In this talk, Daniel B. Ahlquist, Assistant Professor in Michigan State University’s James Madison College of Public Affairs, examines the Thai state’s upward expansion into the northern uplands over roughly the past half-century through the lens of settler colonial theory (Wolfe 2006; Veracini 2011; Whyte 2017, 2018).

Focusing primarily on state conservation and development interventions, he argues that this upward expansion has been – and continues to be – a settler colonial project. He draws on extended ethnographic fieldwork in and beyond two Akha communities in Chiang Rai Province to show how state interventions rupture and replace Indigenous ecologies with settler ecologies; facilitate (ethnic) Thai settlement while continuing to deny Uplanders’ land claims; disadvantageously integrate Uplanders into the market economy; and create generational rifts between elderly Uplanders and the youth on whom they depend to both care for them and carry on their cultural traditions.

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