Caring for the river-border: Struggles and opportunities along the Salween River-border

Geographers have shown how borders rely on the enactment of state power and violence to reinforce territorial integrity and sovereign authority, or even perpetuate the destruction of nature. Moving away from an emphasis on violence, in this paper, I take an approach to borders and bordering that emphasises the opportunities of the border when it is also a river to understand borders as a resource and site of engagement with the state by a range of actors, including variants of care. To illustrate this, I draw on longstanding research along the Salween River, the 120 km stretch where the river forms the Thai–Myanmar (Burma) border, to reveal the ways in which borders as rivers can provide new insights into socio-natural bordering processes. In particular, I illustrate a range of ways local residents are caring for a river-border, and how even an ‘exploding’ or ‘hungry’ river-border can be a fragile space for care and for non-state actors to enact the border ‘differently’ in everyday life.