ABSTRACT
The porosity of borders in Southeast Asia, both in physical and in virtual terms, has led to a complex articulation between political economies and cultural ecologies. The degree of porosity enables and/or constrains commodity and cultural flows. This leads to significantly hybridized cultural, political and social systems that bear the imprints not only of European and North American colonization, but also of regional influences, both from immediate neighbours and from the larger region covering Southeast Asia and China. Some of these forces are borne by formal processes immanent in political and economic interactions in the form of trade agreements, treaties, tourism and travel, regional development initiatives such as power and energy grids and the formal mechanisms associated with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in all its Tracks. Others are carried by the more informal and/or invisible mechanisms associated with the migration of peoples and commodities across borders, which are outside the legitimate state-sanctioned processes.
