Spaces of Solidarity: Karen Activism in the Thailand-Burma Borderlands 9781789207170

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Spaces of Solidarity

Spaces of Solidarity Karen Activism in the Thailand–Burma Borderlands

 Rachel Sharples

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2020 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2020 Rachel Sharples

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without wri en permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sharples, Rachel, author. Title: Spaces of Solidarity: Karen Activism in the Thailand–Burma Borderlands / Rachel Sharples. Description: New York: Berghahn, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020007077 (print) | LCCN 2020007078 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789207163 (hardback) | ISBN 9781789207170 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Karen (Southeast Asian people)—Social conditions. | Karen (Southeast Asian people)—Social networks. | Borderlands—Social aspects— Thailand. | Borderlands—Social aspects—Burma. | Refugees—Thailand. | Refugees—Burma. | Thailand—Ethnic relations—Political aspects. | Burma—Ethnic relations—Political aspects. Classification: LCC DS432.K2 S43 2020 (print) | LCC DS432.K2 (ebook) | DDC 305.895—dc23 LC record available at h ps://lccn.loc.gov/2020007077 LC ebook record available at h ps://lccn.loc.gov/2020007078 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper

ISBN 978-1-78920-716-3 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-717-0 ebook

For He ie and Albie

And in memory of Pi Aeo, Ajarn Pornpimon and Saw Kweh Say

 Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Preface

viii

Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction. Spaces of Solidarity

xi xiii 1

Chapter 1. Movements across Space The Thailand–Burma Borderlands as a Social Construct

25

Chapter 2. From Buffer Zone to Friendship Bridge The Contemporary Context of the Thailand–Burma Borderlands

42

Chapter 3. By the Shade of a Tree Scales of Resistance, Pa erns of Activism

67

Chapter 4. This Story Is Not for Myself Paths of Connectivity, Networks of Solidarity

88

Chapter 5. ‘Symbolic Anchors of Community’ Processes of Cultural Recovery

115

Conclusion. The Space Between

144

References

153

Index

161

 Illustrations Figures 0.1. Weaving in Mae La refugee camp

15

1.1. Group of displaced persons gathered under the Thai–Myanmar Friendship Bridge

34

1.2. The market in Mae Sot

40

4.1. ‘Fate’

102

4.2. ‘Hsaw Pa Kaw’

104

Maps 0.1. Map of Burma

xv

0.2. Map of the Thailand–Burma borderlands

xvi

 Preface I first arrived in Mae Sot on the Thailand–Burma border in 2002. Back then it was like a ‘frontier’ town, a melting pot of undesirable and eclectic individuals engaged in a diverse range of activities. Some of these constituted Mae Sot’s seedy underside, like the black market, which specialised in gems, jewellery, drugs, teak and guns at the time. Others serviced the growing refugee population, the most visible of which were the myriad of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) that based themselves in Mae Sot, the larger of which perused Mae Sot’s tiny streets in large SUVs that moved like dark mysterious beasts and represented incredible wealth. There was also a glut of researchers, journalists and missionaries who could be evasive and mysterious about their intentions and their activities. On one of my first trips to Mae Sot on the overnight bus, I was asked the question: ‘Are you a missionary or an NGO worker?’ This largely encapsulated the perception of what a Western person might want being on the border. Mae Sot is the keeper of many hats. It was the central hub for Burma’s political opposition movement and a safe haven for many of the student and opposition leaders who fled the Burmese military backlash against the uprising in 1988. As a result, many of these organisations had offices there and used Mae Sot as a base to project their political aspirations to an international audience. It has close proximity to old Kawthoolei, the spiritual centre of the Karen resistance movement until its fall in 1995, though it still remains a revered reference point of the revolution. It is also, due to its close proximity to a number of Karen refugee camps, the central hub for the NGOs that service these camps. Members of various ethnic groups from Burma reside here, consisting of refugees in the camps, migrant workers who live illegally in the community, and activists who straddle both camp and community worlds. Importantly, and perhaps less visible, is the role that Mae Sot has played as a cross-border entry and exit point

