“When ASEAN Comes”: In search of a People-Centred ASEAN Economic Community in Greater Mekong Borderscapes

Ethnographic snapshots from borderscapes in the Greater Mekong Subregion suggest that the information campaign to promote ASEAN Economic Community, with its promise of open borders from the end of 2015 onward, had reached the borderlanders. But the region’s borders, though transgressed daily, remained firmly in place. These snapshots raise questions concerning whether anything was in fact opening up; if so, what was opening up; and for whom it was opening up. Limited agreements, whose implementation has lagged, promise to facilitate tourism, large-scale trade and the cross-border employment of skilled personnel, but national governments continue to manage the heavy flows of low-skilled migrants tightly.