New blog exploring why online scam compounds may be flourishing in Myanmar’s borderlands

From the SOAS CIVAD team undertaking SOC ACE-funded research, The centrality of the margins: Borderlands, illicit economies and uneven development, comes their first research output, a blog that starts to explore the concentration and resilience of scam compounds in remote, war-affected regions of Myanmar.

The blog unpacks the research team’s working hypothesis that it’s the ways in which digital criminality, armed governance, and global capitalism come together in Myanmar’s border zones that nurture the emergence of and sustain their operations.

The research project, likely to publish final findings in summer 2026, will be looking into rare earth mining and drug economies, as well as online scam compounds, to explore how conflict-affected borderlands are connected to development processes and wealth accumulation in metropolitan centres.

Read the blog here and keep an eye out for new research outputs, events and news on the project’s SOC ACE website page linked above.