Aditya Kiran Kakati presented a paper during a panel on “History and Its Impacts” during the interdisciplinary Myanmar conference “Myanmar’s International Role: More Than a Buffer State”. The conference took place on 21-23 June 2024 at Palacký University, in Czech Republic, and was hosted by the EUVIP (an EU-funded project entitled the EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region, EUVIP) and the MSC@ UP (Myanmar Studies Center at the Palacký University), in collaboration with the Myanmar-Institut e. V. (Berlin)
This paper examined how Allied cooperation and competition during World War II initially globalized and later isolated the China-Burma-India border region. American, British, and Chinese policies briefly integrated the region, erasing all borders, only to later treat northwestern Burma’s peripheries as buffer zones, driven by diplomatic and cartographic anxieties in the Eastern Himalayas.
Focusing on a cross-border road project, the paper illustrates how this significant trans-regional infrastructure project temporarily transformed the highland Asia region into a cross-border transport corridor. Despite its short lifespan, road, aerial and rail transport, integrated the region during the war.
Wartime pressures brought state presence into areas otherwise maintained as ambiguous buffers. The paper explores why such colossal trans-Asian connectivity fell into obscurity and ruin post-war. Diplomatic anxieties, contingencies, and subversion threats shaped state policies, leading to fragmentation. Following independence, India and Burma reoriented connectivity concerns towards nation-state priorities, and borders re-emerged more strongly. The paper highlighted how the World War erased or made international borders irrelevant momentarily. However, this did not last long as diplomatic priorities shifted with the end of the war and decolonization.