Kevin M. Woods was the inaugural speaker in the Critical Asian Political Ecologies Seminars series. In “Race and Territorial Politics in Making Agro-capitalism in Asia’s “final frontier” in Burma,” Woods discussed how the making of agro-capitalism in Burma during this current neoliberal reform period is borne through violent regional histories defined by contested and racialized territorial politics.
Kevin’s research is situated on the Burma-China border where he initially investigated cross-border timber trade in the mid-2000s. His current dissertation project follows emerging post-war land governance changes in northern Burma’s uplands with the arrival of Chinese agribusiness subsidized by China’s opium substitution program.