Papers

• Genealogies of Enclave Capital: Scam Centers as Para-Sovereign Operational Zones in Myanmar’s Borderlands Masao Imamura Yamagata University

  Scam centers in Myanmar are best understood as para-sovereign operational zones: territorially bounded enclaves organized for the extraction, movement, and transfer of money at very large scale, governed through privatized coercion and negotiated impunity. Situating these formations within a longer regional genealogy, this paper reads scam centers as the latest instantiation of a recurring pattern in which illicitness, territorial negotiation, and capital accumulation are co-produced. The central question is why these formations emerged at exceptional scale in Myanmar’s borderlands. Three genealogies account for this. The first is a genealogy of territorial autonomy: Myanmar’s borderlands have long been structured by negotiated semi-sovereignty, protected commerce, and armed intermediaries—a layered history that made them receptive terrain for new enclave formations. The second is a genealogy of organizational mobility: successive crackdowns across the region pushed highly mobile networks carrying expertise in labor recruitment, fraud operations, payment routing, and money laundering from one jurisdiction to another, until they found in Myanmar’s frontier spaces a terrain they could fully exploit. The third is a genealogy of casino-SEZ urbanism: these mobile operators did not invent enclave urbanism from scratch, but extended a regional repertoire—visible in formations such as the Golden Triangle SEZ in Laos—that combined casino development, special economic zones, and selective regulation into a replicable infrastructure of illicit accumulation. Together, these genealogies produced formations that combine territorial fixity with operational mobility. Materially embedded yet functionally dispersed across jurisdictions, para-sovereign operational zones operate as nodal points linking frontier spaces to transnational financial networks—concentrating labor and infrastructure in place while circulating value, authority, and organizational capacity across borders. It is precisely this combination that makes them both so effective as instruments of illicit financial governance and so resistant to conventional analytical and enforcement frameworks.

• Rescue, Repatriation, and Prosecution: The Geography of Anti-Scam Governance in Southeast Asia Xu Peng University of Manchester

  Industrial-scale scam compounds in Southeast Asia are often examined as illicit economies, trafficking sites, or infrastructures of forced labour. This paper shifts attention to the enforcement and humanitarian regimes through which these compounds are investigated, disrupted, and made governable. Focusing on the Greater Mekong region, it examines how China, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos have responded to online scam industries through police cooperation, border control, rescue operations, repatriation, and prosecution. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2026, the paper draws on interviews and exchanges with law-enforcement and humanitarian actors, including data from the Lancang-Mekong Integrated Law Enforcement and Security Cooperation Center, Thai police, Cambodian police, Lao police, and Myanmar-related sources. It also uses Chinese criminal judgments, official notices, media reports, and open-source enforcement data. The paper argues that anti-scam governance is not a coherent regional security regime, but a fragmented assemblage of criminal justice, consular protection, border policing, and humanitarian intervention. Within this assemblage, people moving through scam economies are classified unevenly as victims, illegal migrants, coerced workers, criminal suspects, witnesses, or deportees. These unstable classifications shape who is rescued, prosecuted, repatriated, or left outside formal protection.

• Making Scam Centers Possible: How Armed Intermediaries Shape Local Political-Economic Orders in Myanmar’s Borderlands Hideyuki Okano Kindai University

  Tracing back the scam centers’ various genealogies, this presentation focuses on the local political and economic orders of Myanmar’s borderlands. The scam centers can be maintained in Myanmar’s borderlands because these spaces feature negotiated semi-sovereignty, protected commerce, and armed intermediaries. This line of analysis shows that local political and economic orders embedded in society enabled the emergence of scam centers in this region. This presentation first describes the nature of these local political and economic orders, and then analyzes how they emerged through local power relations, economic arrangements, and the role of armed intermediaries in the region. The data used in this presentation were collected on fieldwork in the Thai–Myanmar borderlands conducted in early 2025, during which large-scale scam centers such as Shwe Kokko and KK Park attracted worldwide media attention.
  Media reported that many foreign nationals had been working as scam callers, and thousands were subsequently transferred across the border into Thailand. Through interviews with local residents, aid workers, traders, and individuals familiar with the political economy of the borderlands, the presenter examined the local political and economic arrangements in the region. Governance in this region cannot be reduced to clear-cut territorial control. Rather, it should be understood as a set of practices through which armed actors exert influence over the local political economy by controlling strategic routes, engaging in border trade, managing illegal and semi-legal economies, maintaining security, regulating violence, and negotiating with administrative and military authorities. In particular, the Karen Border Guard Force (BGF), which is said to have introduced scam center operations to the area, should not be understood as an armed group exercising territorial control. Rather, it should be regarded as an actor that mediates and manages the local political economy.

Abstract

Keywords

• Myanmar borderlands
• Southeast Asia
• anti-scam governance
• armed intermediaries
• enclave capital
• para-sovereign operational zones
• political-economic orders
• scam centers