Immaterial Infrastructures and Conflict in the Salween River Basin

This paper historicises Burmese and Thai efforts to cooperate around hydraulic infrastructure construction in the conflictual Salween landscape. Transboundary water governance literature focuses on the material or physical changes in river flows or in upstream and downstream governance dynamics that are caused by infrastructure. This study enhances understandings of water conflict and cooperation by tracing how immaterial infrastructure can increase conflict dynamics at potential Salween project sites even before any concrete has been poured. Hydraulic infrastructure is used in its immaterial forms to restructure the landscape and international relations. The Burmese military or 'Sit Tat' uses such projects as an 'illiberal signal' to convey future political intentions to international partners. The immaterial infrastructures hold together securitised elite alliances that obtain legitimacy and foreign reserves for the Sit Tat in exchange for future resource extraction profits. Mirumachi’s TWINS model (Transboundary Water Interaction NexuS) is used to highlight moments of infrastructure intentions that simultaneously increase violence and conflict without changes to the river’s hydrology. This paper shows how international cooperation around megaprojects keeps Salween communities in cycles of violence and dispossession for decades, even at project sites where infrastructure has yet to be constructed.