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for the provision of much-needed services and other forms of support for communities still inside Burma’s conflict zones. For all of these reasons, it was an obvious choice as a research location. In 2002 I was working for Burma Issues, a grassroots organisation that had a dual focus on documenting the human rights abuses against ethnic groups in Burma and conducting community-organising trainings with populations inside Burma. My job was to present the raw human rights data in a format that could be used to draw the a ention of an international, English-speaking audience. This took the form of submissions to United Nations (UN) agencies as well as reports and newsle ers that documented particular pa erns in human rights abuses. However, most of the work of this organisation was carried out by local staff – Karen, Karenni and Shan from Burma, and Thai staff – with an emphasis on both prioritising grassroots voices and building their capacity to affect change. This experience taught me many things, but in particular that there are ways to understand and resolve the conflict in Burma through the voices of grassroots communities. My experience working in this space suggests that much of this type of work occurs in ways that go largely unrecognised in both theoretical and operational accounts of the conflict in Burma. With this in mind, I have sought to give prominence to Karen voices in this book, particularly those who can articulate a grassroots perspective. My interest was in developing a greater understanding of the spatial construct, the borderlands, but also the actions and voices of those who have an ‘everyday’ engagement with the space. I did not want to present the position of leadership or dominant framings like those of the state or local authorities, though of course elements of these are woven throughout the book, particularly as a contextual tool. I believe these positions are well-documented already. I wanted to examine a phenomenon I was witnessing in the borderlands: the actions of individuals that collectively pointed to pa erns of resistance and activism that were both particular to the space and driven by a desire to be a part of the change in Burma. There were many voices in the borderlands, articulating alternative versions/ visions of what it meant to survive and belong in a deeply divided national space. But they struggled against a dominant narrative that essentially positioned them as either deviant subversives or as passive victims of the conflict. I was therefore also interested in the structural frameworks that were supportive (or not) of these actions and what impact these may have had on their form and effectiveness. In a conflict as long as that in Burma and in a se ing that constitutes a protracted refugee situation, it seems pertinent to assess the dominant approaches taken to date and to examine alternatives. This book therefore examines the active engagement the Karen have with their persecution and displacement, and subsequent

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emplacement in the borderlands, and, in particular, how these acts construct spaces of solidarity through pa erns of activism, paths of connectivity and processes of cultural recovery. There is much we can learn when we redefine the terms of inquiry and centre grassroots voices. There are a few points worth making about some of the material and terminology in the book. The ethnographic material presented in this book comes from fieldwork conducted between 2005 and 2011, predominantly in and around Mae Sot. I have been conducting research on the Karen and the larger Burmese context from 2002 up to the present day, and this extended engagement with the country informs many of the ideas and arguments in this book. The names of the Karen participants in this book are pseudonyms, including references to their cultural expression. I acknowledge that this is not ideal. Voice and cultural expression are important tools of agency and resistance, and I in no way want to take this away from those who participated in this research. However, this decision was based on the need to ensure the ongoing safety and privacy of many of the people who gave their time and their stories to this research. In academia, it is common to mask the identity of informants when it is deemed that disclosure could be harmful to them; in fact, it is o en an ethical imperative. Using conventions set out by McCoyd and Kerson (2006), I have chosen to use pseudonyms that reflect the ethnicity of those who participated in the research. A point of clarification is also needed around the use of ‘Burma’ or ‘Myanmar’. Since 2011 and the so-called democratic elections, it is far more common to use ‘Myanmar’ in reference to the country. However, this terminology evokes passionate and highly politicised debates. At the time of my fieldwork in the 2000s ‘Burma’ was more commonly used, particularly by those residing in the borderlands who opposed the perceived political illegitimacy of the military regime. In the context of this material and out of respect of the wishes of the participants in this research, I have retained the use of ‘Burma’ in reference to the group, ‘Burmese’ when referencing the citizens of the country and ‘Burmans’ in reference to the ethnic group. Also a note on spelling: many Karen words have slightly different spellings when translated into English, for example, Sgaw, S’gaw or S’Gkaw. These can vary depending on the author. As a result, my spelling of Karen words can differ from the spelling used by other authors. When quoting directly from other literature and authors, I have retained their spelling of the words, but in all other instances I have retained the spelling used by the participants themselves. As there is no universally accepted convention around Karen spelling, this seems the most authentic approach to take.

 Acknowledgements This book is dedicated to the many Karen who gave their stories with generosity and courage. I hope that I have done these stories justice. My heartfelt respect and gratification goes out to you all, but in particular I would like to thank: Mort, Theblay, Padi, Htoo Moo, Hten Dah, Taw Nay Htoo, Gay Hu, Cha Mu, Tham La, Padoh, Ehna and Nico. You all suffered my curiosity and endless questions, and you are all instrumental in guiding my ideas and arguments around the problems facing Burma. I would especially like to thank colleagues at Burma Issues, who introduced me to Burma and to new ways of viewing the conflict, and ultimately resolutions to it – in particular, Ngamsuk Ru anasatain, whose commi ed and unassuming way has inspired and guided me from the day we met, and who remains one of my dearest and most thought-provoking friends. Also, I would like thanks others who have worked along the border and provided insights at various stages in the process, especially Jack Dunford, Max Ediger, Chutima Thongburan, Siraporn Kaewsombat, Erich Miller, BJ and Chris Rollins. I would also like to acknowledge Saw Kweh Say, Pi Aeo and Ajarn Pornpimon – while no longer with us, their influence on me was profound and their legacies in the broader Thai and Burmese communities are strong. I would like to thank the many academic colleagues who have engaged with me over the ideas inherent in this book, in particular Damian Grenfell, Paul James, Kevin Dunn, Victoria Stead, Anne McNevin, Val ColicPeisker and the two reviewers of my original thesis, Michael Connors and Anna Tsing. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of the earlier version of this manuscript. Special thanks to Susanne Rouillard, who applied much-need mapping skills to the maps in this book. I would like to thank the Heinrich Boll Foundation, which funded my field trips in 2005 and 2008, and RMIT University and Western Sydney

