Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum Variegated borderlands governance in Dehong Dai-Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture along the China-Myanmar border Ian G. Baird a , Li Cansong b, ⁎ a Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 550 N. Park St., Madison, WI 53706, USA b School of Tourism and Geography, Yunnan Normal University, China ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Borders Borderlands Myanmar China Yunnan ABSTRACT International borders and associated borderlands—especially as viewed at the national and international scales, and via regional and global-scale maps—are generally thought of as being primarily governed by national governments. In reality, however, national borders and associated borderlands are complex and varied spaces, ones that are governed not only through national laws and regulations, but also an array of policies and localized practices, both formal and informal, conceived and implemented by government agencies and other non-gov- ernment entities operating at various scales. This is especially the case for the borderlands we are focusing on. In this article we conceptually apply Agnew’s idea of the ‘territorial trap’, Ong’s notion of ‘graduated sovereignty’, Laine’s conceptualization of the ‘multiscalar production of borders’, Amilhat Szary and Giraut’s concept of ‘borderity’, and Brambilla’s understanding of ‘borderscapes’ to consider the multiscalar and multi-sited nature of borderlands governance along the China-Myanmar border in Dehong Dai-Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan Province, China. Focusing on the China side of the border, we emphasize how different scales of gov- ernment agencies and non-government entities variously interact. Ultimately, these different actors create multiscalar borderscapes dependent on various situational factors, ones which are more complex than is typi- cally acknowledged by national governments. 1. Introduction The border between China and Myanmar (Burma) is typically as- sociated in the international media and in academic writings with se- curity, lawlessness and danger, including insurgent activities (AFP News Agency, 2015; Hua, 2015; RFA, 2015), illegal wildlife and timber trade (Nijman and Shepard, 2014, 2015; Phillips, 2015; Mizzima, 2016), drug trafficking (Su, 2015, 2016), vice and prostitution (Ripper and Saxer, 2016; Zhang et al., 2011), and dangerous diseases, especially malaria (Hu et al., 2016; Zhou et al., 2014). There has, however, also been some more positive reporting related to transboundary business expansion along the border and the use of the border as an energy conduit (Lin, 2016; Ptak and Hommel, 2016), even if others are ap- propriately critical of these types of interventions (Kramer and Woods, 2012). While these are certainly important issues, they sometimes contradict another contrasting image of China as authoritarian, rigid, and centralized (Nathan, 2003; Mertha, 2005). Indeed, Rippa and Saxer (2016) have recently argued that the circumstances along the China- Myanmar border, including the development of large amounts of in- frastructure and intensive resource exploitation, actually represent a ‘successful’ example of border development in the Chinese state vision. Su (2012) has also effectively demonstrated—again in relation to the China-Myanmar border—how the Chinese state has rescaled border- lands governance to facilitate transnational regional development in- itiatives, including the Greater Mekong Subregion programme and the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar forum. We emphasize the flexible and decentralized nature of the Chinese state when it comes to remote borders, through focusing on the policies and everyday multiscalar practices associated with borderlands gov- ernance that are evident on the Chinese side of the China-Myanmar border, in Dehong Dai-Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture (DAP) in Yunnan Province, southwestern China. The objective of this article is to better understand the different scales of borderlands governance that are evident in DAP. To do this, we adopt a conceptual framework founded on five important scholarly works, ones that have not previously been used in combination. The first, which is well-known in borderland studies and geography more generally, is John Agnew’s ‘territorial trap’ (Agnew, 1994, 2015). The second is Aihwa Ong’s (2000) notion of ‘graduated sovereignty’, which is widely known within human geography and Southeast Asian studies. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.07.026 Received 10 February 2017; Received in revised form 24 July 2017; Accepted 31 July 2017 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: ibaird@wisc.edu (I.G. Baird), cansongli@126.com (L. Cansong). Geoforum 85 (2017) 214–224 0016-7185/ © 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd. MARK