1. Introduction
In August of 2020, 400 migrant laborers from Myanmar gathered in protest in Mae Sot, one of Thailand’s Special Economic Zones (SEZ), located along the western Thai-Myanmar border (Khaosod, 2020). Crouched in front of shuttered factory gates, they announced that it had been more than two months since they had received a paycheck and many were growing desperate for money to pay for rent, utilities and food. The SEZ in Mae Sot houses 430 factories that typically employ 40,000 Burmese migrants. Yet, during the height of a global pandemic and in the wake of Myanmar’s military coup d’état in February of 2021, many migrant laborers’ livelihoods rapidly deteriorated.
While three million Burmese migrant laborers toil in Thailand’s underpaid sectors (Wongsamuth, 2019), labor precarity also persists in Myanmar’s urban centers where domestic migrants from rural areas congregate to find work. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated precarity among laborers in Myanmar, which received Southeast Asia’s paltriest Covid-19 relief package (Asian Development Bank, 2020; Frontier, 2020). Surveys show that 80 per cent of residents experienced food insecurity, 50 per cent had taken loans pursuant to Covid-19 effects, while only 20 per cent had received any form of government support (CNA, 2020, p. 23, Kyu Khin Gar et al., 2020:1; Lawi Weng, 2020). Moreover, aid distribution was concentrated in urban areas populated by the country’s majority Burmans, excluding rural and ethnic areas and adding to a long history of state abandonment of border area residents (Progressive Voice, 2020).
Beyond these zones of exclusion are the refugee camps along Myanmar’s borders. One million Rohingya, driven from Myanmar during various ethnic cleansings and the 2017 genocide, now reside in the world’s largest refugee camp in Kutupalong, Bangladesh, while 120,000 (of the approximately 600,000 Rohingya who live a de facto stateless life inside Myanmar) are confined to squalid internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state. While, for decades, camps along Myanmar’s northern and eastern borders provided safe havens for displaced ethnic minorities, during the ostensible “democratic transition” of the 2010s, residents were told to prepare for their imminent shuttering. Governments and NGOs informed residents that economic development and civil society was arriving to Myanmar and refugees could safely return. However, since the 2021 coup d’état, this option has largely been foreclosed (Sebro, 2017, Prasse-Freemen and Sebro, 2021).
In this article, we focus ethnographically on the economic precaritization of Myanmar’s borderlands residents, demonstrating how flows of international humanitarian aid are supplanted by geoeconomic hope for capitalist enterprise, as well as how they trigger geopolitical fears that not only affect displaced residents, but suffuse the entire country. Geoeconomics broadly speaks to the leveraging of economic tools for geopolitical ends and the “economic remaking of territory” to serve large-scale transboundary political projects (Sparke, 2018b). We observe this playing out in Myanmar’s construction of SEZs, plantations and agribusinesses, infrastructure corridors, and resource extraction zones, many of which have been fast-tracked by their incorporation into China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (Lee, 2018).
The ever-tightening relationship between neoliberal capitalist globalization and humanitarian crises raises a number of critical questions around the “co-generative relationship” between geopolitics and geoeconomics in foreign policy (Sparke, 2018: 484). In Myanmar, the fear felt by displaced people is caused not only by explicit military threat (geopolitical fear), but by the consequences of “hopeful” interventions (geoeconomic hope) – from landgrabs, to hyper-exploitation in labor markets, to the effective abandonment by those labor markets. In other words, the pervasive discursive context of Myanmar’s period of transition, in which guns were putatively turned to ploughshares meant to build prosperity for all, nonetheless led to a form of primary accumulation driven by an increase in land dispossession, but which did not provide sufficient labor opportunities for the newly proletarianized. Instead, deracinated subjects searched for reabsorption, taking on incredible risk (Prasse-Freeman, 2021). As their homelands were emptied of people, their ecologies became incapable of supporting viable communities. Consequently, these spaces became available – as land transformed into an agribusiness, as transfer zone for an oil pipeline – for insertion into broader supply chains, actions interpreted as losses of local sovereignty (which we interpret as a geopolitical outcome). Moreover, those who objected often faced violent reprisals at the hands of the Myanmar state, actions the state justified by pointing to the necessity of placating international capital, particularly that originating in China. [1] Therefore, the overarching “fear” among Myanmar subjects during the transition was overdetermined both by the pharmakon nature of geoeconomic hope (simultaneously poison and cure), and by the way that (geo)political agendas were cloaked in the hopeful narrative of economic liberalization.
To draw out these dynamics, we examine foreign direct investment (FDI) through what Anna Tsing describes as “supply-chain capitalism” or “the structural role of difference in the mobilization of capital, labor, and resources” (2009: 148). Within supply chain models, social categories of difference such as “gender, ethnicity, nationalism, religion, and citizenship status” are leveraged as sites of surplus value extraction, revealing how difference is “structurally central to global capitalism” (ibid). In Myanmar, we argue, supply chain capitalism obscures the state’s continued neglect of its populations through its stoking of geoeconomic hope for future prosperity among disenfranchised residents through practices of primary accumulation and surplus precaritization – or the way populations progressively approach the point at which they become absolutely surplus: beyond reabsorption into labor markets, and beyond support by fields of care.
During the decade of “democratic transition” that followed the 2010 democratic elections and the release from house arrest of the nation’s symbol of democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar transitioned from a pariah country ruled by a military junta to a frontier nation attracting massive sums of foreign investment. Myanmar’s “reconciliation” phase included the lifting of international sanctions, intensifying the transition to neoliberal capitalism that began in earnest in 1990 (Campbell forthcoming), and deluging the country with regional investors seeking to spatially fix (Harvey, 1981) capital into Myanmar’s new markets, particularly into its frontier areas’ relatively cheap land and mineral sources. In 2019 alone, more than USD 4.2 billion of foreign direct investment (FDI) flooded the country (Tiha Ko, 2020) and triggered new rounds of sometimes violent struggles in Myanmar’s borderland frontiers (Gallo, 2015).