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University for the various forms of financial and nonfinancial support they have provided. I would like to acknowledge Taylor & Francis for granting permission to reprint aspects of one of my journal articles in this manuscript. Parts of Chapter 1 first appeared in ‘Movements across Space: A Conceptual Framework for the Thai–Burma borderlands’, Rachel Sharples, Journal of Borderlands Studies, copyright © Association for Borderlands Studies, reprinted by permission of Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group, www.tandfonline.com on behalf of Association for Borderlands Studies. To friends and family, who have offered the right kind of support at just the right time – Daniel Crosariol, Rebecca Barnes, Claudia Crosariol, Bronwyn Humm, Jonathan Sharples, Kimberley Sharples, Dennis Sharples, Marianne Nicholson, Derek Nicholson and Alice Laws. And finally to Emma, for your unwavering support and love. Without you, I would never have been able to write this book.

 Abbreviations ABSDF BBC BERG BSPP CCSDPT CDP COERR CPB DKBA FTUK HRDU HRFM HRW ICC ICJ IDP KESAN KHRG KIO KMT KNLA KNU KORD KPC KRW KSNG KWO KYO MOI MoLIP

All Burma Students’ Democratic Front Burmese Border Consortium Burma Ethnic Research Group Burma Socialist Programme Party Commi ee for Coordination of Services to Displaced Persons in Thailand Chin Democracy Party Catholic Office for Emergency Relief and Refugees Communist Party of Burma Democratic Karen Buddhist Army Federation of Trade Unions – Kawthoolei Human Rights Documentation Unit Human Rights Foundation of Monland (Burma) Human Rights Watch International Criminal Court International Court of Justice Internally Displaced Person Karen Environment and Social Action Network Karen Human Rights Group Kachin Independence Organisation Kuomintang Karen National Liberation Army Karen National Union Karen Office of Relief and Development Karen Peace Council Karen River Watch Karen Student Network Group Karen Women’s Organisation Karen Youth Organisation Ministry of Interior (Thailand) Myanmar Ministry of Labour, Immigration and Population

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Abbreviations

MSF NCGUB NDUF NGO NLD NMSP NRC NULF SHRF SPDC SSA SWAN TBBC TBC UNHCR UNICEF

Médecins Sans Frontières National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma National Democratic United Front Non-governmental Organisation National League for Democracy New Mon State Party Norwegian Refugee Council National United Liberation Front Shan Human Rights Foundation State Peace and Development Council Shan State Army Shan Women’s Action Network Thailand Burma Border Consortium The Border Consortium United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees United Nations Children’s Fund

Map 0.1. Map of Burma. Created by Rachel Sharples.

Map 0.2. Map of the Thailand–Burma borderlands. Created by Rachel Sharples.

 Introduction Spaces of Solidarity The lives of the porters are unlucky, no chance to survive We have to carry unfair heavy loads We have wounds on our shoulders and heads We have to climb mountains and are beaten like ca le We have to suffer from this powerlessness They tortured us cruelly All these problems are caused by the military government Escaping to survive Their power depends on their arms They killed many porters Many porters have sacrificed We, the escaped porters, have hearts filled with hatred… They beat and injured over one hundred of us porters Don’t cry porters Together we will carry our loads until we reach the frontline Along the way we saw many dead porters Who died from landmines when they tried to escape When we think of them we feel pain in our hearts Porters run to escape and the soldiers try to shoot them When we escape we feel grief for the porters who cannot escape When we think of this we want to fight back to the military government… Together we will struggle from now on! —Eh De Li, a prison porter1

In November 2003, a group of prison porters arrived at the Thailand– Burma border. Their most immediate journey had begun in various Burmese prisons where they had been incarcerated for offences ranging from receiving stolen goods to buying illegal lo ery tickets, murder and desert-

