Session Name: Change and Improvement at the Neighbourhood Level
Disentangling state-imposed gentrification and rural-urban transitional neighbourhood through border Special Economic Zone development in Thailand
Thursday, August 1, 2024
09:00 – 10:45 (GMT+7)
Paper Abstract: The establishment of Special Economic Zones (SEZ) has become an engine of economic growth and connectivity since the 1950s, predominantly in Asia and the Pacific. Such state-driven development ambitions, contemporarily converged with the Belt and Road Initiative to accelerate global infrastructure linkages, have turned rural villages into financial and digital metropolis. SEZ, thus, emerges as a state apparatus to propel capitalist accumulation and impose urbanization in the place-based setting. In Thailand, the military-installed National Council for Peace and Order government enforced border SEZs project in 2014. SEZ gentrification process started off with the government’s territorialized appropriation to create enclosures of communal or public land and natural resources. Tensions and conflicts arose as local neighbourhoods faced with the dispossession of nature-dependent traditional livelihoods and rapid rural-urban transition. Through these contexts, this paper examines how the Thai state propaganda of future growth and urbanized industrial development convinces and compels existing customary land users at the border margin to relinquish their tenure over commons, such as community forests. By juxtaposing 2 case studies of SEZs in the North and Northeastern regions of Thailand, I substantiate the conjunctional factors and processes of state-imposed gentrification, followed by the resulting effects of land speculation and landlordism in weakening or strengthening the subaltern resistance. The paper contributes to the discussion on diverse connotations and implications of gentrified neighbourhood, shedding light on how large-scale development, as also happened in Tanjung Perak Port of Surabaya, can embrace diverse groups of people to share resources in this transitional space.
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