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Record W4408027808 · doi:10.1080/08865655.2025.2469854

Dark Zomia: Myanmar Frontier and the Chinese Enclosure

2025· article· en· W4408027808 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Pinkaew Laungaramsri

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Borderlands Studies · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicAsian Geopolitics and Ethnography
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersNational Research Council of Thailand
KeywordsFrontierEnclosureChinaEconomicsDevelopment economicsPolitical scienceComputer scienceTelecommunications

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This paper discusses the proliferation of illicit enterprises operated by Chinese syndicates along the Myanmar-Thai border. Far from being a closed enclave, the transnational cyber-scam industry has grown invincibly by weaving together various networks both within and across the border. Rethinking Scott's notion of “shatter zone” in the frontier of Southeast Asia, this paper argues that Myanmar's “indigenous Zomia” has increasingly been transformed into what I call “Dark Zomia” – a non-state space inhabited by runaway criminals who evade China's state-making project. As a result, the border region has become a contested terrain where the “friction of sovereignty” among various state and non-state entities has allowed illicit industries to thrive.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.039
Threshold uncertainty score0.077

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0050.003
Scholarly communication0.0020.001
Open science0.0000.002
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.009
GPT teacher head0.324
Teacher spread0.315 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations5
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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