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ing the Burmese Army. These porters ended up in Burma’s eastern border area of Karen State, where they were used as human labour to carry heavy loads of machinery, ammunition and food for the Burmese military. The porters told stories of being used as landmine sweepers (walking in front of Burmese military personnel to activate landmines), of beatings when they became too tired to walk and of experiencing the malignancy of war. Many porters who a empted escape were killed, while a few made it back to their villages or to the Thailand–Burma border. Those who made it to the border were afforded temporary security. A number of these porters then did something that was only made possible by their current location: tell their stories to a wider international audience. They wrote a poem about their experience and spoke it to camera. The porters were entrusting that their story would be told and their message heard, but with li le idea where it might end up or how it might be used. An act such as this highlights some of the key themes that frame this book. In a straightforward sense the book examines the significance of what is being said and where it is being said, and the relationship between them. While fairly standard questions, an in-depth analysis shows that the answers are of course much more complex. At one level, what is being said is a personal experience of persecution. At another level, it shows a conscious reflection on the effects of armed conflict, and in its delivery an awareness of the place in which it is voiced. The poem is spoken and projected from the perceived safety of the Thai side of the Thailand–Burma border, an action that could not have taken place inside Burma. In its public projection, the porter’s story became part of a larger narrative of political injustice that is produced in relation to Burma. In the poem the porter’s talk of their persecution in terms of killings, beatings and being forced to carry heavy loads. They do so in critical terms: ‘Escaping to survive, their power depends on their arms.’ The porters know who is responsible for their persecution and that the perpetrator’s power lies in the threat of their guns. The poem also frames the porter’s experiences in a way that promotes solidarity with others who share similar stories, ending with a cry to action: ‘Together we will struggle from now on.’ This is a story of persecution that is shared by many and in its telling, it becomes part of the larger body of activist material that helps shape the identity of displaced Karen in the borderlands. The location of this voicing of persecution is a key preoccupation of this book. Burma is one of Southeast Asia’s frontiers. Its southern border faces the Bay of Bengal, but on all other sides its borders are landlocked, shared with Bangladesh, India, China and Thailand. From the time of a military coup in 1962 until the early 1990s, these borders kept Burma politically and economically isolated, a position largely achieved through the so-

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cialist path pursued by the military dictatorship and the enforcement of a policy of national unity that denied democratic reform and isolated the population from the rest of the world (Callahan 2003; Fink 2009; M. Smith 1999; Taylor 2009). With more than 52 million people and over 130 ethnic nationalities, successive military governments have largely a empted to contain and control the population through authoritarian rule, and with li le tolerance for political plurality or ethnic diversity (Silverstein 1997; Steinberg 2001; Taylor 1982). The ramifications of these policies are particularly evident in Burma’s border areas where ethnic populations are concentrated and armed ethnic groups opposing the military dictatorship are typically based. Particularly since the 1970s, these policies have seen large numbers of people displaced within Burma and many hundreds of thousands forced to flee across borders and into neighbouring countries (BERG 1998; HRW 2005).2 One consequence of this is that the Thailand–Burma border has become a place of refuge and reprieve for those fleeing persecution in Burma. The porters mentioned above not only found a safe and relatively familiar place at the Thailand–Burma border, but were also afforded an open informal hospitality and access to resources not found inside Burma. There is some historical continuity to this as, despite state regulation, people have moved back and forth across this modern international border for over a century. But in constructing and projecting their poem from the Thailand–Burma border, the porters are distinguishing the place from which they choose to tell their story; the location of this act of cultural resistance is no random coincidence. So what gives the border this perceived status of refuge? How does this largely invisible line on the ground come to represent differing states of security? Why did these porters tell their story here, on the Thai side of the Thailand–Burma border? And, more broadly, what impact does the telling of such stories have, particularly in terms of identity, agency, cultural reaffirmation and solidarity? The central argument of this book addresses these preoccupations. I argue that the Thailand–Burma borderlands is the se ing for modes of social practice that critically inform Karen activism. The borderlands is a distinct space characterised by a tension between a modern territorial domain, which is characterised by the modern demarcation of the Thailand–Burma border and the consolidation of state control over it, and the intersection of a particular form of social relations, typified by a fluidity of movement (of information, resources, ideas, culture and identity) that intensifies the possibilities available to displaced Karen, particularly in terms of political agency and mobilisation. These social relations take on the form of an interchange that occurs across the national border. This interchange is defined by the nature of sociality in conjunction with a

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territorial domain (the Thailand–Burma border) and is framed by three modes of social practice conducted by displaced Karen and specific to the space: pa erns of activism and resistance, networks of solidarity and processes of cultural recovery. These points are elaborated upon across the remainder of the book, but it is first necessary to provide some context to the borderlands space and the displaced Karen who inhabit it.

