In this talk, Drs Eric Jones and Micah Morton discuss the work of certain ethnic Akha elite to promote a pan-Akha identity among their roughly 730,000 ethnic kin residing throughout the Upper Mekong Region. The region’s ongoing transformation from battlefields to markets is being accompanied by the growth of more formal transborder ties among a number of non-dominant ethnic groups, such as the Akha, Dai-Lue, Lahu, and Hmong. Since the late 2000s, a network of self-declared “Neo-Traditionalist” Akha elite based in the Thai-Myanmar borderlands has been recrafting the religio-political borders of belonging in a larger “Akha World” in the making that encompasses multiple local, national, and regional borders.