As refugee camps along the Thai-Myanmar border are threatened with closure (Sebro, 2017), the privatization and sequestration of arable land renders populations in both countries increasingly dependent on neoliberal shifts that facilitate opportunities for market participation in the region’s shadow economies, especially within Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Yangon, or in the special economic zones (SEZs) that are proliferating along the Thai-Myanmar border (Aung, 2018; Wood, 2017). Similarly, many Rohingya – either those scattered within Myanmar or languishing in southeastern Bangladesh – are attempting perilous boat voyages across greater Asia. They endeavor to join the hundreds of thousands already living in Malaysia, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, where, despite statelessness, they nonetheless relay tenuous experiences of hope for a better future. These geographies of displacement are mapped out by state-driven geoeconomic hopes for market integration through promises of waged labor and resource development.
It is in this context of post-transition Myanmar that we ask: how does geoeconomic hope for Myanmar’s market integration and geopolitical fear of political violence precaritize borderland exiles, camp residents, migrant workers – and ultimately lowland subjects of Myanmar? Following Myanmar’s sit-tat2 (military) 2021 coup d’état, which nullified the 2020 elections and ended the country’s decade-long democratic experiment, what will happen to Myanmar’s most precarious subjects? In the furious mass uprising against the coup, many who identify as Bama, the country’s majority ethnic group, have claimed newfound appreciation for the struggles of non-Bama peoples (Aung Kaung Myat et al., forthcoming), identifying common cause based on similar abuses. A viral protest sign circulating on Burmese Facebook distilled this sentiment, writing: “First they came for the Karen, and we didn’t speak out. Then they came for the Rohingya, and we didn’t speak out. Now they are coming for ALL OF US.” While we follow ethnic individuals who have expressed ambivalence at such appeals – recognizing new attempts at solidarity while conveying skepticism at the sustainability of Burman pledges – we also note that the coup has drawn the variegated exploitations and abuses suffered by various Burmese peoples into a single frame. Indeed, while the transitional moment, constituted as it was by authoritarian neo-liberalism, always contained within it the conditions of possibility for a return to fascism via a military coup, the coup has made fascism manifest condition for all, even if it has different effects on differently positioned subjects.
In what follows, we elaborate on the geoeconomics of Myanmar’s “transition” and illustrate how the economic ambitions of the state relied on the exploitation of othered and exiled bodies – namely, the land, labor, and resources of Myanmar’s displaced ethnic minorities. Next, we outline the context and methods of our collective research, then address how geopolitical fear pervades in three of Myanmar’s borderland areas: the Northern and Western Thai-Myanmar borders and the Myanmar-Bangladesh border. Finally, we juxtapose intensified geopolitical fear in borderland camps with geoeconomic hope for Myanmar’s tightening embrace of “free market” capitalism, as illustrated through its most visible FDI collaboration, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This hope, we contend, facilitates the development of new land and labor frontiers in ways that coproduce what we term, surplus precaritization in Myanmar and throughout the region. We conclude by considering a potential post-coup inversion in the way hope is felt by Burmese subjects: from an uncompromising and exclusionary hope of the market to a hope that, by relying on transethnic solidarity, enacts a positive sum hope of revolution.
2. The geoeconomics of Myanmar’s reconciliation
In Myanmar’s borderlands, several temporary ceasefire agreements were established during and prior to the transition, and large-scale extraction activities (mining, logging, natural-gas pipelines) rapidly ensued, displacing local communities that became increasingly vulnerable to abuses by the sit-tat and other armed organizations. These practices take on particularly salient forms in the context of FDI – especially the resource-extraction focused FDI that has dominated in Burma and which, post-coup, will become ever more prominent. As China has emerged as the defender of the new junta, self-named the State Administrative Council (SAC), BRI projects appear poised to become more salient. The practices surrounding BRI investments reflect Sparke’s description of the phenomenon whereby the same material assemblage of investment, enterprise, and accumulation can be described simultaneously in two antithetical ways. On one hand, an investment project may constitute an “‘arc of instability’ or ‘disputed border’ might thereby be blamed for causing geopolitical unrest.” On the other, a ‘free trade region’ or ‘free zone’ may be idealized as bringing geoeconomic peace and prosperity” (Sparke, 2013, p. 289, cited in Sparke, 2018b, p. 484). Originally proposed by Edward Luttwak, geoeconomics predicted that in an era of economic globalization, the militarism characteristic of geopolitics was a less viable tactic and would be replaced by economic modes of territorialization (1990). Critiquing Luttawak’s framing of geoeconomics, Sparke (2018a) describes how, rather than being a departure from geopolitics in toto, geoeconomics and geopolitics form a dialectic in which the latter is rendered via a language of fear, while the former disseminates narratives of free market capitalism that cultivate hope. Building on David Harvey’s description of capitalism as a system that is constantly preoccupied with “the creation of social and physical infrastructures that support the circulation of capital” (1985:129), Sparke notes how geopolitics and geoeconomics become an expression of the “uneven development dialectic in capitalism between spatial fixity and spatial expansion” (Sparke, 2018a, p. 484). We build on this framing of the dialectic to address the relationship between geoeconomic hope for the spoils of free market enterprise in Myanmar’s borderlands and geopolitical fear of the consequences of the Myanmar state’s behaviour in the context of this accelerating accumulation regime.
3. Supply-chain capitalism and surplus precaritization
Myanmar residents are increasingly subject to precarity not only within, but well beyond, the confines of the camp. Social scientists have categorized the experience of ‘precarity’ in divergent ways (Muehlebach, 2013; Han, 2018; Kasmir, 2018). For instance, ‘precariousness,’ when not denoting an eternal ontological condition in which humans are radically exposed to harm (Butler, 2004), has been used to describe a contemporary political condition in which all subjects suffer differing degrees of exposure to capitalist relations (c.f. Kasmir, 2018). Guy Standing (2011) articulates the ‘precariat,’ by contrast, as cutting a stark line within humanity, demarcating those lives who enjoy and expect stable labor relations and those who suffer perpetually insecure livelihoods and non-insured lives (Duffield, 2008).
