Dams, Diversions, and Development: Slow Resistance and Authoritarian Rule in the Salween River Basin

We engage geography's longstanding debate on what “counts” as resistance by introducing slow to account for temporal-political strategies against unjust developments, particularly under authoritarian conditions. draw over a decade of fieldwork in the Salween River Basin where dams and diversions have been proposed since 1979, including most recent iteration, Yuam water diversion project Northwest Thailand. find that impacted communities civil society encompasses slow, strategic, considered actions time generations. Such is necessarily protracted contest developments (re)proposed decades. By foregrounding strategic use temporality, we highlight often overlooked diverse range actors, showing how movements are incremental interconnected time, even when “under radar”. These key contesting (re)shaping conditions development Basin.