Bureaucratic migrants and the potential of prosperity in upland Laos

[Extract] A key theme informing understandings of power across Southeast Asia is the contract between lowland centers and upland frontiers. The lowlands are sites of productive irrigated agricultur, religious and cultural refinement and political integration and welath, wheras the uplands signify the opposite. While associated with 'tributary frameworks of pre-modern states' (Jonsson 2000: 76), many moderns states and non-state actors also utilize and perpetuate such upland-lowland distinctions. In recent years, a considerable body of research has questioned the presumed divide between centres and peripheries across Southeast Asia. For instance, Scott's (2009: 24-7) 'anarchist history' of the region sees uplands as an ecological 'shatter zone' where a 'fugitive population' of swidden agriculturalists flee to evade unwanted control of lowland states