Frontier Assemblages offers a new framework for thinking about resource frontiers in Asia. Frontier assemblages are the intertwined cultural, spatial, material, ecological, and political economic processes that produce particular places as resource frontiers at particular moments in time. Contributors offer rich ethnographic and historical studies of both spaces of extraction and production, mapping a set of radical transformations unfolding across Asia. In doing so, they collectively formulate new ways to think about how resource frontiers are made, their implications for those who live and work within them, and their rippling consequences across space and time. Frontier Assemblages brings together noted anthropologists, geographers and sociologists to rethink a set of processes that are reconfiguring millions of people’s relationship to land. In doing so, it opens a set of new conversations about resource frontiers and their relationship to pasts, presents, and futures of economy, ecology, and life in the margins of Asia.

Written for scholars of human geography, political ecology, political and environmental anthropology and more, Frontier Assemblages maps the flows, frictions, interests, materialities and imaginations that accumulate in frontier spaces to transformative effect.