above in the form of new regionalisms, and from below in migrations and other transboundary influences and flows. The Mekong as an interconnected and integrated region provides a motif for this new context of Thailand's frontiers (Khaosaard and Dore 2003; Kasetsiri and Baker 2008).

My main contention is that the concept of frontier continues to have relevance in modern Thailand, in particular as an heuristic for understanding societal and spatial transitions, but that we need to think beyond the traditional frontier spaces and processes in order to see its continuing relevance. The paper proposes the frontier as both a spatial and temporal heuristic for understanding Thailand's societal transitions. It examines the changing context of each frontier in turn, and it also identifies a number of commonalities.

The frontier is both a place and a time. When we talk of the American frontier, we immediately think of the nineteenth century, as well as the westward edge of agricultural expansion and colonisation. Similarly, the agricultural frontier in Thailand is thought of as the period of rapid agricultural expansion during the 1960s and subsequent decades, when cash cropping extended into previously forested areas along the western and eastern fringes of the Central Plains (Hirsch 1990 1992) and onto higher land in northeastern provinces that had previously been forested (Rigg 1986). Peri-urbanisation as a new kind of frontier is associated with the rapid expansion of Bangkok, land speculation and the growth of industry on the fringes of the metropolis in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Frontier expansion into Indochina is a post-Cold War phenomenon with a regional expression in Chatichai Choonhavan's call for regional marketplaces to replace battlefields in Indochina during the 1990s.

The transitions inherent in the frontier include land use changes, typically from forest to permanent agriculture or from agriculture to residential and industrial uses. They also invoke a notion of civilisation and development, as roads are progressively pushed into inaccessible areas, and upgraded from cart tracks to laterite to all-weather sealed thoroughfares. The process of extending national administration, as sub-districts are upgraded into branch districts, and then full district administration, sees a transition toward central state control (Hirsch 1990 1993). At the peri-urban frontier, territory is incorporated into municipal boundaries, where specific forms of zoning and regulation mark a qualitative shift from rural administration to controlled urban space.

With the delayed but ultimate 'closure' of the forest frontier has come the 'opening' of new frontiers. What Rigg (1998) refers to as 'rural urban interpenetration' has manifested itself, most obviously, in the desakota periurban zone around Bangkok and, increasingly, other regional urban centres. There has also been a more general and less spatially fixed urbanisation of the countryside through rural-urban migration, remittances, and values that come with education, television, consumer preferences and so on. The closure of Thailand's domestic resource frontier has also seen the opening of another, in neighbouring countries, as regional integration has allowed a permeation of borders and spilling over of Thailand's natural resource economy into Laos, Cambodia and Burma.

Changing dynamics of the agricultural frontier