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Border Governance: Reframing political transition in Myanmar
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2022
Abstract
Borderlands and bordering processes are central to politics and the governance of people, goods, and territories, not only as markers of territorial-administrative control but also as practices that shape the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, mobility/immobility, and relations of power and authority. This special issue focuses on Myanmar, where political governance is deeply entangled with ethnicity, territory, borders, and bordering processes. We attempt to untangle these relationships by adopting an approach that combines consideration of how borderlands are governed with recognition of the ways in which borders, borderlands, and border populations shape governance and administration. We define this approach as ‘border governance’, by which we mean governance in, of, and through borderlands. In this introduction, we explore the meaning and significance of border governance as it relates to Myanmar, its ethnic border states, and their relations to other nations bordering the country. In doing so, we engage with and develop scholarly debates in three primary areas: (i) Borders, territoriality, and bordering processes; (ii) Plural governance and everyday bordering; (iii) Peacebuilding and the borders of transition. The articles in this special issue were written prior to the military coup of February 2021. Nevertheless, the central arguments presented here remain relevant, as does our conclusion: to achieve lasting peace in Myanmar, the borderlands must be at the centre.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Modern Asian Studies , Volume 56 , Special Issue 2: Border Governance in Myanmar , March 2022 , pp. 471 - 503
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press
Footnotes
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This special issue has been developed from papers presented at a workshop on Border Governance in Myanmar, held at the University of Warwick in April 2018. Many thanks to the Warwick School of Law for supporting the workshop, and to all the participants for their contributions. Thanks also to Amanda Snellinger for her assistance at an early stage in this project, to Ludek Stavinoha and Brendan Whitty for comments on earlier drafts, and to Olivia Hammershøy and Rune Korgaard for proofreading and formatting assistance in the final stages.
References
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14 Anssi Paasi, ‘Borders, Theory and the Challenge of Relational Thinking’, in Corey Johnson, Reece Jones, Anssi Paasi, Louise Amoore, Alison Mountz, Mark Salter and Chris Rumford, ‘Interventions on Rethinking “the Border” in Border Studies’, Political Geography, vol. 30, no. 2, 2011, pp. 61–69, pp. 62–63.
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24 Ibid.; David Lyon, ‘The Border is Everywhere: ID Cards, Surveillance and the Other’, in Global Surveillance and Policing: Borders, Security, Identity, (eds) Elia Zureik and Mark B. Salters (Cullompton: Willan, 2005), pp. 66–82.
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26 See, for example, Kirsten McConnachie, ‘Boundaries and Belonging in the Indo-Myanmar Borderlands: Chin Refugees in Mizoram’, Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, 2018, pp. 314–333; Duncan McDuie-Ra, ‘Adjacent Identities in Northeast India’, Asian Ethnicity, vol. 17, no. 3, 2015, pp. 400–413.
27 Anssi Paasi, ‘Boundaries as Social Processes: Territoriality in the World of Flows’, Geopolitics, vol. 3, no. 1, 1998, pp. 69–88.
28 See, for example, Karin Dean, ‘Spaces, Territorialities and Ethnography on the Thai-, Sino-and Indo-Myanmar Boundaries’, in The Routledge Research Companion to Border Studies, (ed.) Doris Wastl-Walter (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 219–241.
29 Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘A Situated Intersectional Everyday Approach to the Study of Bordering’, EU Border Scapes Working Paper 2, August 2013, p. 1.
30 Sara Smith, ‘Gendered and Embodied Geopolitics of Borders, Marginalization, and Contingent Solidarity’, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, vol. 13, no. 3, 2017, pp. 350–353, p. 350.
31 Middleton, ‘States of Difference’, p. 14.
32 International Crisis Group, ‘Identity Crisis: Ethnicity and Conflict in Myanmar’, 28 August 2020, https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-east-asia/myanmar/312-identity-crisis-ethnicity-and-conflict-myanmar, [accessed 14 December 2021]. On ethnic language and education, see Marie Lall and Ashley South, ‘Power Dynamics of Language and Education Policy in Myanmar's Contested Transition’, Comparative Education Review, vol. 62, no. 4, 2018, pp. 482–502.
33 Junxi Qian and Xueqiong Tang, ‘Dilemma of Modernity: Interrogating Cross-Border Ethnic Identities at China's Southwest Frontier’, Area 49, 2017, pp. 52–59, https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12283.
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41 Ibid.
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50 On legal pluralism in Myanmar, see Kyed (ed.), Everyday Justice in Myanmar; Helene Maria Kyed, ‘Introduction to the Special Issue on Everyday Justice’, Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship, vol. 1, no. 2, 2018, pp. ii–xxii.
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53 C. Rumford ‘Seeing like a Border’, in Johnson et al., ‘Interventions on Rethinking’, p. 68.
54 Ibid., p. 68.
55 McCartan and Jolliffe, ‘Ethnic Armed Actors’; South, ‘Hybrid Governance’, pp. 50–66.
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57 Annika Pohl Harrisson, ‘Fish Caught in Clear Water: Encompassed State-Making in Southeast Myanmar’, Territory, Politics and Governance, vol. 9, no. 4, 2018, pp. 533–552; on this issue see also Helene Maria Kyed and Annika Pohl Harrisson, ‘Ceasefire State-Making and Justice Provision in Ethnic Armed Group Areas of Southeast Myanmar’, Sojourn, vol. 34, no. 2, 2019, pp. 290–326.
58 Van Schendel, ‘Afterword’, pp. 268–269.
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80 Jonathan Goodhand, Markus Mayer and Oliver Walton, ‘Building Peace from the Margins: Borderlands, Brokers and Peacebuilding in Sri Lanka and Nepal’, International Alert, 2019, p. 1, available at: https://www.international-alert.org/sites/default/files/BuildingPeaceFromTheMargins_EN_2019.pdf, [accessed 15 December 2021]; Zahbia Yousuf, ‘Peacebuilding in Borderlands: A View from the Margins’, in Borderlands and Peacebuilding, (eds) Plonski and Yousuf, pp. 20–25.
81 Sharri Plonski and Oliver Walton, ‘Conflict and Peace in Borderlands’, in Borderlands and Peacebuilding, (eds) Plonski and Yousuf, pp. 5–11.
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