Ashes of co-optation: from armed group fragmentation to the rebuilding of popular insurgency in Myanmar

Abstract

This paper argues that attempts to buy insurgency out of violence can achieve temporary stability but risk to produce 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 paper develops this argument by analysing the reescalation 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 resentments among local communities and the movement's rank and file, and ultimately the rebuilding of popular resistance from within.

Diamonds, Rebel’s and Farmer’s Best Friend: Impact of Variation in the Price of a Lootable, Labor-intensive Natural Resource on the Intensity of Violent Conflict

“…Other insurgent groups switch between rebellion and looting as well. The Kachin Independence Organization in Myanmar switched from fighting the government, to signing a formal cease fire with the government in order to exploit natural resources in areas they controlled, to breaking this cease fire to reengage the government (Brenner 2015).…”

Untangling the proximate causes and underlying drivers of deforestation and forest degradation in Myanmar

“…For example, land previously left fallow by upland swidden agriculturalists was in some cases reclassified as "wasteland" and converted to rubber plantations (Woods 2011). The grievances resulting from these land seizures in the wake of cease-fire ultimately undermined these truces and incentivized further conflict (Brenner 2015) (Fig. 5).…”

Forgotten Conflicts: Producing Knowledge and Ignorance in Security Studies

“…In a similar vein, Myanmar Studies has largely been missing from the greed and grievance paradigm despite elaborate discussions of a) the collusion of state and non-state elites in profiting from the country's extensive war economies (Brenner 2015;Jones 2014;Woods 2011); and b) the political grievances of ethnic minority communities whose marginalization by an ethnocratic state has fuelled a decades-long civil war (Sadan 2013;Smith 1999;Walton 2013). Instead of explaining rebel mobilization as a function of individual choices based on political grievances or economic opportunities, scholars of Myanmar's rebel movements have highlighted the importance of the historically grown social and political context within which rebellion emerged and persisted (Brenner 2019;Christensen and Sann Kyaw 2006;Thawnghmung 2008). In fact, Myanmar experts show how rebellion has often become 'a way of life' in the country's borderlands, which produces its own social, political and moral orders within which political violence needs to be analyzed (Smith 1999, 88).…”