Conflict Timber along the China-Burma Border: Connecting the Global Timber Consumer with Violent Extraction Sites (original) (raw)
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Since ceasefire agreements were signed between the Burmese military government and ethnic political groups in the Burma–China borderlands in the early 1990s, violent waves of counterinsurgency development have replaced warfare to target politically-suspect, resource-rich, ethnic populated borderlands. The Burmese regime allocates land concessions in ceasefire zones as an explicit postwar military strategy to govern land and populations to produce regulated, legible, militarized territory. Tracing the relationship of military–state formation, land control and securitization, and primitive accumulation in the Burma–China borderlands uncovers the forces of what I am calling ‘ceasefire capitalism’. This study examines these processes of Burmese military–state building over the past decade in resource-rich ethnic ceasefire zones along the Yunnan, China border. I will illustrate this contemporary and violent military–state formation process with two case studies focusing on northern Burma: logging and redirected timber trade flows, and Chinese rubber plantations as part of China’s opium substitution program.
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United States Institute of Peace, 2018
This report examines Burma's conflict resource economy in the areas along its borders with China and Thailand, focusing on the relationships between extractive and productive resources, armed conflict, and the peace process. Data and analysis are based on the author's previously conducted interviews, focus group discussions, workshops, and research, complemented by an extensive literature review. The report is supported by the Asia Center at USIP.
China’s contemporary cross-border investments in northern Myanmar have been confronted by, and in turn have re-animated, the region’s post-Cold War geographies and associated illicit drug economy. Since the mid- 2000s, mainland Chinese companies have invested in large-scale agribusiness concessions in northern Myanmar under China’s liberalized opium substitution programme. Chinese companies have partnered with local armed ‘strongmen’ – many of whom were or still are involved in the illicit drug trade – where they exercise armed authority within a wider landscape of ‘armed sovereignties’. Field case study data demonstrate how China’s contemporary cross-border investments have extended Myanmar’s national political authority within the arc of armed sovereignties. Chinese-backed agricultural estates, whether awarded to paramilitary militias or rebel leaders under ceasefires, acted as state territorial interventions and led to incremental Myanmar state-building outcomes. The state-building effects from contemporary Chinese investments are in contrast to the Cold War period in which China sought to destabilize non- aligned nation-states by supporting armed communist revolutions. The study traces how China’s current land-based investments have reawakened the borderland’s legacy of political violence and reconfigured armed sovereignties closer towards Myanmar’s military state.
Conflict, Security and Development, 2015
This article argues that attempts to buy insurgency out of violence can achieve temporary stability but risk producing new conflict. While co-optation with economic incentives might work in parts of a movement, it can spark ripple effects in others. These unanticipated developments result from the interactions of differently situated elite and non-elite actors, which can create a momentum of their own in driving collective behaviour. This article develops this argument by analysing the re-escalation of armed conflict between the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO) and Myanmar's armed forces after a 17-year-long ceasefire broke down in 2011. After years of mutual enrichment and collaboration between rebel and state elites and near organisational collapse, the insurgency's new-found resolve and capacity is particularly puzzling. Based on extensive field research, this article explains why and how the state's attempt to co-opt rebel leaders with economic incentives resulted in group fragmentation, loss of leadership legitimacy, increased factional contestation, growing resentment among local communities and the movement's rank and file and ultimately the rebuilding of popular resistance from within. Link: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14678802.2015.1071974
Non-State Armed Groups in the Myanmar Peace Process: What are the Future Options?
2014
DIIS Working Papers make available DIIS researchers' and DIIS project partners' work in progress towards proper publishing. They may include important documentation which is not necessarily published elsewhere. DIIS Working Papers are published under the responsibility of the author alone. DIIS Working Papers should not be quoted without the express permission of the author. DIIS WORKING PAPER 2014:07 ROHINGYA Fragmented struggle by various groups from 1947, mainly from outside Myanmar. CHIN Low-level insurgency over di use area from 1988. Ceasere 2012. KIA PALAUNG Separatist struggle from 1963. No ceasere. Recent ghting.