Organizer: Karin Dean, Tallinn University, Estonia Chair: Alexander Horstmann, Independent Scholar, Germany Myanmar/Burma is a state conceived in 1948, while territorially and socially enforced upon spaces and peoples and ruled through coercion by military regimes since 1961. Until today, however, no central power has been able to enforce whole territorial control over this largest mainland SEA state – particularly at its borderlands that have no pre-existing cultural, economic or geographical affiliations with the present seat of power which perspective has been the basis for the ‘nation.’
At its borderlands, an array of actors have been able to create spaces of their own – whether ’liberating’ these from the state, or negotiating ceasefires for various reasons. This has lead to a complex mosaic of territorialities and practices that may circumvent or bend the normative knowledge informed by laws of citizenship and sovereignty, ethnicity and language, economic activities, politics and governmentality. However, the crucial issue is who constructs and controls the multiplicity of borders, and for what.
Theoretically, the border is no longer viewed as a line – be it on the map or as a symbolic line of differentiation. Borders have their own space, exemplified in the term borderland (Rumford 2006). In order to better understand the social, this panel discusses the dynamics and developments at different spaces and contexts of Myanmar/Burma’s borders. The aim is to extend understanding of the border – as one of the key issues for the politics of the troubled ’geo-body’ such as Myanmar/Burma but also in wider social theory where Myanmar/Burma’s borders challenge many of the dominating discources, past and present.
In this paper, I am interested in the position and contextuality of the people who have to run away from civil war and military deafeat, but are constantly involved-against all odds- in the reconstruction of their life projects. I see refugees not only as passive recipients of humanitarian aid, but as active participants who have their share in bordering and rebordering (see Brees 2010, Dudley 2010). In the paper, I begin by outlining a political topography of the different actors and forces who control and govern the borderland. The state, military, local government, illicit economy, armed movements of the minorities, entrepreneurs etc. are involved in creating a special border zone. They control the refugee camps that are called temporary shelters, but have become durable phenomenona. International humanitarianism holds the political project of the ethnic minorities and refugees from Burma alive. The control and repression of the Thai authorities is never total, but there is a dynamic that develops in the refugee camps and outside of the refugee camps and in Burma itself. I outline the different spaces in which the refugees move, including the camp, border town and countryside and how the refugees as collective actors move and reproduce themselves in these spaces. I provide the case of Karen Christian Baptist networks, NGO's and their translocal alliences to illustrate the movements and agency of refugees across the Thai-Burmese border. In the context of political defeat, people use their ressources to create at the micro-political level their own sovereignties.
This paper is co-authored by Olivier Ferrari, Reseach Fellowq IRASEC, 29 Sathorn Tai Road, Bangkok 10120, Thailand oliferrari@gmail.com
Studying the South borderland between Thailand and Myanmar/Burma as a living space for its populations, its management, questions right away the center-oriented concepts of nations and ethnicity thus addressing a reflection to both politics and scientific researches. Borderland’s populations of the South occupy and shape their own social space that may be defined according to different aspects at different scales. Paradoxically, while the static and in many ways ‘imagined’ international frontier is everything but a limit, this social space evolves according to ‘real’ borders moving in terms of time, space and representations. This can be addressed through the understanding of ethnoregional social dynamics that regulate the interrelations between social spaces within a regional cultural framework.
We want to assert that borderlands exist more ore less independently from the international frontiers (that are still part of the identity defining factors) but as a wider concept that may serve to study societies within their encompassing nations. We will follow the Burmese migrations from inner Myanmar/Burma towards their littoral, from the Ayeyarwaddy delta to the Tanintharyi peninsula and south Thailand and trace the historical, political, social and cultural events that brought them to the adaptive colonization of the South. In southern Thailand, thanks to preexisting ethnorégional social dynamics, Burmese migrants were able to integrate by adapting their social dynamics to the other populations (Thais, Sino-Thais, Malay muslin, sea gypsies) through social, cultural but also ritual structures. While borderlands can be ‘inside’ the nation as well as transnational, we will show that borders are necessary to constitute social spaces and articulate fluid ethnicities and identities thus helping forming the nations from the ‘peripheries’ toward their center. Indeed, while the nowadays transnational Burmese population can be considered as a social space, its coherence can only be understood through their representations of multiple and moving borders of their own, structuring their diversity.
This paper is co-authored by Mart Viirand, PHD Candidate
The border is no longer viewed as a line but rather as a social process embedded in various practices of spatiality. However, only a few political geographers, such as Paasi (2009; 2009) have called upon including contextuality as a part of the theory on borders, noting that the way how any institutionalized mechanisms channel and pattern daily lives are always contextual. Furthermore, contextuality is embodied in the continuously changing mixes of ‘past’ and new territorialities, contingent developments and trajectories in local dynamics, wider geopolitics and shifting local/state interests, all in mutual reaction.
