After the Rice Frontier: Producing State and Ethnic Territory in Northwest Myanmar

“The Ancestral Line is through the Father”: The Gendered Production of Statelessness in Rural Myanmar

“…Men are still overwhelmingly presumed to be the only legitimate household head (Norwegian Refugee Council [NRC] 2018). 25 This invisibility of women on important family documents subordinates their status in the family, community, and nation and impairs their ability to exercise their rights (Faxon 2017).…”

“…The ensuing discrepancy between the official law and discriminatory practices on the ground would likely not be contested by the Myanmar state. While the citizenship law is gender neutral, and the government promotes an official narrative of gender equality, the Myanmar state continues to be shaped and guided by patriarchal norms and practices that subordinate women (Ikeya 2005(Ikeya , 2011Tharaphi Than 2014;Minoletti 2016;Faxon 2017). Furthermore, because of women's role in "reproducing the nation," their bodies have often been sites of state anxiety and targets of state migration and citizenship governance (Brown 1992;Yuval-Davis 1993;Haney 2000;Ikeya 2005;Lonergan 2018).…”

“…While neither are formal state employees today, these village leaders have long been crucial mediators or brokers between the formal state and villagers. During colonial rule, which relied heavily on decentralized or bifurcated systems of governance in the colony’s “Frontier,” or rural periphery, village headmen were formally considered government agents (Taylor 2009; Huard 2019; Faxon 2021). But while they continue to play an important role in conflict resolution, mediation, and everyday village affairs, they are not formally part of the country’s modern government bureaucracies and often try to “keep the state at arm’s length” (Scott 2009, 9; Huard 2019).…”

Uneven Frontiers: Exposing the Geopolitics of Myanmar’s Borderlands with Critical Remote Sensing

“…This uneven geography of authority, conflict, natural resource extraction, and informal migration has structured Myanmar's development prospects, especially along its borders with China, Thailand, Laos, India, and Bangladesh. After reforms began, China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which launched in 2013, targeted Myanmar's borderlands at the crossroads of South and Southeast Asia with ambitious plans for infrastructure projects ranging from domestic hydropower plants to cross-border transportation corridors [27][28][29][30][31]. At the same time, the Myanmar military's violent persecution of the Rohingya in Rakhine State, in western Myanmar bordering Bangladesh, led over 900,000 people to flee the country after the genocide intensified in 2017 [32].…”

“…We apply a critical remote sensing approach [71] integrating satellite imagery and qualitative data drawn from a review of scholarly and gray literature and ethnographic fieldwork in Myanmar, where one of the article's authors has conducted research on development, environment, and governance since 2013 with attention to resource frontiers in the country's borderlands [72]. Our research brings geospatial data into conversation with debates on borderlands, contested authority, and territory [73][74][75] to offer two main contributions.…”