“Zomia Zone” – A Non-State Space in the James Scott’s Viewpoint

Abstract

The James Scott’s book titled “The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia” is really a grand and valuable research work of the power and political position of the peoples recorded in history as the backward peoples who still had not reached the modern level, the history of the peoples resisting the control of the nation-state and creating a model of socio-political management different from the model of nation-state in which they lived. Scott’s discovery of Zomia zone which represented in a clear way the cracks of the centralized nation-state indicates that the formation of a residential zone of trans/cross-border mountainous people in a number of the Southeast Asian nations was not a type of savage living but it was a strategy of response in nature. This work is a warning of the power limitations of the nation-state for the policy makers, scholars, military strategists and maybe also for those who participate in building and developing the nation-states