Illicit economies are not confined to the margins of global development. This research examines how frontier and borderland regions are connected to rapidly developing metropolitan hubs through extraction, labour, trade, infrastructure and illicit supply chains. Introducing the concept of ‘adverse incorporation’, it shows how violence, poverty and environmental degradation can be produced by the unequal integration of these regions into wider political economies. The paper also challenges the separation of licit and illicit activity, demonstrating how informal and illegal economies can intersect with formal markets and metropolitan development. It argues for policy responses that address the broader systems that enable these connections, rather than focusing solely on borderlands.

Professor Jonathan Goodhand (SOAS University of London)

Dr Patrick Meehan (University of Manchester)

Xu Peng (Manchester / SOAS CIVAD )

August 2026

Online scam compounds are often described as a cybercrime problem, but this is only partly true. Victims encounter scams online, yet the industry is built offline. It depends on territorial control, armed protection, labour recruitment, telecom access, supply chains, transport routes, financial channels and legal ambiguity. This research shows that scam compounds in the China–Myanmar borderlands are not isolated criminal hideouts but nodes in a wider corridor through which people, goods, money, data and coercion circulate. Armed groups, militias, brokers, traders and state-linked actors regulate movement, provide protection, extract rents and shape enforcement outcomes. Far from being marginal, scam centres reveal how illicit borderland economies are embedded in broader processes of accumulation, governance and uneven development.

Xu Peng (Manchester / SOAS CIVAD )

July 2026