ASEAS 16(2) | 311

Book Review: Tappe, O., & Rowedder, S. (Eds.). (2022). Extract-
ing Development: Contested Resource Frontiers in Mainland 
Southeast Asia. 

ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. ISBN: 9789815011197. 284 pages.

Michael Kleinod-Freudenberga*

aUniversity of Cologne, Germany

*corresponding author: mkleinod@uni-koeln.de

Received: 22 September 2023 / Accepted: 9 November 2023 / Published: 23 December 2023

► Kleinod-Freudenberg, M. (2023). Book Review: Tappe, O., & Rowedder, S. (Eds.). (2022). Extracting 
development: Contested resource frontiers in mainland Southeast Asia. Advances in Southeast Asian 
Studies, 16(2), 311-314. 

Socio-economic development in the countries of mainland Southeast Asia, 
like in the region as a whole, is very much shaped by state-sponsored resource 
extraction. The volume Extracting Development: Contested Resource Frontiers in 
Mainland Southeast Asia, edited by Oliver Tappe and Simon Rowedder and pub-
lished by renowned ISEAS Publishing, addresses this topic from the perspective 
of the concept of the frontier. Such a perspective is suggested not least by the 
academic discourse itself, which – especially in its political-ecological orienta-
tion – operates with this and related concepts (e.g., enclosure, land grabbing, 
or ‘primitive accumulation’) to analyze and compare socio-economic and eco-
logical conditions in Southeast Asia and beyond (e.g., Baird, 2011; Barney, 2009; 
Hall, 2013).

The fact that the Lao People’s Democratic Republic figures prominently in the 
volume is not only because the editors are proven Lao Studies experts. Rather, 
as Tappe and Rowedder point out in the introduction, Laos can be considered 
a prime example of the frontier logic that is primarily defined by the appro-
priation of resources as cheap input for commodity production (Moore, 2015). 
This becomes evident in the semi-official guideline of the Laotian government: 
‘to turn land into capital’ (han thi din pen theun) (Dwyer, 2007; Kenney-Lazar, 
2021).1 Central to this policy is a logic of appropriating land for the purpose of 
the ‘cheap’ extraction of cash crops, mineral resources, or hydropower. This is 
accompanied by a fundamental change in social structures (increasing inequal-
ity) and ecological conditions (degradation).

1 Hence, a recent call for political ecology to focus on issues of capitalist value was brought forward 
by, among others, Lao Studies scholar Miles Kenney-Lazar (Kay & Kenney-Lazar, 2017). The authors 
in turn draw on Robertson and Wainwright (2013). 

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312 | ASEAS 16(2)

Book Review: Tappe, O., & Rowedder, S. (Eds.). (2022). Extracting Development.

While the concept of the frontier builds a bridge to questions of capitalist val-
orization, and thus to Marxian theory of value (see below), the editors emphasize 
in the introduction the heuristic value of the concept. Consequently, concepts of 
frontierization (the social co-production of frontiers) (Acciaioli & Sabharwal, 2016; 
Haug et al., 2020), resourcification (those processes that define something as valu-
able resource in the first place) (Hultman et al., 2021), and frontier assemblages (the 
dynamic overlapping of local frontier configurations) (Cons & Eilenberg, 2019), as 
well as the interplay of institutional and cultural factors, loom large in the volume’s 
investigations, thus contributing to conceptual differentiation. Thankfully (since not 
necessarily common in comparable publications), these concepts run as a red thread 
throughout the ten case studies, paired with the – conceptually as well as empirically 
fundamental – question of how local actors themselves actively contribute to the 
production and reproduction of such spaces of rapid socio-ecological change. With 
this comparatively close interplay between empirical work and theory, this volume 
makes an important contribution.

The individual chapters are consistently rich in empirical detail and systemati-
cally illuminate the problem of the resource frontier in mainland Southeast Asia. 
Among the most notable chapters from the reviewer’s point of view is the ‘hydro-
social’ analysis by Surimas and Middleton of the Mekong River in Northern Thailand, 
illuminating the ontological dimensions of the frontier: Practices, narratives, and 
knowledges of various actors are seen as forces shaping the Mekong as a frontier. 
The perspectives of both riverside communities and civil society, as well as the inter-
governmental Mekong River Commission and Lancang-Mekong Cooperation, are 
related: While water is recognized as both a resource and a cultural value among 
the former, the latter conceive of water in terms of ecological modernization, as a 
purely economic resource to be used efficiently. Also, Rowedder’s contribution on 
fruit cultivation and trade is instructive, as the author vividly demonstrates how the 
frontier logic is enacted and reproduced in everyday practice, for example, when Lao 
middlemen mediate between Thai farmers and Chinese buyers based on national 
stereotypes.