We engage with these debates by arguing that ‘the precariat’ does not describe a coherent class in and of itself. This is not only because the material and phenomenological connections shared between garbage pickers in the South and knowledge workers in the Northern gig economy are so thin, but because the hypostatization of the precariat – as a stable, bounded unit – undermines the focus on the dialectical processual movement which defines precarious life itself (Breman, 2013; Scully, 2016). And while we are intrigued by ‘precaritization,’ as it denotes the process of becoming precarious, it circumscribes two stabilized domains (‘standard’ labor relations and the realm of ‘insecure livelihoods’) which subjects traverse. Conversely, we foreground the perpetual process of precaritization that renders some populations absolutely surplus: beyond the ability to be reabsorbed into the labor market, and beyond the ability to be supported by fields of care – whether by the Myanmar state, local communities, or formal humanitarian apparatuses. Surplus precaritization, by contrast, engages the debate on how labor is made absolutely surplus to the needs of capital (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2019), by linking practices of extrusion – from homelands, political economies, stable social relations, and the camp itself – to practices of self- and super-exploitation (Prasse-Freeman, 2021).
Indeed, the process of becoming-surplus shared by both refugees (predominantly ethnic minorities) and dispossessed peasants (predominantly lowland Burmans) evokes recent academic debates over whether subjects become absolutely surplus to capital (Li, 2010; Sanyal, 2007) or humanitarian regimes (Biehl 2008), or merely relatively surplus – in particular, as Campbell (forthcoming) and Rajaram (2019: 632–33) respectively explore, when peasants or workers are extruded from one form of capital do they become absorbed by another? Likewise, when refugee camps are liquidated, do refugees then become “illegal migrants”? We attempt to synthesize these positions by highlighting the narratives of those being pushed and pulled into and out of various forms of exile and exploitation (Prasse-Freeman, 2021). Rather than reifying and definitively labeling bodies as ‘surplus’ (or ‘the precariat’), we stress the becoming and unbecoming of superfluity (Mbembe 2004).
Facing the choice between life in or beyond the camp, forcibly displaced and minoritized groups are exceedingly vulnerable to processes of superexploitation, which describes “exploitation greater than might be expected from general economic principles” that derives from differences in “gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexuality, age, and citizenship status” (Tsing, 2009, p. 158). Tsing observes that ‘supply chain capitalist’ firms have displaced the Fordist firms of the 1950s and franchised ones of the 1990s as the icons of contemporary capitalism by “depend[ing] on” superexploitation. Yet, supply chain capitalism proceeds not only through superexploitation but through “conflations between superexploitation … and self-exploitation” (2009:158, emphases added). Tsing elaborates on this by identifying the double-bind in which many such subjects find themselves: “A day laborer must perform brawn and availability; a prostitute [sic] must perform sexual charm. These performances bring them contracts and make it difficult for them to negotiate the wage outside niches for gender, sexuality, and race” (2009:159). Thus, surplus precaritization describes populations impelled well beyond non-formalized labor relations that ‘merely’ lack legal protections or symbolic aggrandizement, and into those marked by racial difference and thereby more likely to include dirty, demeaning, and dangerous practices. Supply-chain capitalism is increasingly the modus operandi through which Myanmar’s borderland residents are forced to self-exploit because of their non-normative (in terms of race/ethnicity and class) subjectification (Tsing, 2016).
These practices of superexploitation by differentiation dovetail with Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualization of the camp as the nomos of modernity (Agamben, 1997). Agamben is concerned neither with refugees per se, nor with the brutalities and exclusions of camp life, but instead notes that “by breaking the identity between the human and the citizen and that between nativity and nationality” the refugee “brings the originary fiction of sovereignty to crisis” (2000:21). He thus demonstrates how citizens can be subject to ‘camp-like’ experiences. This helps us see how through practices of social differentiation in Myanmar’s borderlands, subjects – whether former refugees, current refugees, or not – are rendered surplus in ways that facilitate the self- and superexploitation on which their lives and livelihoods depend. As we demonstrate below, in Myanmar’s supply chain capitalism, a range of FDI projects such as BRI depend on surplus precaritization as well as practices of super exploitation.
4. Methods
Collectively, this article is based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews conducted by the authors between 2014 and 2020 among Burmese refugees and migrants and INGO actors along the Thai-Myanmar and Myanmar-Bangladesh borders as well as among researchers, government, and civil society actors in Yangon, Mandalay, and Kyaukphyu. Our ethnographic methods include participant observation and semi-structured interviews with approximately 100 research participants. Interviews along the western Thai-Myanmar border were conducted over four months in 2014 and 2015 in the cities of Mae Sot and Chiang Mai, Thailand. Participant observation and interviews with northern Thai-Myanmar border residents were conducted over nine months in 2014, 2015, and 2017 in Piang Luang village and the Koung Jor Camp, Chiang Mai Province; in the Pang Mapha District of Mae Hong Son Province; and in the city of Chiang Mai. Interviews with civil society and government actors in Myanmar were conducted over an eight-month period between 2018 and 2019 by Karen and Burmese research assistants in Yangon, Mandalay, and by phone with residents of Rakhine state. Participant observation with activists was conducted over a one-year period between 2014 and 2015 in Yangon, Mandalay, and Ayeyawaddy. Interviews along the Bangladesh-Myanmar border in Cox’s Bazar camps were conducted over a one-month period in 2018 and 2019. Finally, participant observation was conducted in Kuala Lumpur over the duration of four one-week trips in 2018 and 2019 (Fig. 1).
In each case, qualitative interviews were conducted in either Burmese, Thai, Tai, or English, audio recorded, translated (if needed), and transcribed. Data from interviews and fieldnotes from participant observations along the Thai-Myanmar border and along the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor in Myanmar were analyzed either by using discourse analysis methods, or were coded for recurrent and striking themes (Bernard & Ryan, 2009). People’s names are pseudonymized to protect their privacy. Collectively, drawing from several years of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, we synergize our findings to illustrate the relationship between large-scale geopolitical and geoeconomics processes in Myanmar and the everyday lives for peoples living in the borderlands.
