Reimagining the Mekong: Historical Continuities, Hydraulic Power and Geopolitical Reconfigurations

Abstract

This article reconstructs the historical evolution of the Mekong River as a space of political authority, cultural articulation, and geopolitical reconfiguration from the first century CE to the contemporary Indo-Pacific framework. Rather than treating the Mekong as a passive geographical backdrop or a purely strategic resource, the study conceptualizes the river as a structuring axis through which different models of sovereignty, legitimacy, and connectivity have been historically articulated. The central argument is that the Mekong has functioned across successive historical periods as a relational continuum in which ecological mediation, spatial imagination, and political authority remain inseparable; and that understanding contemporary hydropolitical tensions requires tracing this layered trajectory rather than treating each period in isolation. From the early hydraulic civilizations of Funan, Chenla, and Angkor, where political authority was grounded in ecological mediation and cosmological order, to the epistemological reconfiguration introduced by European expansion, the Mekong has continuously functioned as more than a river. It has been a medium through which power was produced, contested, and symbolically legitimized. French colonial exploration in the nineteenth century institutionalized the river as a cartographic and administrative object, transforming relational spatiality into territorial abstraction. The twentieth century layered militarization and developmental technocracy upon this colonial framework, while the post-Cold War era has witnessed the emergence of hydropolitical asymmetries and infrastructural geopolitics, particularly in relation to Chinese dam construction and regional connectivity corridors. Drawing on a longue durée analytical framework and integrating historiographical, political-ecological, and geopolitical literatures, this study offers an original contribution by bridging premodern hydraulic sovereignty and contemporary Indo-Pacific strategic competition within a single interpretive arc: an integration that existing Mekong scholarship, often compartmentalized by period or discipline, has not yet fully achieved. By adopting a longue durée perspective, this article argues that connectivity in the Mekong basin is not a modern invention but a historically embedded condition. What distinguishes the contemporary period is not the existence of interdependence itself, but its intensification through technological mediation, environmental stress, and geopolitical competition. Reimagining the Mekong as a relational continuum enables a more historically grounded understanding of sovereignty, infrastructure, and ecological fragility in mainland Southeast Asia.