Furthermore, Cole’s concise political-ecological analysis of maize cultivation in 
Northeastern Laos tackles the complex interplay of political objectives (anti-opium 
policy, sedentarization, etc.), structural changes in agricultural production (high 
maize demand in Vietnam), and various actors in Laos and Vietnam in the rapid con-
version to maize in the Lao-Vietnamese border area. Vietnamese traders emerge as 
important frontier-building actors here, as they bridge the ‘last miles’ in the network 
and open additional production sites. Crucial also is Tappe’s illumination of a rarely 
treated and under-researched phenomenon: artisanal tin mining conducted within 
the framework of local subsistence strategies, both in ethnographic detail as well as 
historical depth, going back to the beginnings of the colonial era. One conclusion 
here is that local actors reproduce the frontier by moving back and forth between 
the level of private household and industrial labor along a continuum of informality. 

But also the remaining chapters make for valuable and informative reads thanks 
to their empirical grounding. Fujita provides in-depth insights into the transforma-
tion of livelihoods and the ecosystem among “middle-income peasants” (see also 
Dayley & Sattayanurak, 2016) in the wake of the expansion of commercial rubber 



ASEAS 16(2) | 313

Michael Kleinod-Freudenberg

cultivation in Thailand’s Northeast. Focusing on Laos’ national master plan for land 
allocation, Suhardiman and Kramp tackle “the interplay between the state’s territo-
rialization approach […] and the reshaping of frontier dynamics which (un)make the 
Lao uplands” (p. 130). Ponce further considers the ambivalent, sociologically revealing 
relation between ‘being modern’ and ‘being comfortable’ in resettlement villages of 
Northwestern Laos in the context of a Chinese hydropower project. Cheang provides 
a succinct account of the nature and effects of Chinese investment in Cambodia, 
taking the port city of Sihanoukville as an insightful case study. Htun then presents 
a similar account of Chinese investment in Myanmar, including vignettes on var-
ious pertinent projects. Finally, Tappe’s tin extraction theme is taken up again by 
Mierzejewski’s discussion of China-Myanmar frontier governance as seen from a 
proclaimed ‘bridgehead’ of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the Province of Yunnan.

While the contributions focus on a wide variety of frontiers (fruit, rubber, corn, 
hydropower, tin, land, etc.) at different levels, overarching themes run throughout 
the volume, such as the regional dominance of Chinese political economy, cross-
border processes of trade and governance, and the complexity of concrete empirical 
configurations and negotiations. In terms of a critical assessment, only two aspects 
should be briefly pointed out here that concern not only this volume but empirical 
work on frontiers in general. Firstly, while various resources are subject to in-depth 
investigations, aspects such as nature conservation or tourism – while so central 
to socio-ecological, cultural, and political-economic transformation – are absent, 
although quite similar socio-economic mechanisms are at work (e.g., ‘expropriation’ 
or tourism’s own distinct frontier logic). The second weak spot is directly related 
to one of the volume’s central strengths, which is its conceptual added value: The 
centrality of the frontier concept notwithstanding, its peculiar theoretical thrust – 
especially its relation to capitalist value in general (and thus necessarily to the global 
level) – remains underdeveloped, as the question of how the respective resources 
are turned into cheap inputs to maintain capital accumulation is hardly explicitly 
addressed. While the case studies do show the active involvement of local actors in 
frontier economies, they remain silent about how exactly these actions contribute to 
the cheapening of resource extraction – that is, in which sense these contexts actually 
represent frontiers, which ultimately would require the authors to tease out their 
position in the overall, global M-C-M’ movement of capital (Marx, 1976).2 This is an 
ambitious task no doubt, but one set by the thrust of the frontier concept itself. One 
could thus ask more concretely: How do local actors actively participate in the cheap-
ening of (access to) natural resources and human labor? Or more generally: How do 
certain institutions, practices, and ideas relate to global circuits of capital, that is, 
valorization? In this way, the explanatory potential of the frontier concept would 
become even more fruitful for empirical analysis, and vice versa. Further work thus 
remains to be done here. Overall, the present volume represents an important con-
tribution and signpost in this regard, which is of interest to Southeast Asian Studies 
scholars as well as students of political ecology from various disciplines and with 
diverse regional foci.

