Surplus precaritization: Supply chain capitalism and the geoeconomics of hope in Myanmar's borderlands

Abstract

The Thai-Myanmar border represents one of the most protracted displacement situations in the world, while the Myanmar-Bangladesh border is now home to nearly one million displaced Rohingya, making it the world's most populated refugee camp. During the period of “democratic transition,” pre-emptively terminated by the February 2021 military coup, foreign direct investment continued to flow into Myanmar despite ongoing humanitarian crises. Rather than being presented as exacerbating ethnic tension, economic development was frequently deployed as a panacea for conflict in ways that rendered borderland residents increasingly precarious. In this article, we draw on multi-sited ethnographic research carried out between 2014 and 2020 in Myanmar's borderlands and along the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor to examine how aid donors' support for displaced ethnic minority populations is supplanted by widespread geoeconomic hope for the ameliorating effects of capitalism. We home in on the role of aid flight, special economic zones, and China's Belt and Road Initiative to argue that geoeconomic hope surrounding Myanmar's deepening integration into circuits of global capital obscures processes of surplus precaritization in which populations progressively approach the point at which they become absolutely surplus or beyond reabsorption into labor markets. The article contributes to emerging scholarship on migrant labor exploitation, supply-chain capitalism and the geoeconomics of BRI in Myanmar's borderlands and beyond.