A Borderlands Space In October 2005 I travelled by song tiaew3 through the early morning mist and was deposited in front of a bamboo gate flanked by a razor-wire fence. Strangers emerged to meet me. We walked the ‘highway’4 of the refugee camp, passing bamboo houses and shops, herds of goats and groups of cha ing villagers. We traversed the tricky terrain of ba ered paths and slippery crevices, exposed roots and rocky outcrops. At the end of this uneven path, at the base of tall white cliffs and in the shade of a canopy of trees, we reached our destination, a Karen friend’s wedding, a refugee camp wedding. I mention this wedding because it represents how confusing and ambiguous the Thailand–Burma borderlands can be for an outsider. The wedding was held in a refugee camp. Special arrangements ensured I could get into the camp and a end the wedding. The groom was Sgaw Karen, the bride Pwo Karen: he is Christian and she is Buddhist. Traditional protocol suggests they should never have met, let alone marry. A Karen National Union (KNU) leader cum Christian pastor presided, and the ceremony included Animist and Buddhist traditions despite its Christian directive. The speeches were in many ways familiar: respect the sanctity of marriage; work on the partnership; be prepared to compromise; do not go to bed angry. The bridesmaids wore the traditional hse (Karen dress) and hko peu (headscarf). A young Karen man dressed in jeans and with a rock star mop of hair brought out a guitar and amplifier, and sang a Karen rock song so loudly the veins in his neck protruded. The groom told me he drank ‘five fingers’ of whisky to calm himself. The bride’s family paid ‘bribe’ money to be allowed to travel from a different refugee camp to a end the ceremony. A erwards, the wedding party ate the meat of three slaughtered pigs, as well as goat, ribs and curries, all washed down with beer and whisky. It was 10 a.m. in the morning and when you looked around, you could see people from different countries, religions and languages laughing, talking and eating. In married life the couple spent their time between a house in the camp, where they raised their pigs, and a share house in Mae Sot, where

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they documented human rights abuses against Karen people back inside Burma. To contact them in the camp, you rang a communal number and le a message, and an hour to a few days later, they would call you back. In Mae Sot they had mobile phones and the internet. They communicated through discussion forums and online chats, talking with people from the other side of the world who they have never met. This wedding is typical of the type of social relationships that I explore over the course of this book. Social se ings such as this one represent a point of intersection, where at times complex and seemingly contradictory activities and messages develop the fabric of social relationships particular to the place in which they are occurring. In the example mentioned above, these social relationships are numerous: interethnic, familial, political, cultural, gendered, interreligious and communal, and enabled by technology, shared languages and historical ties. The wedding mirrors the complex contributions both individuals bring to the relationship, differing religious orientations, gender roles and ethnic traditions, but it is also influenced by the space in which it takes place, the restrictions of a refugee camp, the inclusion of Western culture and technology, and the ability to move around freely. My point of interest is not that these relationships occur, for they are replicated in some way across the world every day, but rather that at their point of intersection, we get an analytical account of the space in which it is occurring. As a researcher, a key concern is how best to capture and present this dynamic in terms of an academic argument. The concept of borderlands will be elaborated in more detail in Chapter 1, but it is necessary to lay out some of the key components of the term here. The location of acts of cultural and political resistance such as the porter’s poem mentioned at the beginning of this introduction occurs in a complex political space that highlights a key thematic concern of this book: the composition of the Thailand–Burma borderlands space. In this book a ‘borderlands’ domain is a space defined as having two intersecting components: loosely bounded geographical places where people live and interact with both state and nonstate institutions associated with the mechanisms of a nation-state boundary (Gupta and Ferguson 1992), and a space where the social interactions across the boundary give meaning to the borderlands as a space of cultural significance (Donnan and Wilson 1999). This definition incorporates two important elements that shape my understanding of the borderlands. First, I take a social constructionist perspective of the Thailand–Burma borderlands, in that I argue that the borderlands is a manifestation of space that is produced in and through the social relationships that occur across the border (Massey 2005; Soguk 2007; Staeheli 1994).This concept of a ‘borderlands’ allows me to map the

