Kevin M. Woods

Graduate Student

Research Interests

political ecology of war; ceasefire capitalism; Burma-China borderlands, production and regulation of narco-political territories

Research Description

My research is situated on the Burma-China border where I initially investigated cross-border timber trade in the mid-2000s. My 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. I am particularly interested in how this most recent Chinese cross-border exchange with northern Burma offers novel mechanisms for military-state territorialization through resource extraction concessions, counter to the hyped fear of Chinese land grabbing. These dramatic biophysical landscape changes have profound socio-economic and political implications.