5. Aid flight and the geopolitics of fear in three borderlands
While the military campaigns orchestrated by the Myanmar sit-tat have accelerated displacement of ethnic minority populations after the coup, forcing 230,000 from their homes (Al, 2021), this merely reflects an ongoing policy over the last decade. Aid agencies that since the mid-1980s have been the major source of political and economic support for Burmese exiles living along the Thai-Myanmar border had, by the late 2010s, already begun to shift their priorities to inside Myanmar. Indeed, these changes have emerged, in part, as a response to 700,000 Rohingyas being forced across the Bangladesh-Myanmar border into Bangladesh due to the sit-tat’s ongoing genocidal scorched earth campaign (FFM, 2018).
Hence, as the humanitarian crisis unfolded in western Myanmar, residents of the unofficial camps or “temporary shelters” along the Thai-Myanmar border were notified that the international aid they rely on for food rations, shelter, and education would come to an abrupt halt. As aid flight from the Thai-Myanmar border ensued, borderland exiles became doubly exiled: first by Myanmar’s military and then by humanitarian regimes that were never designed to contend with the condition of protracted displacement. As Duncan MacArthur, the director of the Thai Border Consortium (TBC), explained to us, “relief aid is generally prioritized as a short-term response in life-threatening, acute emergencies rather than a long-term response to chronic displacement.” Over the past decade, life in the Thai-Myanmar border camps reached an unprecedented level of precarity as extreme reductions in aid and food rations have forced residents to find other means of survival (Sebro, 2017). Since the Thai military coup in May 2014, camp residents have been subject to increasing travel and living restrictions in the camps (Moretti, 2015), as rumors of imminent repatriation have spread widely. By late 2020, more than 93,000 refugees remained in nine official “temporary shelter areas” and one “unofficial” camp on the Thai side of the border.
5.1. Western Thai-Myanmar border: Mae Sot and Mae La camp
Home to more than 200,000 Burmese residents, the western Thai-Myanmar border city of Mae Sot has long been known as “Little Burma” (Arnold & Campbell, 2017). Historically an important conduit for trade and commerce, today the Mae Sot-Myawaddy Special Economic Zones (SEZs) occupy the area (Campbell, 2018; Pinitwong, 2018). Recently completed road construction integrates Mae Sot with the East-West Economic Corridor and construction continues on the India–Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway. Located 70 km north of Mae Sot, Mae La Camp is the largest refugee camp in Thailand, with more than 30,000 residents. “The story of Mae Sot,” Pongsawat writes, reveals how its development as a “modern frontier of Myanmar and the modern border of Thailand [is] the outcome of an ongoing ethnic armed struggle between the Karen and the Burmese and the struggle among the Karens, and the development of the registered illegal immigrant worker regime in the political economy of Thailand’s industrialization and globalization” (2007: 363). Cross-border trade that has historically shaped Mae Sot has long funded the Karen National Union and Democratic Karen Benevolent Army and perpetuated ongoing conflicts with the sit-tat. This decades-long war, Pongsawat argues, “created a large pool of displaced persons that were central to the creation of illegal [sic] immigrant workers under the current registered illegal immigrant worker regime (Pongsawat, 2007: 363).
Today, the geoeconomics of hope in the camp are mediated not only by promises of rapid development in Myanmar, but also through the establishment of SEZs and new migrant worker visa programs (Tangseefa & Paribatra, 2019). Yet, in Mae La Camp, hope is punctuated by the “far-reaching geopolitics of fear that has materialized around the threat of repatriation resulting from rapid political-economic change in Burma” (Mostafanezhad, 2017, p. 67; see also Loong, 2019). Rapid aid flight to other humanitarian crisis zones (e.g. Bangladesh and Syria) has contributed to reduced food rations and deteriorated living conditions in the camp. Many residents understand these declines as an unofficial strategy to forcibly repatriate camp residents (Perkins, 2019). TBC, whose members include nine international NGOs and 95 per cent of whose funding comes from five countries (The Border Consortium, 2020), has been the primary provider of food and shelter for residents in the camps in Western Thailand for more than three decades. Over the last decade, TBC has been forced to pivot according to geopolitical shifts and funding interests of its donors. For instance, in 2015, the US ended its repatriation programme through which thousands of camp residents were resettled. During this period, many residents had lost hope for a long-awaited future. For example, Htet, a former political prisoner and part-time camp resident and journalist described how he felt after he learned of the closing of the resettlement program:
Recently … I got to interview some of the refugees in the camps. Yesterday, they announced that the United States ended the reunification program. As soon as they heard about that news, they went into shock because they hoped for that a lot. They told me that they are so hopeless. We have no tomorrow. What the fuck life, something like that. Some people told me that, yeah. They feel so sad because the United States is the biggest country for the resettlement program for Burmese refugees.
Aid flight from Mae La Camp has exacerbated the already precarious existence of its residents. While large-scale FDI in Myanmar cultivates new kinds of hopes for some, it continues to trigger the forging of new land and labor frontiers in the borderlands. Camp residents are subject to alienation through the practice of turning people and things into “mobile assets” removed from their livelihood conditions as flexible labor that is easily forced into and out of capitalist supply chains (Tsing, 2016). These practices, Jonathan Padwe observes, produce “new kinds of precarity that attend to capitalism ‘after progress’, when surplus laborers and those seeking refuge from unworkable lives find themselves without the protections of the welfare state, and bereft of the benefits and securities that proliferated in earlier economies” (2018: 2). Yet, as Watts (2017) and others note, in many cases, including in Myanmar, “many of these putative state-backed securities were never there in the first place” (483). Rather, alienation is enacted in multiple iterations for Mae La Camp residents. Prior to entering the camp, for instance, Monir, one Rohingya resident, “used to have a land there [in Myanmar],” but
then the Burmese military occupied our village after it was burnt down. So, we have nothing now … it all started when soldiers decided to build makeshift hut[s] to celebrate … water festival (New Year) in front of the mosque. Three of the mosque committee members got arrested after they tried to discuss with soldiers to move their hut [a] little aside. They were sent to the front line as hard labor. Then sentenced to two years in jail. The military announced that they confiscated the village soon after.
