The Antipode Book Series explores radical geography ‘antipodally’, in opposition, from various margins, limits, or borderlands.

Antipode books provide insight ‘from elsewhere’, across boundaries rarely transgressed, with internationalist ambition and located insight; they diagnose grounded critique emerging from particular contradictory social relations in order to sharpen the stakes and broaden public awareness. An Antipode book might revise scholarly debates by pushing at disciplinary boundaries, or by showing what happens to a problem as it moves or changes. It might investigate entanglements of power and struggle in particular sites, but with lessons that travel with surprising echoes elsewhere.

Antipode books will be theoretically bold and empirically rich, written in lively, accessible prose that does not sacrifice clarity at the altar of sophistication. We seek books from within and beyond the discipline of geography that deploy geographical critique in order to understand and transform our fractured world.

Zachary R. Anderson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto. He has conducted research on the cultural politics of conservation, development, and resource extraction in frontier spaces across Southeast Asia. His doctoral research investigates the emergence of the ‘green economy’ in Indonesia in the province of East Kalimantan. He has published in Journal of Peasant Studies, the Austrian Journal of South‐East Asian Studies, Global Environmental Change, and Conservation Biology.

Young Rae Choi is an assistant professor of Geography in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. Her research interrogates the complexity and interwovenness of development‐conservation relations with a focus on large‐scale coastal development in East Asia. Previously, she worked on marine policy and strategic planning of ocean science research at the Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology and led the Korean side of the Worldwide Fund for Nature Yellow Sea Ecoregion Support Project as the national conservation coordinator. Her work has been published in Ocean & Coastal Management, Dialogues in Human Geography, and Marine Pollution Bulletin.

Jason Cons is an assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He works on borders in South Asia, especially the India–Bangladesh border; on agrarian change and rural development in Bangladesh; and, most recently on climate change, development, conservation, and security along the India–Bangladesh border. His book, Sensitive Space: Anxious Territory at the India–Bangladesh Border was published by the University of Washington Press in 2016. His work has also been published in Antipode, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnography, Journal of Peasant Studies, Limn, Modern Asian Studies, Political Geography, SAMAJ, and Third World Quarterly. He is an Associate editor of the journal South Asia.

Prasenjit Duara is the Oscar Tang Chair of East Asian Studies at Duke University. In 1988, he published Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Stanford University Press) which won the Fairbank Prize of the AHA and the Levenson Prize of the AAS, USA. Among his other books are Rescuing History from the Nation (University of Chicago Press, 1995), Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Rowman 2003), and most recently, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Michael Eilenberg is an associate professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University. His research focuses on issues of state formation, sovereignty, autonomy, citizenship and agrarian expansion in frontier regions of Southeast Asia with a special focus on Indonesia and Malaysia. His book, At the Edges of States, first published by KITLV Press (2012) and later reprinted by Brill Academic Publishers (2014), deals with the dynamics of state formation and resource struggle in the Indonesian borderlands. His articles have appeared in Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Journal of Borderland Studies, Journal of Peasant Studies, Modern Asian Studies and Development and Change.

Gökçe Günel is an assistant professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona, and specializes in social studies of energy and climate change. She is the author of Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Duke University Press, 2019). Her articles have appeared in Ephemera, Public Culture, Anthropological Quarterly, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, The ARPA Journal, Avery Review, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (IJMES), Engineering Studies, and PoLAR.

Christian C. Lentz is assistant professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He specializes in Southeast Asia with particular focus on agrarian studies, development, state formation, nationalism, and nature‐society relations. His articles have appeared in Geopolitics, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Political Geography, Modern Asian Studies, and Journal of Peasant Studies. His book manuscript Contested Territory: Dien Bien Phu and the Making of Northwest Vietnam, forthcoming with Yale University Press (2019), explores hidden histories of territorial construction and political struggle during and after the battle that toppled French Indochina in 1954.

Christian Lund is a professor of Development, Resource Management, and Governance, at the Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on property, local politics and state formation; in particular socio‐legal processes of conflict over land and natural resources. He is the author of Law, Power and Politics in Niger: Land Struggles and the Rural Code (Lit Verlag/Transaction Publishers) and Local Politics and the Dynamics of Property in Africa (Cambridge University Press). He currently is working on a book manuscript, Nine‐Tenths of the Law: Enduring Dispossession in Indonesia.

Duncan McDuie‐Ra is professor of Development Studies at University of New South Wales, Sydney. His most recent books include Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, Refuge and Retail (Amsterdam University Press, 2012), Debating Race in Contemporary India (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Borderland City in New India: Frontier to Gateway (Amsterdam University Press, 2016). His articles have appeared in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Geoforum, Urban Studies, Geographical Journal, Energy Policy, Men and Masculinities, and Violence Against Women among others. He is associate editor for the journal South Asia, for the book series Asian Borderlands (Amsterdam University Press) and editor in chief of the ASAA South Asia monograph series (Routledge).

