Logistical turbulence: Between valorization and violence along the China–Myanmar Economic Corridor

Abstract

A pivotal Belt and Road project, the China–Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC) includes port, pipeline, economic zone, and transport projects that cut across Myanmar to southern China. Along this corridor, severe episodes of violence have shadowed the CMEC: communal violence, insurgencies, and counter-insurgencies, including atrocities against Rohingya Muslims. This article considers the relation—direct and indirect—between the logistical infrastructure projects of the CMEC, dedicated to capitalist valorization, and the episodes of violence that have occurred in their vicinity. Revisiting critical logistics scholarship, I suggest that the turbulence of logistical worlds does not necessarily reflect an internal logic of capital. Drawing on a form-analysis view of the state, rather, I show how the CMEC requires a conjunctural grasp of logistical worlds whose turbulence can stem from multiple determinations, including state-backed, extraeconomic force. Emphasizing the ties between the CMEC and Myanmar military operations, I argue that logistical infrastructures in Myanmar are dual in form. They are incorporative and connective, fuelled by fantasies of boundless growth and endless valorisation. Yet they are also “anti-relational,” forging not only connections but disconnections along spatial, gendered, and racialized ethnic divides. These racialized processes of dispossession and immiseration present violent limits to logistical imaginaries of connective relation.