Monir’s story is echoed throughout Mae Sot, where many residents recall periods of forced displacement and land-grabs. The widespread loss of land and livelihoods has co-constructed new socio-economic relations where those who flee to border camps become dependent on their co-dwellers and INGOs. For instance, when asked about his experience in the camp, Thiha, a Karen man in his mid-40s, explained, “we are totally dependent on them. Our life would be like a stray dog … The rations has been gradually cut down. I worry that may happen in future … I am scared.” For most, life in the camps is a protracted experience where children and even grandchildren have been born and raised. For others, it is a short-lived period of precaritization that thrust them into the urban core of Thailand and beyond.
5.2. Northern Thai-Myanmar border: Chiang Mai, Mae Hong Son and Koung Jor Camp
Outside of the nine officially designated “temporary shelter areas” situated along Thailand’s Western border, the border-zone is also checkered with unofficial camps that house displaced persons along the northern Thai-Myanmar border. In 2019 there were 32 IDP “sites” in Shan State, and one unrecognized camp situated on the Thai side of the border (OCHA 2019). The residents of the Koung Jor Camp in Chiang Mai Province are among thousands of Tai peoples forced to flee during the military campaigns of the early 2000s that targeted villagers in Shan State who were suspected of providing succor to the Shan State Armies.
In July of 2017, Aye, an elderly woman and her middle-aged daughter, Kyi, tended to a small garden of chilies growing in the partial shade of their temporary bamboo shelter in the Koung Jor Camp. Outside the lean-to, a bag of rice rested against the wall of thatched straw – the last bag the mother and daughter would receive that year. The pair arrived at the Koung Jor informal refugee camp in 2002 after the Myanmar military violently occupied and later razed their village in Shan. Kyi’s hands moved with remarkable agility as she cleaned and sorted the chilies into a woven basket. Aye and Kyi are not formally permitted to work, but they make approximately $1 per day between them cleaning chilies to sell at Thai markets. When asked what happened to her family when the Burmese military came to her house in Shan state, her hands slowed as she threw a quick glance at her mother, asking for approval to speak. Aye nodded, and Kyi recalled the experience.
A Burmese soldier killed my father. At first, he asked for money. He got drunk and asked for money from my father. My father said, he doesn’t have money and my father begged for mercy. He asked for 200 kyat [15 cents]. My father didn’t have it and so he killed my father. He shot my father one time – he fell down and cried out “I’m hurt!!” My father got up and begged again for mercy. He shot my father another time. So, we all ran away and we heard the sound of our father falling to the floor because our floor was made from bamboo. We told ourselves that “our father is dead’’ and we ran away. […]After we gathered again, we did not dare live in the house. So, we buried our father and moved to Thailand.
Aye and Kyi, having fled the deadly military campaigns between the sit-tat and the Shan State Army-South, and abuse by the hands of Burman military personnel, sought shelter on the Thai side of the border in a Tai monastery. In 2002 the monastery was overwhelmed by approximately 600 refugees, and brokered a deal with the Thai authorities to allow them to dwell unofficially on Koung Jor, or Happy Hill, where the monastic community maintained an orange grove. Temporary dwellings were erected along with basic water and sanitation, but the Thai authorities maintained that no permanent shelters shall be built on the premises and the refugees would remain unregistered in UNHCR’s statistical databases, and ineligible to work in the Thai economy. NGOs such as TBC have provided minimal funding to Koung Jor and to some of the IDP camps situated within the Myanmar border, but this funding ended in 2017 as, on the other side of the country, approximately 700,000 Rohingya people were forced into Bangladesh.
By 2017, residents of the unofficial Koung Jor were rendered both stateless and facing malnutrition as the last bags of rice were delivered. The sudden aid flight resulted in widespread fear of destitution and forced repatriation among camp residents as life on the other side of the border remained uncertain. Lung Sai Leng, a resident and leader of the Koung Jor camp since 2002, lamented:
If we have to return [to Myanmar], we will not be allowed to live in our villages. So, the first thing we think is: if we have to live there, who can guarantee that there won’t be fighting […] and how will we work and earn money when our land is filled with landmines?
As donor aid poured across the border to Myanmar, survivors of Myanmar’s civil wars continued to eke out their existence along the border. Fear in the camp is punctuated by scenes of hope as small children dash about the bamboo structures, chasing dogs and basking in the cool afternoon breezes that pass over the Shan Highlands. Parents are hopeful that their children will one day find a life of dignity outside the camp, yet this hope is ephemeral as to the camp’s right looms an imposing mountainside where a Thai military encampment sits, watching them and controlling their movement with checkpoints. To its left stands the sit-tat military outpost and further upland into the hills, the Shan State Army-South, the military arm of the Restoration Council of Shan State. The three military garrisons hover over the camp, their turrets lining the hillsides and the flags of all three nations planted firmly into the soil to territorialize and make concrete imagined lines denoting conflicting claims to sovereignty.
While the garrisons’ presence can instill a sense of safety, they also ensure currents of geopolitical fear for lost land and disenfranchised rights. Residents fear being caught and deported while working to supplement their rations in the camp, but, for the most part, the Thai soldiers turn a blind eye to the informal economies that recruit undocumented Tai laborers (Sebro, 2019). The camp’s remaining residents are mostly elderly or school-aged youths as the middle aged have left for the cities where they toil for long hours in factories, as maids, or in dangerous sectors spraying pesticides, doing construction work, or in the sex industry. While life in the camps is intensely precarious, millions more exiles find themselves beyond the limited services provided in the camps. By rendering camp residents surplus, once outside of the camp they are vulnerable to superexploitation. Thus, the surplus precaritization of the residents of Koung Jor is well underway. With over half of the camps residents looking for opportunities elsewhere, the geoeconomic hope they are promised is elusive.