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interchange that occurs across a broader space that is informed by the Thailand–Burma border, rather than seeing the border as purely delineating two distinct autonomous spaces. This interchange is defined by the nature of sociality in conjunction with a territorial domain. In the context of this book, the interchange is broadly mapped through the operations of the nation-state and the practices of displaced Karen, and manifests as a point of tension between a empts by the nation-state to create a homogenised space delineated by the border and the intersecting social relations of displaced Karen that tend to map more fluid activities across the border. Second, this definition of borderlands allows me to retain the importance of the geographical place that plays an integral part in the shape these social relationships take. While I will speak of places throughout this book, such as Mae Sot, Mae La refugee camp or the strip of ‘no-man’s land’ that sits between the two nation-states, this is a process of orientating the reader in terms of a geographical location that is treated by locals and others as distinct from other places. In this definition, the borderlands is distinct from the Thailand–Burma border, which is used here to describe the national boundary, as marked on a map, that separates Burma and Thailand, and that is an outward manifestation of the political power and territorial sovereignty of the adjoining states (Donnan and Wilson 1999; Newman and Paasi 1998). The border is part of the borderlands and as a manifestation of state power, the Thailand–Burma border should also be viewed as a spatial social construct (Newman and Paasi 1998), though encompassing a more homogenised sense of space than applies to the borderlands. Within this definitional framework, the term ‘borderlands’ is used as an analytical device to account for the social relationships that occur across the geographical boundary that is the Thailand–Burma border and that can also account for the notion of the contested social interaction that occurs in the space. This relates directly to the spatial arguments made in this book: that the borderlands exists at the nexus of tension between state and nonstate actors; it has both geographical and conceptual qualities, both of which are o en highly contested; and it is o en a site of discursive contestation and struggle, and as a result is conducive to a process of formulating new identities.

The Karen While the origins of the Karen are contentious, the claim most commonly accepted by early colonial administrators and missionaries was that the Karen originally came from present-day China (Cross 1854; Saw Aung

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Hla 2000 [1939]; Marshall 1997 [1922]).5 What is more evident is that a er a period of migration, the Karen se led in areas that cover present-day Burma and Thailand. In Thailand the Karen are predominantly found in the hills of the country’s northwest, as well as around major northern cities like Mae Sot, Chiang Mai and Mae Hong Son. Many Karen also live along the Thailand–Burma border, a result of either earlier migration or forced displacement caused by conflict inside Burma. Within the territorial confines of Burma, Karen people are predominantly found on Burma’s eastern side, in the Tenasserim Region and the Karen State,6 but also in the Irrawaddy Delta to the west of Rangoon.7 Karen in these areas are predominantly engaged in agriculture, forestry, fisheries and livestock, and, for many in the mountainous areas, subsistence farming. Many Karen are also found in urban areas like Rangoon and Pegu, where they largely participate in the urban economy and lifestyle. Such a description may carry the sense that there is a homogeneous Karen identity, even one that stretches across national boundaries, but there is li le evidence to suggest that a syncretic nationalist Karen identity integrates the Karen in Burma and the Karen in Thailand. It is an important distinction to make, not only in terms of pu ing parameters around the displaced Karen I study in this book but also in its ability to illustrate a Karen identity partially formed around nationalist ties to territory rather than a shared ethnicity for all Karen. Differences in culture, religion and language that have formed over time may account for this, but one would also suggest that the mechanisms of the respective nation-states and the notion of the international boundary that now divides them also plays a significant role (Rajah 1990). These are important distinctions that are explored over the course of this book; however, it is important from the beginning to note that the displaced Karen I talk of here do not include Thai-Karen. This is because despite largely conducting their political struggle from Thai territory, the Karen political movement in the Thailand– Burma borderlands has made no real a empt to incorporate Thai-Karen into their struggle (Rajah 1990). The idea of ‘the Karen’ of Burma needs further analysis before we begin to understand the group of displaced Karen discussed in this book. Karen inside Burma are thought to number 5–7 million (BERG 1998). Yet pu ing an accurate figure on Karen population numbers o en seems like a futile business. There is li le official data available and over the years numbers have o en been manipulated for political purposes (Cusano 2001: 141; M. Smith 1999: 30). For example, the 1931 Census, which is considered the last a empt to truly capture Burma’s demography and particularly its ethnic population, numbered the Karen at 1.3 million. The 1971 Census noted 3.2 million Karen, but in 1983 the Burmese government put the Karen