2 For examples of how this can be done, see the historical studies of the initiator of the ‘world-ecology’ 
conversation, Jason W. Moore (e.g., Moore 2010a, 2010b, 2012). 



314 | ASEAS 16(2)

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

REFERENCES

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America since 1800 (pp. 47-62). Routledge. 

Baird, I. G. (2011). Turning land into capital, turning people into labor: Primitive accumulation and the 
arrival of large-scale economic land concessions in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. New Propos-
als: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry, 5(1), 10-26. 

Barney, K. (2009). Laos and the making of a ‘relational’ resource frontier. Geographical Journal, 175(2), 146-159. 

Cons, J., & Eilenberg, M. (2019). Frontier assemblages: The emergent politics of resource frontiers in Asia. John 
Wiley & Sons. 

Dayley, R., & Sattayanurak, A. (2016). Thailand’s last peasant. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 47(1), 42-65. 

Dwyer, M. (2007). Turning land into capital: A Review of recent research on land concessions for investment 
in the Lao PDR. Part, 1. A Report commissioned by the Working Group on Land Issues. CIDSE-Laos. 
https://data.laos.opendevelopmentmekong.net/dataset/turning-land-into-capital-a-review-of-recent-
research-on-land-concessions-for-investment-in-lao-pdr

Hall, D. (2013). Primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession and the global land grab. Third 
World Quarterly, 34(9), 1582-1604. 

Haug, M., Grossmann, K., & Kaartinen, T. (2020). Introduction: Frontier temporalities: Exploring pro-
cesses of frontierisation, defrontierisation and refrontierisation in Indonesia and Africa. Paideuma: 
Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde, 66, 171-182. 

Hultman, J., Corvellec, H., Jerneck, A., Arvidsson, S., Ekroos, J., Gustafsson, C., Nilsson, F. L., & Wahlberg, 
N. (2021). A resourcification manifesto: Understanding the social process of resources becoming 
resources. Research Policy, 50(9), 104297. 

Kay, K., & Kenney-Lazar, M. (2017). Value in capitalist natures: An emerging framework. Dialogues in 
Human Geography, 7(3), 295-309. 

Kenney-Lazar, M. (2021). Turning land into capital? The expansion and extraction of value in Laos. 
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 55(6), 1565-1580. 

Marx, K. (1976). Capital: A critique of political economy (vol. 1). Penguin Books.

Moore, J. W. (2010a). ‘Amsterdam is standing on Norway’. Part, 1: The alchemy of capital, empire and 
nature in the diaspora of silver, 1545–1648. Journal of Agrarian Change, 10(1), 33-68. 

Moore, J. W. (2010b). ‘Amsterdam is standing on Norway’. Part, 2: The global North Atlantic in the 
ecological revolution of the long seventeenth century. Journal of Agrarian Change, 10(2), 188-227. 

Moore, J. W. (2012). Dutch capitalism and Europe’s great frontier: The Baltic in the ecological revolution of 
the Long Seventeenth Century. In R. Lee (Ed.), The longue duree and world-systems analysis (pp. 65-96). 
State University of New York Press.

Moore, J. (2015). Capitalism in the web of life: Ecology and the accumulation of capital. Verso Books. 

Robertson, M. M., & Wainwright, J. D. (2013). The value of nature to the state. Annals of the Association of 
American Geographers, 103(4), 890-905. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Kleinod-Freudenberg is academic coordinator at University of Cologne’s Global South 
Studies Center. His work focuses on the political ecology of Mainland Southeast Asia, 
particularly ecotourism and animism in Laos, as well as on socio-ecological theory and trans-
formation studies.

► Contact: mkleinod@uni-koeln.de

mailto:mkleinod%40uni-koeln.de?subject=