Triangulating the borderless world: geographies of power in the Indonesia–Malaysia–Singapore Growth Triangle

Abstract

This paper argues that the Indonesia–Malaysia–Singapore Growth Triangle makes manifest the complex geographies of power that subvert efforts to read cross‐border regionalization as a straightforward geographical corollary of ‘globalization’. As such, the region needs to be examined not simply as a complementary transborder assemblage of land, labour and capital, but rather as a palimpsest in which the imagined geographies of cross‐border development and the economic geographies of their uneven spatial fixing on the ground are mediated by complex cultural and political geographies. We seek to unpack these by triangulating how the geographies of capital (including its uneven development and its links to the geo‐economics of intra‐regional competition), land (including post‐colonial relations across the region, the geopolitics of land reclamation and the enclaved landscapes of tourism) and labour (including the divergent itineraries of migrant workers) overlay and complicate one another in the region. By charting these complex triangulations of space and place, we seek to problematize narratives of the Growth Triangle as an exemplary embodiment of the ‘borderless world’.