The context of Myanmar/Burma is a conceptual state with the central power, largely constituted in the Myanmar military, having no full territorial control, particularly over its borderlands with no pre-existing cultural, economic or geographical affiliations. The spatial outcomes are quite specific patchworks of spaces controlled by a multitude of different stakeholders from the state (i.e. Myanmar Army) to various political organizations and militias, some of which have mobilized and others regrouped with shifting interests and in reaction to the geopolitics, politics, trade, business and personal opportunities. The stakeholders also include ’common’ people who use the border for the arrangement of their everyday lives. The paper will study bordering as a process in time and space, focusing on the Sino-Myanmar border and the multitude of different stakeholders who nevertheless all share the skill of creatively negotiating this international boundary. Through this ’common ground,’ the paper tries to find a theoretical framework to studiying borders of various contexts.
National borderlines are political as well as social. The political authority links borders with sovereignty while the people living on the borderline perceive it as social space that offers a different context of identity formation. Myanmar/Burma’s border with Bangladesh affects the Rohingya ethnic minority people of Myanmar politically as well as socially. This is due to the artificial and arbitrary drawing of the boundary lines by the British colonial authority between India and Myanmar, separating and dividing the minorities artificially. The post-independence Myanmar authority claimed political sovereignty on Arakan, the state of the Rohingya minority ethnic group, which led to subsequent discrimination and exclusionary policies against the Rohingyas claiming that they were intruders from Bangladesh. Consequently, despite historical evidence of their originality in Arakan, the Rohingyas became misfits in their own homeland. Due to the government exclusionary policy, a large numbers of Rohingyas were compelled to cross the international border into Bangladesh as refugees, particularly during 1978 and 1991-92. At present, nearly half a million Rohingya refugees are still living in Bangladesh along the borderline.
The paper examines the historical settings to seek how the Rohingyas are oscillating between political sovereignty claim and social space of artificially drawn borderline. It will particularly explore the social memory of violence and struggle for life, and the real life-politics for these displaced people in the borderlands. It argues that the refugee life in the borderland is far more complex than it is perceived. The close proximity of the refugees to their homeland creates a complete different psychology of attachment and alienation, which needs further attention in refugee studies.
Burma is home to one of the longest-running internal conflicts in modern history, with various armed militia holding territories and controlling black-market trade in geographically peripheral areas. One such group is the Shan, who have engaged in military separatism since 1958. Until a major surrender in 1996, the Shan insurgency controlled territories from the Salween River east to the border with Thailand. The Salween River, in addition to being treated as a boundary in the geo-political sense, as troops from the Burmese Tatmadaw would have difficulty crossing the gorge, is also symbolic for the Shan insurgency, and national identity writ large. Within the corpus of Shan insurgent writing and expressive culture such as popular music, the Salween River (Nam Kong in Shan) is referred to frequently, its frequency second only to Shanland itself. Therefore, for the purposes of this paper, I will first discuss the changing nature of frontiers and boundaries within the historical context of an ongoing ethnic insurgency, and second, using Shan language publications and popular songs, I will discuss how this boundary can take on metonymic status within insurgent literature and political symbolism.
Ethnic politics have shaped the society and culture of the Wa as a frontier people since the 14th century between Burma and Yunnan in Southwest China. One aspect of borders in the Wa lands was based on the interpretation of the myth about the head hunting and the Han strategist Kong Ming, which established a symbolic border between the head hunters and the other Han along the transportation routes. Since the 1720s when the Qing government integrated native chieftains into the administrative system, in order to resist the new Han migrants, some tribes in the Wa lands became involved in Lahu religious movements, which marked a new political border between the Wa with the Han and the Dai as well as the newly entitled chieftains. Since the 1880s, the Qing government began to negotiate borders with the British colonial powers until the Five Colors Map was made in 1941. The Wa lands were a problematic frontier forming either a barrier between Han officials and the Dai chieftains, or between the Qing state and the British colonial powers. But the local people also used their frontier identity strategically to cooperate with each other for resistance and to control the flow of commodities such as opium and mines. Thus three ways in which the Burma-Yunnan border can be viewed in the frontier context: as a conduit for interaction with others and interpreting relative identities, as a border between states, and as a border in local ethnic politics.
The border is no longer viewed as a line but rather as a social process embedded in various practices of spatiality. However, only a few political geographers, such as Paasi (2009; 2009) have called upon including contextuality as a part of the theory on borders, noting that the way how any institutionalized mechanisms channel and pattern daily lives are always contextual. Furthermore, contextuality is embodied in the continuously changing mixes of ‘past’ and new territorialities, contingent developments and trajectories in local dynamics, wider geopolitics and shifting local/state interests, all in mutual reaction.
The context of Myanmar/Burma is a conceptual state with the central power, largely constituted in the Myanmar military, having no full territorial control, particularly over its borderlands with no pre-existing cultural, economic or geographical affiliations. The spatial outcomes are quite specific patchworks of spaces controlled by a multitude of different stakeholders from the state (i.e. Myanmar Army) to various political organizations and militias, some of which have mobilized and others regrouped with shifting interests and in reaction to the geopolitics, politics, trade, business and personal opportunities. The stakeholders also include ’common’ people who use the border for the arrangement of their everyday lives. The paper will study bordering as a process in time and space, focusing on the Sino-Myanmar border and the multitude of different stakeholders who nevertheless all share the skill of creatively negotiating this international boundary. Through this ’common ground,’ the paper tries to find a theoretical framework to studiying borders of various contexts.
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