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population at only 2.21 million (BERG 1998: 7). At the time of publication, ethnic population data from the 2014 Census was still to be publicly released, the ‘sensitivity’ of the data being cited as the reason. While an accurate population figure may be hard to derive, so is a comprehensive distinction of the Karen as a cultural grouping. Throughout this book I will argue that Karen identity in the borderlands is projected through modes of social practice that manifest in much more fluid and elaborate understandings of identity than the sole focus on a homogeneous Karen identity would typically allow. There is much evidence to support the argument about the complex nature of positioning a Karen cultural identity and the cultural, economic, linguistic and religious differences between the various people who call themselves Karen (Cusano 2001). There are generally considered to be two major subgroups within the Karen: Sgaw and Pwo. They each have their own dialect and loosely speaking an assigned religion: Pwo Karens tend to be Buddhist and Sgaw Karens Christian.8 Chris Cusano suggests that a distinction could also be made between lowland and highland Karen (2001: 143), and there is some merit to this categorisation. Lowland Karen are typically involved in the mainstream economy through small businesses or employment in the civil services. As such, they are more likely to interact with non-Karen members of the population, particularly in trade and schooling, and are more likely to take on elements of the Burmese culture and speak the Burmese language. They are also more likely to be exposed to Western and Burmese dress and culture. On the other hand, highland Karen are more isolated from the Burmese culture. They are commonly subsistence farmers living in Karen State’s eastern mountainous terrain and generally maintain a strong sense of their Karen language and culture. Highland Karen can be economically isolated and experience low education rates (Cusano 2001). While the majority of Burma’s Karen population is estimated to live in the Irrawaddy Delta (Thawnghmung 2008), the Karen are more commonly associated with Karen State. This is due, at least in part, to two reasons: first, Karen State’s eastern hills are remote and Karen communities living there have more easily retained the distinctive features of Karen culture; and, second (and of particular relevance to this book), Karen State is closely linked to the Karen resistance movement, and claims over Karen territory are commonly found in the projection of a Karen identity from the borderlands. Burma has a long history of ethnic unrest. The main ethnic groups are the Arakan, Burman, Chin, Kachin, Karen, Karenni, Mon and Shan. Each has its own language and culture. But even within these ethnic groups, one finds a multitude of subgroups with differing dialects and traditions.

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It is generally claimed that there are over 100 ‘national races’ in Burma. Finding an adequate system of governance that can accommodate the political needs of the various non-Burman ethnic minority groups has dominated Burmese politics since independence in 1948. Many of these ethnic minority groups were disillusioned with the political landscape postindependence and in turn developed their own political and armed movements (M. Smith 1999). In the absence of appropriate representation in the 1947 Constitution, they were prepared to develop resistance groups against the central government. The KNU formed in 1947 and quickly became a significant armed force against the central authorities, although it was certainly not the only one, with the Kachin, Shan, Chin, Mon and Karenni all waging similar ba les against the newly independent government. At times, the KNU controlled considerable territory; in 1949 it famously took control of Insein, an outer suburb of Rangoon, while at other times they controlled a large swath of territory from Mandalay in the north to Thaton and Kawkareik in the southeast (M. Smith 1999). A political resolution to the ethnic minority issue caused considerable concern for both the postindependence democratic government and the subsequent military regime. When General Ne Win staged his coup in 1962, he justified the act by stating that ‘Federalism is impossible; it will destroy the Union’, while a spokesman of the new regime went even further, commenting that federalism was a luxury Burma could ill afford (M. Smith 1999: 196). Ne Win saw the Tatmadaw9 as the sole protector of the country’s unity and national integrity, and federalism (with its accommodation of ethnic representation) as a threat to this unity. It is a position synonymous with the military regime throughout the 1990s and 2000s, with giant billboards lining Mandalay’s fortress stating: ‘Tatmadaw and the people, cooperate and crush all those harming the Union.’ What Ne Win and his military government instigated was a concerted effort to eradicate the ethnic opposition forces, which over the years were increasingly pushed back into Burma’s ethnic border areas. In 1974 the Burmese Army implemented a ‘Four Cuts’ campaign in Karen State,10 which was an a empt to cut off the insurgent group’s access to food, funds, intelligence and recruits. But such a campaign was never going to simply target ethnic armed groups; civilian villagers bore the brunt of this campaign. The Burmese Army conducted a systematic campaign of terror where they a acked villages and burnt crops, tortured and killed those accused of harbouring Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA)11 soldiers, stole food and animals, moved entire villages into relocation sites under military control, made impossible extortion demands, used villagers as porters and for forced labour, and raped and killed at will.12 The

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result was a mass movement of traumatised people, many eking out an existence as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) within Karen State, and others fleeing to the Thailand–Burma border where they sought refuge in Thai villages or, a er 1984, the refugee camps. This is a perfunctory summary that serves a number of purposes: to give historical context to the conditions that preside in Karen State today, to give a demographic snapshot of the displaced Karen who participated in this book and to give some understanding of the key elements from which Karen activism and identity in the borderlands has formed. The vast majority of Karen currently residing in the Thailand–Burma borderlands, including most of those who participated in this research, would be considered highland Karen from the eastern hills region of Karen State, the area of land immediately adjacent to Thailand. They are typically both Pwo and Sgaw, although Christian Sgaw Karen tend to hold many of the leadership positions of the Karen political movement in the borderlands. Many have a strong connection to the KNU, which has been a significant presence in the hills region of eastern Karen State and the main proponent of the projection of a nationalist Karen identity. Most displaced Karen in the borderlands share a common experience of persecution and displacement as a result of a civil war that has consumed Karen State for more than sixty years. This unresolved conflict continues to have a considerable impact upon villagers in Karen State, and it is this group of traumatised individuals, having fled into Thailand and se led into refugee camps or local Thai communities, that make up the group of displaced Karen discussed in this book. While most tell a story similar to the circumstances listed in the paragraph above, it is their presence in the Thailand–Burma borderlands that is the basis for the arguments made in this book. From the borderlands space, displaced Karen a empt to re-establish some form of community, cultural identity and political agency. They do this through acts that develop an alternative articulation of the sociopolitical space in which they reside, an articulation that o en sits in tension with the dominant state discourse of the space. This alternative space provides opportunities for displaced Karen to undertake social practices that critically inform their activism.

