In the 1990s, an elite-level struggle over political power in Burma remapped the politics of belonging and language in the country for the first time in over a century. National borders did not change, but an internal divider that marked off the unquestioned political center from its attendant margins suddenly became permeable and contentious. First established as a colonial administrative simplification in the late nineteenth century, this boundary between the central areas and what became known as the “Frontier” or “Excluded” areas demarcated where politics happened, who could be what kind of citizen or subject, and which language would animate struggles for power throughout the twentieth century. After political independence in 1948, the colonial-established distinction between center and margins persisted until just after the 1988 pro-democracy uprising, which sprang up mostly in the central region. The uprising toppled the weak Burma Socialist Program Party regime, but the struggle for control over the successor state took several years to play out. Along the way, the seemingly solid barrier between the center and frontier became porous, destabilizing the spatial logic that had characterized and pacified political conflict in the modern era. After 1988, ethnic minority populations long held in ambivalent categories of lesser citizenship and territory that rarely crossed the central state's radar screen became potentially formidable threats to those in power in the center.