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

Abstract

A critical remote sensing approach illuminates the geopolitics of development within Myanmar and across its ethnic minority borderlands. By integrating nighttime light (NTL) data from 1992–2020, long-term ethnographic fieldwork, and a review of scholarly and gray literature, we analyzed how Myanmar’s economic geography defies official policy, attesting to persistent inequality and the complex relationships between state-sponsored and militia-led violence, resource extraction, and trade. While analysis of DMSP-OLS data (1992–2013) and VIIRS data (2013–2020) reveals that Myanmar brightened overall, especially since the 2010s in line with its now-halting liberalization, growth in lights was unequally distributed. Although ethnic minority states brightened more rapidly than urbanized ethnic majority lowland regions, in 2020, the latter still emitted 5.6-fold more radiance per km2. Moreover, between 2013 and 2020, Myanmar’s borderlands were on average just 13% as bright as those of its five neighboring countries. Hot spot analysis of radiance within a 50 km-wide area spanning both sides of the border confirmed that most significant clusters of light lay outside Myanmar. Among the few hot spots on Myanmar’s side, many were associated with official border crossings such as Muse, the formal hub for trade with China, and Tachileik and Myawaddy next to Thailand. Yet some of the most significant increases in illumination between 2013 and 2020 occurred in areas controlled by the Wa United State Party and its army, which are pursuing infrastructure development and mining along the Chinese border from Panghsang to the illicit trade hub of Mongla. Substantial brightening related to the “world’s largest refugee camp” was also detected in Bangladesh, where displaced Rohingya Muslims fled after Myanmar’s military launched a violent crackdown. However, no radiance nor change in radiance were discernible in areas within Myanmar where ethnic cleansing operations occurred, pointing to the limitations of NTL. The diverse drivers and implications of changes in light observed from space emphasize the need for political and economically situated remote sensing.

Rugged terrain, forest coverage, and insurgency in Myanmar

“…21 In Myanmar, the areas with the greatest luminosity would indicate greater government presence and/or relative government capacity since the provision of electricity reflects the government's control of specific territories in the area. Since no reliable set of GDP data at the local levels is provided by the Myanmar authorities, the night-time luminosity data is a useful proxy for economic activity at the local level (Bennett and Faxon, 2021). Second, to assess the government's capacity and reach, as well as potential access to international support and markets, we include two sets of distance measures.…”

The politics of pixels: A review and agenda for critical remote sensing

“…Jiang (2003) also brings remote sensing analysis “to the cultural realm” (p. 228) by cross-referencing the landscape-level connections in inner Mongolia made apparent by remote sensing imagery with ethnographic interviews. Bennett and Faxon (2021) combine imagery of the Earth at night with ethnographic fieldwork in Myanmar’s borderlands to draw attention to processes that can go undetected, such as government clearances of communities lacking electricity, which would not have appeared in the imagery in the first place. This omission in the data underscores the analytical risks present in remote sensing’s exclusive focus on visual measures of change (Turner, 2003).…”

Integrating Pixels, People, and Political Economy to Understand the Role of Armed Conflict and Geopolitics in Driving Deforestation: The Case of Myanmar

“…Methodologically, we combined the "grounded" approaches of political ecology and ethnography that rely on context-and place-dependent field-based research and analysis to critically engage in LULCC via satellite remote sensing [49]. Political ecology can be described as a multiscaled approach to studying the political economy of the environment [50].…”