"...I would like to begin this concluding chapter with a statement from an elderly Karen woman: “We have hope as long as we have the Salween River.” This statement is emblematic – it is not only a pithy reflection of an elderly woman whose life has been interwoven with the struggle, but it is also an insight into the intimacy that local people share with the Salween River. The Salween is no longer merely a source of the local people’s livelihoods, but it has become more than that; it represents a hope, a struggle, and a challenge. From this, I am concerned with border people’s negotiation processes, those that take place beyond the Salween borderlands and allow a broader possibility for them to invent a strategy which functions as a connection between diverse groups of people, from many places and on different scales – to enhance their network and strengthen their struggle for a common goal. The issues and questions posed by the border people’s everyday survival struggles are the central points of this study. The Salween River has been targeted by capitalist markets and states as a resource frontier – to generate capitalist expansion along the Thai-Burmese border in a form of frontier capitalization. Frontier capitalization at the Salween borderlands, in terms of social construction of ‘nature’, can be characterized as the commodification of the Salween resources, namely forests and rivers, that have been transformed into commodities for trade in particular markets. It has taken place in that the landscape of Salween borderlands have been read by the capitalist market and the states as empty lands where they can turn nature into a commodity, which in turn facilitates and generates economic growth and progress. This commodification takes place in different forms, and has been produced by different forces at various points in history...."