5.3. Bangladesh–Myanmar border: Cox’s Bazar and Kutupalong refugee camp
In mid-2017, the sit-tat murdered 10,000 Rohingya and expelled more than 700,000 others. The Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority group that has long been forcibly confined to three districts of western Myanmar’s Rakhine state, have endured protracted plight since the late 1970s when they experienced massive expulsions events (1978–79, also in 1992–94), during which the military forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Yet, the brutality of 2017 was unprecedented, especially when coupled with sit-tat Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing declaring it an attempt to complete an “unfinished job” (FFM, 2018).
While foreign diplomats and UN bureaucrats initially deemphasized the depth of the mistreatment of the Rohingya, not wanting to undermine the successful-Myanmar-transition narrative (Beech, 2017; Stoakes & Holmes, 2017), the 2017 atrocities forced a reckoning. Despite the acknowledgement of ethnic cleansing by some states and the endorsement of symbolic/legal mechanisms such as the International Court of Justice as a response, the conditions for the Rohingya have continued to devolve. In 2020, after three more years of hosting an additional 700,000 refugees, Bangladesh’s hospitality waned. The subsequent decline in material support led to numerous acts of resistance among Rohingya camp residents. For instance, we observed mobilizations to forge camp-wide protests in 2018 and 2019 against the “Smart Card” that the UN sought to distribute (Prasse-Freeman, 2022), and succeeded in delaying. Residents called it the “genocide card,” in part because they distrusted its use as it required the collection of their personal data but denied them their ethnic name “Rohingya.” Refugees from across the class spectrum asserted that by eliminating their name, the card participated in ethnic erasure; many also maintained that their biodata would be passed on to the Myanmar state to serve nefarious purposes, such as denying future citizenship claims. This fear was heightened by the internet ban imposed by Bangladesh that denied the Rohingya access to the web, and hence a virtual global presence, since August 2019 (Prasse-Freeman, 2022). These forms of ‘biopolitical minimalism’ (Redfield, 2005)—in which care regimes seek to maintain the mere life of victims they render as without politics—have contributed to the growing sentiment that “the world has forgotten” them. Like the western and northern Thai-Myanmar border experiences, feelings of fear and hopelessness were once again exacerbated along the Myanmar’s border with Bangladesh.
Moreover, as the reprieve from immediate threat gave way to the realization that the camp life would not be temporary, some Rohingya have chosen to travel by sea in attempts to escape the biopolitical purgatory of the camp (TAF 2020). Such passages are exceedingly dangerous, as memoirs of Rohingya migration poignantly attest (Habiburahman, 2019; Noor, 2012). Most Asian countries, as non-signatories of the UN Refugee convention, keep Rohingya in a legally-orchestrated state of exception. In Malaysia, Rohingya lack legal permission to work, yet are supported materially neither by the state nor the UN (Frydenlund, 2020). Prohibited from enrolling children in school, Rohingya in Malaysia face the perpetual risk of imprisonment or expulsion – a fact that has become painfully clear during security crackdowns proximate to the Covid-19 pandemic in which even those registered with the UN faced detention. Moreover, boats carrying Rohingya fleeing Bangladesh have been rebuffed upon arrival, particularly after the pandemic shifted public perception of Rohingya from objects of compassion to disease transmitters (Nursyazwani 2020; Sheik, 2020). Hussain, whom we met in Kuala Lumpur, stands as a particularly poignant example of this precarity: he described growing up in Teknaf, a town south of Cox’s Bazaar refugee camps. Hussain was closely integrated into a local Bangladeshi community and, as a child, unaware of his de facto legal invisibility. When Hussain learned he was Rohingya, and therefore could not advance to middle school, he interpreted his status as conferring a bereft future, a “shattering of his dreams” after which he became cognizant that his home was a perpetual camp. At that point, that “camp became a prison, and life a dead end.” Hussain then made the desperate choice to seek out human smugglers to bring him to Malaysia. While he survived the months-long boat journey, he described inhumane ship conditions, death threats, extortion, and how his fellow travelers suffered beatings, murder, and drownings. Those who lived washed ashore in Indonesia after being abandoned by their traffickers; Hussain remained there for some months in a detention camp and eventually obtained a refugee card and a job in Malaysia. Sitting at an outdoor café near his NGO’s office he drank tea and shuddered at the memory of that odyssey. He gestured to the café, to the street, and to his place in it, “Here,” he said, “I feel a bit free.” As Hussain’s narrative makes clear, the experiences of the Rohingya along the Bangladesh-Myanmar border echo the experiences of residents along the Thai-Myanmar borders who also have “nowhere to be home” (West & Lemere, 2015). Further, they reflect how Agamben’s camp has become the general and diffuse condition – whether in, out, or ‘after’ the camp, there is no place for them.
In this sense refugees encouraged to return and those in perpetual exile are both decreasingly able to affect how they are regulated, subject instead to biopolitical governance regimes that manage their life and even abandon them to death. Refugees in Myanmar’s borderlands are rendered surplus to previous life-sustaining networks and relationships, and hence face a vulnerability that goes beyond the version of precarity conceptualized as insecure employment, and threatens their very survival.
6. Geopolitical fear and the specter of geoeconomic hope for BRI Myanmar
The widespread practices of enclosure and dispossession in Myanmar’s borderlands described above are juxtaposed with signs of wealth that have proliferated throughout urban landscapes in Myanmar and its regional neighbors. In Yangon, the glittering shopping malls adorning the remodeled cityscape index a geoeconomic hope that circulates in the news, social media, and teashops across the country. For instance, Yangon Myo Thit, also known as New Yangon City (NYC), is a billion-dollar BRI expansion of Yangon intended to grow to twice the size of Singapore; it has come to symbolize geoeconomic hope that circulates among some residents (Nan, 2020; TNI, 2019, p. 29). President Xi Jinping explicitly branded NYC “as a pillar of the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC), a key component of the BRI” and in early 2020 he sought Myanmar government’s cooperation “on practical implementation of CMEC projects” (Nan, 2020). Images of NYC provoke the specter of geoeconomic hope in the peripheries, where residents are encouraged to persevere in hopes that they may benefit from future spoils through access to new markets or waged labor (Prasse-Freeman and Phyo Win Latt, 2018). The geoeconomic hope sparked by China and Myanmar’s neoliberal embrace reflects the shifting analytical approach and foreign policy that appears focused less on military power than the growing strength of economic power in geopolitical relations.
