New Experiential Learning Trip to Southeast Asia Explored Conflict Transformation through the Mekong River

That was the challenge that Professors Jessica Teets and Wei Lang faced as they started planning their most recent immersive travel course. At the time, travel to China was still limited under COVID regulations, so the two came up with a different plan: looking at China’s powerful influence just outside its borders.

The resulting course, “Water Conflict and Development in Southeast Asia,” took students for a week each to Vietnam and Thailand this past January. Six Middlebury undergraduates joined 10 graduate students from the Institute for the intensive research course, which was sponsored by Middlebury’s program in conflict transformation.

The Mekong River, which starts in the Tibetan Plateau and weaves its way through six different countries, provided an ideal framework to explore the complex political, economic, and environmental challenges facing the region.

“This region, and in particular these two countries we’ve chosen, provides a laboratory for students to study a number of issues, depending on their research interests,” said Liang, who teaches in the international trade master’s program at the Middlebury Institute. “There are so many interdisciplinary fields students can focus on—international relations, environmental protection, U.S.–China competition in development of financing projects.”

The class observed that the Mekong has been subject to a lot of damming, especially upstream in China. At the same time, the downstream countries are looking to hydropower to achieve their clean energy goals.

It posed a fascinating research question, said Teets, a professor of political science at Middlebury College. 

“We wanted to try to understand: China is an investor in these downstream energy projects, but also they are damming the river upstream, which then reduces the flow of water downstream. So we wanted to try to understand the complicated politics around this source of renewable energy.”

As the students interviewed representatives from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), they found that, despite the nations’ desires to invest in hydropower, for most it was not a feasible option. Additionally, researchers emphasized that hydropower was not a particularly clean source of energy and that solar farms built atop the existing hydro projects would be a much cleaner way to generate the needed power.

“That’s the importance of doing this kind of field work—you can uncover those sorts of things that we weren’t finding in the reading,” said Teets. “What we really wanted students to do was dig beneath the surface and try to figure out some things that people aren’t talking about, or some really complex issues that maybe other people don’t understand well, and we can shed some light on it.”

A grant from the Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation covered the full cost of travel for the undergraduates and all but airfare for the graduate students.

“It was a really generous grant,” noted Teets, “which meant that we could find students who were interested in this type of experience without worrying about whether they’d be able to afford it.”

Watch an interview with Professors Wei Liang and Jessica Teets below.