Embedded illegality: How the drug trade shapes development trajectories in the Myanmar-China borderlands

This paper explores the intersections between two phenomena that have shaped Myanmar’s borderlands with China since the late 1980s: the transformation of once-remote spaces into resource frontiers that are now highly integrated into global economies, and the upsurge of illegal drug production and use. The paper examines how drugs have become embedded in the political settlements that now shape development trajectories in Myanmar’s borderlands. The paper focuses on two dynamics. First, the informal brokerage arrangements that have developed between the Myanmar Army and local militias and how the illegal drug trade has become integral to these systems of brokered rule. Second, how involvement in the drug trade has become embedded in the everyday institutional practices of various public authorities that are meant to be policing drugs. In doing so, the paper reveals how the drug trade is not simply a legacy of armed conflict, state breakdown, and economic marginalisation; rather it is embedded in the informal systems of governance that are the DNA of the modern Myanmar state and frontier capitalism.