Since the military-capitalist state that ruled from 1962 to 1988 finally dropped any pretense of socialism when it reconsolidated in 1990 (Campbell, forthcoming), Myanmar has integrated into transnational circuits of capital. This integration peaked by the mid-2010s, as FDI and new land and labor frontiers proliferated (Faxon, 2020; Kiik, 2016). China increased FDI in Myanmar as a way to postpone its own crisis of overaccumulation (which has resulted in excess construction capacity, inflated property values, and infrastructure bubbles in the PRC – see Roberts, 2016; Sum, 2018). In the 1990s, China’s official policy agendas have sought to absorb overaccumulation in subnational contexts such as through the “Go West” policy (e.g. in Xinjiang, Tibet, Yunnan), as well as through transnational endeavors including the “Go Out” initiative under President Jiang. Since 2008, the China Dream and New Normal initiatives similarly sought to recalibrate the barometer on which success was measured (Sum, 2018). Today, BRI represents one of the most ambitious transregional geoeconomic pursuits in history.
In Myanmar, BRI describes a diffuse array of projects as well as a global branding project (Hameiri et al., 2018; Mark et al., 2020, p. 383; Jones & Zeng, 2019) as well as disparate engagements with Myanmar’s political-economy. BRI can be disaggregated into three parts in Myanmar: a “spatial fix” for over-accumulated capital invested in land (Bo Bo Nge, 2020); extraction of resources; and the site of a logistics/supply chain, principally to secure petrochemical inflows from the Middle East. Myanmar’s economy is not only transforming into a site available for the extraction of labor and resources, but is itself becoming a site available for extraction and insertion into vast supply chains. Even as BRI marketing narratives stress GDP growth in infrastructure, security, and finance investments (Sum, 2018) to stoke geoeconomic hope for Myanmar’s incorporation into free market enterprise, BRI also spurs geopolitical fear for the loss of intra and interstate sovereignty. Geoeconomic “hope”– a synthesis of narratives of economic prosperity with fearful material realities of dispossession and precaritization – plays out dramatically in the borderlands where, as Prasse-Freeman (2021) shows in Hpakant jade mines, BRI operates as a mechanism of surplus precariatization.
Myanmar’s geopolitical relationship with China and its weak negotiating position within regional supply chains is not lost on residents who frequently highlight the unequal ground on which BRI pipelines, tracks and concrete are laid, and benefits accrued. For instance, Champo, a 27-year-old civil society actor explained to us how he worries that Myanmar’s incapacity to negotiate fair agreements with China will disenfranchise farmers and small business owners. He laments that Myanmar is being exploited for China’s benefit: “I worry that we will become like a kitchen for China – to be used as much as China wishes … As a kitchen, despite whether or not it produces smoke, it will become dirty, they will come and eat whenever they like.” This perception of the broadly uneven benefits of BRI for China circulates widely among borderland residents. For example, Aung Khine, a Mandalay-based NGO worker explained to us how most people in Rakhine are skeptical of the benefits the pipelines will have for Myanmar:
With regards to gas pipeline in Kyaukphyu, many people say that although this project comes and operates in Myanmar, it provides minimum profit because all the gases are exported to China for their use … The electricity produced in Myanmar is not used for Myanmar people but for Chinese.
As natural resources and raw materials are broadly exploited in BRI developments, residents in Rakhine and other border areas reveal how new land and labor frontiers are opened up for Chinese capital accumulation, often cultivating new forms of precarity among residents. Khin, a 27-year-old civil society actor and journalist from Mandalay explained that:
The risk is that farmers become unemployed. This is the biggest risk. Those leased farmlands are no longer fertile to grow crops again after the leasing period. Maybe one of the reasons could be that farmers are no longer familiar with the agricultural practices. They could become migrants in this area. When this becomes a migrant area, it will become an economic zone for China. What I mean is that China can easily buy those areas for a cheaper price to build factories. I see this as one of China’s strategies … This is how they do things. When they want to sell tractors, they buy cows from Myanmar.
While some borderland residents maintain hope for the potential benefits of BRI, they also resent what they see as China’s unfair advantage. Shwe, a 31-year-old civil society actor and part-time merchant reflects that “If Chinese wants to do investments, there are many sectors they can invest to create a win-win situation. I would want their investment to be in the production sector, but now most of the Chinese investment is in the natural resource sector which I do not like.” Lamenting the lack of transparency on both sides, Htway further describes how BRI projects often contribute to significant precarity among local communities through the exploitation of a precarious land tenure system. He describes how land becomes available for theft by military, government, or connected cronies because the 2012 land law provided a byzantine legal process that farmers find difficult to navigate, if they even know about the new requirement to engage it. Indeed, “for farmers, they assume that these lands are their property since they have been living and working there for a long time. I think there are more losses because our legal system is also weak.” Widespread experiences of BRI-linked landgrabs throughout the borderland areas have triggered not so much geopolitical fear, at least not initially. Indeed, geopolitical fear would entail fear of militarized invasion and loss of sovereignty, which is rather a secondary effect of the way that geoeconomic hope is betrayed. For instance, Thet, a 25-year-old Rakhine-based INGO practitioner explained to us how farmlands in Rakhine were cleared and lands were grabbed for the Shwe gas pipeline project in Kyaukphyu. As former farmers now look for work, they are forced into superexploitation or to move to urban centers (see also Woods, 2020). This imperative to move leaves their own territories gutted, drained of vitality and hence made available primarily as resource for insertion into the Chinese petro-chemical supply chains. Thet explained,
[…] the jobs offered from the [Shwe gas pipeline] project are very basic manual jobs for locals. I found out that higher positions are filled up by the Chinese. From what I noticed; I didn’t see any youth above 20 years of age living nearby the area. They all migrated to the city since there are no job opportunities there. Only middle-aged people work as laborers in the Chinese Shwe pipeline project because they already lost their farmlands and therefore their livelihoods.
