The frontier in heterogeneous time: finance, temporality, and an economic zone on hold

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article follows the history of the Dawei special economic zone (SEZ), a port, industrial zone, and logistics project located in Myanmar’s southern borderlands. Suspended in 2013 due to financing shortfalls and public criticism, the Dawei project’s implementation has been far from straightforward. This article dwells on the non-linear temporality of the project, focusing on the problem of financing. It is there, above all, that project proponents continually entertain both prospects of progress and frustrating obstacles. This story of financing shows, I argue, that frontiers are temporal projects, constituted by fits and starts, slowdowns and accelerations, and periods of deferral and delay. Beginning with the project’s origins and moving through recent attempts to revive it, I foreground three moments of labor in and of time – three timescapes, in short – which I describe in terms of futurity and deferral, boom and bust, and suspension and renewal. The complex temporality of the project raises doubts about the notion that capitalist modernity consists of a singular, abstract, homogeneous time – defined by acceleration, speed, or time–space compression. On this frontier, rather, the inter-mingling of multiple times suggests not vestiges of the premodern, but the heterogeneous timescapes – unstable, unruly, uneven – that compose capitalist modernity itself.