Lerner’s description contextualises our interest in borders. The papers in this special section of Asia Pacific Viewpoint have been inspired by recent work that examine borders not as forever peripheral to core interests of the state, but as sites of opportunity for state actors and institutions, personal discovery of freed spaces for identity formation and alternative gender roles (Schendel and Abraham, 2005; Tagliacozzo, 2005; Horstman and Wadley, 2006). They deal with both metaphoric and national/ jurisdictional boundaries by privileging narratives of those who are actually involved in negotiating one or both (Kyle and Siracusa, 2005). The papers further address the hierarchies of power that are linked to these narratives. Scott’s (1998) seminal work of problematising state attempts to exercise power for the control of publics and spaces through technologies of administration (censuses, town planning, mapping and systematised revenue generation and collection) has clear influence in much of current writing on borderlands as it does on contributors to the present volume. Attempts at control, according to Scott (1998), is fraught with tension since control over populations whose loyalty cannot be assumed or taken for granted is a perpetual anxiety for many states. Such populations include those who can escape state scrutiny because of being located at the geographical periphery where state presence may be weak or because of historical links that promote dual or multiple cultural affiliations whether prompted by geography or not. Consequently, such efforts are often unsuccessful. Similarly, Thongchai Winchakul’s (1994) pioneering work expanded on the notion of the nation-state as problematic when viewed from local perspectives and the ambiguity of the margin, thereby arguing for social scientists to pay more attention to local stories of the nation (Thongchai, 2002 cited in Horstman and Wadley, 2006). Work on borders has proceeded to examine international jurisdictional borders as there to be crossed and has taken up the challenge of locating the political economic and cultural dynamism of border regions, which, in Horstman and Wadley’s (2006) terms, is about ‘centering the margins’. More importantly, border studies have gone a step further in suggesting that border regions can be found throughout the geographical space of the nation (Cummings, 2006). This is because, borders, if viewed as dynamic social spaces in which dominant and marginal people negotiate their relationships, are to be found in most nation-states that are ethnically diverse such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea and Thailand, areas that are covered in this volume.