The Aims of This Book While the genesis of this research lay with the arrival of the prison porters mentioned at the beginning of this introduction, its development into a book was an intellectual journey both challenging and invaluable. What one begins with is rarely what one ends up with, and that is certainly true

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of this book. The original premise was to explore practices of cultural expression as a form of resistance, to look at the act itself as a means of articulating opposition to the political forces responsible for persecution and displacement in Burma. I would look at these acts of cultural expression from a specific ethnic group from Burma, the Karen, and in a particular location, from the Thai side of the Thailand–Burma border where many had been displaced to because of conflict inside Burma. The acts of cultural expression I initially explored were in their nature public, intended, political acts of resistance, or so I intended to argue. But the longer I stayed in the Thailand–Burma borderlands and the more I spoke with Karen about the motivations and meanings behind their actions, this premise seemed an inadequate account of what was occurring. Instead, what became quickly apparent was that the act of cultural expression was an outcome of a larger political struggle that was being uniquely articulated from the borderlands. The act could only be understood in the context of the space from which it was being projected and the political influences that shaped its content. The collective weight of these acts of cultural expression also suggested they were being used as a way to explore the parameters of a cultural and political identity that was shaped both by the experience of displacement and persecution in Burma as well as emplacement in a new location in Thailand. In other words, the expressive act was a conduit to what appeared to be the creation of an alternative political space that I contend is made up of multiple, concentrated sociopolitical activities that challenge typical state-centric notions of the borderlands space. Its multiplicity heightens its contestability, and it is this idea of contestation that develops my understanding of the Thailand– Burma borderlands as a spatial form and as a site for the construction and projection of Karen activism. On reaching this conclusion, I proposed a study that could draw together the place (the Thailand–Burma border), the political act (narratives of cultural and political resistance), and the background of the struggle (conflict, displacement and persecution), through the framework of a borderlands space. For the following reasons, it seemed to be a study that was long overdue. Most existing studies of the Karen on the Thailand– Burma border contain theoretical constraints that limit an understanding of the relationship between the Karen as politically active subjects and the borderlands as a spatial entity. This link is important, first because it more adequately captures the nature of displaced Karen activity in the borderlands and, second (and in a much broader sense), because it sheds much-needed insight on the borderlands as a social construct, shaped by the social relationships that occur there.

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There is a significant body of existing literature on the Karen, and while I describe some of the key texts here, a more comprehensive examination of the literature is evident across the entirety of the book. This book is preoccupied with a particular set of themes where the literature can be grouped into three broad categories. The first constitutes literature that focuses on the political and ethnic resistance movement, largely dominated by the practices and doctrine of the KNU and its previous incarnations (KNU 1991; M. Smith 1999; Thawnghmung 2008). There has also been some literature on the identity-making of a Karen nation, in particular literature that focuses on the ethnonationalist political movement (Horstmann 2011, 2014; Rajah 2002; South 2011), the role of religion in the formation of a Karen identity (Gravers 2007; Horstmann 2011) and the development of a pan-Karen identity (Cheesman 2002; South 2007). A vast majority of the political and ethnic resistance movement literature tends to focus on intra-state relations that privilege a state-centric understanding of Burma and the Karen. While relevant, I want to push beyond the limitations I see in a state-centric discourse. First, Karen in the borderlands are forcibly displaced from Burma and are stateless in Thailand. In many respects, state operations and the state discourse a empt to exclude displaced Karen from the political domain, and so an approach that can account for the way in which displaced Karen engage with this marginalisation is required. Second, a state-centric approach privileges a state articulation of place and this fails to adequately account for differing articulations, particularly those of nonstate actors such as displaced Karen. The second category into which this body of literature falls is that which focuses on the large refugee population on the Thailand–Burma border. This literature places particular emphasis on the implementation and impact of refugee policy along the Thailand–Burma border (Banki and Lang 2007; Bowles 1998), as well as the documentation of human rights abuses inside Burma, which tends to follow a human rights discourse.13 Increasingly, we see writing that explores the political agency of refugees, in particular how they challenge governance and bureaucracy constraints (Lee 2012; Saltsman 2014), the connections between displacement and the cultural constructs of materiality, home and identity (Dudley 2010; