Territorial (In) Coherence: Labour and Special Economic Zones in Laos's Border Manufacturing

This article engages literature on special economic zones and territory in global development. I suggest a focus on labour's spatial class composition as constitutive of territorial coherence provides insights into how the Savan-Seno Special Economic Zone in Lao PDR operates as an economic border territory bridging Laos to the regional and global economies. The distanciated global connections which special economic zones aim to create are predicated on zones gaining internal coherence for capital accumulation. I suggest zones' internal coherence depends on zone firms reworking the local class composition of labour, itself constituted by workers' spatial practices. In the Savan-Seno zone this occurred through immobilising a mobile labour force and taking advantage of its continuing embeddedness within a subsistence rice-producing village economy. The argument aims to illustrate how zones producing for global markets act as territories of complex spatiality which span and connect multiple spaces of production and workers' social reproduction.