Thet’s observations demonstrate how experiences of alienation from the means of production trigger processes of surplus precaritization among Myanmar residents as well as migrants. Ethnic and class differences facilitate the expansion of new land and labor frontiers that cement the structures through which difference is cultivated and lubricate the supply chains that “link precarity and prosperity, as well as varied cosmologies and ways of life, creating difference-in-connection” (Tsing, 2016, p. 330).
China’s role backing the SAC junta after its February 2021 coup helps us further synthesize geopolitical fear and geoeconomic hope, as it demonstrates how geopolitical concerns – and the direct violence they can entail – suffuse the fears wrought by ostensible geoeconomic hope. Shades of this were first observable after the Rohingya genocide, when the cover China provided Myanmar at the UN Security Council led many to suspect that an expanded BRI would be extracted as a concession (Mark et al., 2020, p. 386). This sentiment became part of the common sense of the anti-coup uprising rhetoric, in which countless cartoons and memes presented SAC generals as Chinese puppets, willing to sell Myanmar’s resources in exchange for power.
This has helped challenge the overarching BRI narrative in which its range of disparate infrastructure projects are less explicitly a project of classical geopolitical control over extraterritorial spaces, than one forging – or at least claiming to forge – economic interconnection (Scholvin and Wigell, 2018, 4). BRI investments in Myanmar reinforce the entanglement of geoeconomics and military statecraft in ways that reveal the reshaping of territoriality, people, and the economy by economic actors (Blackwill & Harris, 2016; Cowen & Smith, 2009). Moreover, geoeconomic narratives of free market integration in Myanmar obscure the violence of supply chain capitalism that characterize new land and labor frontiers. Uneven development in Myanmar’s urban centers and borderland areas drives the cogeneration of spatial fixity and expansion (Sparke, 2018a, p. 484). Its supply chains trigger emergent forms of self- and superexploitation, where dependence on access to aid and resources are waning, at least in part due to the specter of geoeconomic hope that calls borderland residents to the urban cores of Yangon, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and beyond.
7. Conclusion
Through an ethnographic examination of the liquidation of refugee camps along Myanmar’s borderlands and shifts in global biopolitics driven by purportedly scarce resources and their reallocation to more pressing needs, this article demonstrates how geopolitical and geoeconomic entanglements play out among those whose labor is rendered surplus. Even as border camp residents relocate to urban centers, the borderlands continue to beckon those threatened with violence and displacement. Accounting for these contraflows, we have highlighted how FDI continues to both flood into Myanmar’s urban core as well as circulate among elites. These capital flows trigger processes of surplus precaritization as a diffuse condition of existing beyond reabsorption into labor markets, and beyond support by fields of care.
By describing the geoeconomics of Myanmar’s reconciliation process, we account for how the state’s economic ambitions rely on the exploitation of othered and exiled bodies through practices of supply chain capitalism where difference is enrolled in the exploitation of capital, labor, and resources (Tsing, 2009, p. 148). Social categories of difference are a critical, if overlooked site of exploitation in cross-border infrastructure projects where ethnicity, citizenship, and religion, among others, are revalued in supply chain structures. Through the mechanisms of supply chain capitalism, the state’s abandonment of ethnic minorities in borderland areas is increasingly obscured by the specter of geoeconomic hope, which during the transition, was higlighted by the littering of BRI projects throughout the country.
While Myanmar’s deepening embeddedness into supply chain capitalism has exacerbated precarity among borderland residents, the specter of geoeconomic hope obscures their broader abandonment by aid donors. China’s BRI and its practices of primitive accumulation in Myanmar’s land and labor frontiers, for instance, triggers processes of surplus precariatization that reveal shifts in foreign policy approaches that are focused less on classic military and territorial power than the growing strength of economic and imperial power (Narins & Agnew, 2020). Through our integration of supply-chain capitalism (Tsing, 2016) and the co-generational dialectic of geoeconomic hope and geopolitical fear (Sparke, 2018a), we have sought to highlight the entangled role of Special Economic Zones (SEZ), aid-flight, and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Myanmar’s borderlands. We also raise a number of important questions regarding how BRI is reshaping migration patterns throughout the region, as rural, resource rich frontier lands are usurped for cross-border capital investment and extraction (Sarma et al., forthcoming). This framing contributes to emerging scholarship on migrant labor exploitation, supply-chain capitalism and the geoeconomics of BRI in Southeast Asia and beyond.
Notably, the military’s seizure of power during the February 2021 coup has drastically altered Myanmar’s political environment. The human toll has been immense. This cost is measured not just in the more than one thousand murders of political protesters recorded at the time of writing (AAPP 2021), nor in the thousands more who have died on account of the COVID-19 pandemic, nor in the coup having irrevocably derailed a “roadmap to democracy” that had already taken decades to put in motion. The human toll is also evidenced in the millions of Burman people, heretofore insulated by propaganda and perhaps their own willful ignorance, who have now felt the sit-tat’s brutality directly – on their dreams, families, and bodies. Such embodied experiences all too closely resemble those that have been felt by millions of their non-Burman countrymen and women over the past 75 years.
As a consequence, the affective environment that animates the hopes and fears described in this article has been radically reshaped. Rather than the zero-sum neoliberal version available under geoeconomic hope (in which one group realizing their hopes comes at the material expense of another’s), anti-coup movements today are articulating a hope that perceives victory as possible through the strengthening of transethnic solidarity. This revolutionary hope articulates a positive-sum game in which victory is only possible if everyone, irrespective of ethnic or religious affiliation, is included in how the state is imagined. This shift may not, of course, ultimately sustain. But the logic of solidarity would seem to motivate a deeper examination of whether, if and when Myanmar’s sit-tat is defeated, dreams of geoeconomic hope could be blithely entertained again. After the betrayal of the transition and the newly-forged appreciation for the experiences of Burmese people of all stripes, there is a strong possibility that forthcoming political movements in Myanmar will forge markedly different paths than those earlier laid down.
Mary Mostafanezhad
Tani Sebro
Elliott Prasse-Freeman
Roger Norum
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