Townsend Middleton is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Demands of Recognition: State Anthropology and Ethnopolitics in Darjeeling (Stanford University Press, 2015); and author of various articles in journals such as Public Culture (2018), American Anthropologist (2013), American Ethnologist (2011), Ethnography (2014), Political Geography (2013), and Focaal (2013). In addition to his ongoing research on cinchona, he is currently leading a collaborative interdisciplinary project examining logistical and infrastructural ‘chokepoints’ around the world and writing on topics ranging from colonial history to contemporary political violence in South Asia.

Kasia Paprocki is an assistant professor of Environment in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research is focused on the political ecology of development and climate change adaptation, particularly in Bangladesh. Her work has been published in academic and popular outlets including Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Geoforum, Climate and Development, Journal of Peasant Studies, Third World Quarterly, Economic and Political Weekly, and Himal Southasian.

Nancy Lee Peluso is Henry J. Vaux Distinguished Professor of Forest Policy and professor of Society and Environment in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM) at University of California, Berkeley. Her work explores agrarian and forest politics, focusing in particular on the political ecologies of resource access, use, and control. She is the author of Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java (UC Press, 1992); and co‐editor of six books, including Violent Environments (Cornell Press, 2001, with Michael Watts), New Frontiers of Land Control (2011, Routledge, with Christian Lund) and author or co‐author of more than 70 journal articles and book chapters. She is currently working on a book examining historical entanglements of violence and territorialities in resource landscapes of West Kalimantan, Indonesia.

Igor Rubinov is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Princeton University. He has conducted research on development, migration and the environment in Central Asia. His dissertation project, conducted over 16 months, examines the impact of climate change adaptation on governance and livelihoods in Tajikistan. As state and international agencies worked to incorporate this novel paradigm, people improvised material and social entanglements to nourish life. He has published in Anthropological Quarterly.

K. Sivaramakrishnan is Dinakar Singh Professor of Anthropology, professor of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and co‐director of the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. His current research includes work on environmental jurisprudence in India and urban ecology in Asia. His published work covers environmental history and political anthropology, science and technology studies, and cultural geography. He is the author of Modern Forests (Stanford University Press, 1999). Most recently he is the co‐editor of Places of Nature in Ecologies of Urbanism (Hong Kong University Press, 2017).

Heather Anne Swanson is an associate professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University, deputy director of its Centre for Environmental Humanities, and a member of the Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene project. Her work investigates entangled human and nonhuman lives in times of anthropogenic disturbance and environmental damage. She is co‐editor of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017, University of Minnesota Press) with Anna Tsing, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt. Most recently she is the co‐editor of Domestication Gone Wild (2018, Duke University Press) with Marianne Lien and Gro Ween. She has published in Social Analysis, Science as Culture, Environmental Humanities, Geoforum, Environment and Society, and HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory.

Max D. Woodworth is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, Ohio State University. His research to date has focused on urban development in mining regions, with an emphasis on the politics of large‐scale development projects in resource boomtowns. He has published in The Journal of Asian Studies, The Professional Geographer, Geoforum, Cities, and Area.

Jerry Zee is an assistant professor of Anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz. His work explores experiments in environment and politics along the trajectory of dust storms in and beyond China. His work has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, and Scapegoat.

The editors would like to thank all the authors for their enthusiasm, active engagement with, and support of this project. We would like, especially, to thank the authors of the commentaries – Christian Lund, Nancy Lee Peluso, K. Sivaramakrishnan, and Prasenjit Duara—for their time and thoughtful and generous readings of these chapters. The majority of the contributors to this project first met in late April 2016 as part of the Frontier Assemblages workshop (convened by Cons and Eilenberg) at the Social Science Research Council’s InterAsian Connections V conference in Seoul. This workshop served as a launching point for this volume and a generative moment for many of the ideas expressed in it. We would like to thank the SSRC’s InterAsia Program – especially Seteney Shami, Holly Danzeisen, and Mona Saghri – for providing intellectual guidance and financial support, and the Seoul National University Asia Center for their hospitality in hosting us and this event. Their support made it possible to assemble such a vibrant group of scholars working on frontiers across Asia. Prasenjit Duara, Sahana Ghosh, Angela Ki‐che Leung, and K. Sivaramakrishnan provided valuable questions and commentary during the workshop. Of the original participants, Mike Dwyer, Dolly Kikon, and Jasnea Sarma have not included essays in this volume. We thank them for participating in the workshop and providing support and encouragement to the project. A longer and substantially different version of Chapter 1 was published in Antipode Volume 51, Issue 1.

We would like to thank Lloyd Farley for his work in assembling the bibliography for this book. We received supportive and constructive feedback on the introduction from Emmy Dawson, Sabrina Lilleby Duncan McDuie‐Ra, Townsend Middleton, Daniel Ng, Kenza Yousfi, and Stephen Zigmund. Erin Lentz, Vasilina Orlova, and James Slotta, provided feedback on earlier iterations of this project. We received invaluable feedback on the manuscript as a whole from two anonymous reviewers. Finally, we wish to thank Jacqueline Scott at Wiley and Vinay Gidwani and Sharad Chari of the Antipode Book Series for their support of this project and their work in bringing it to publication.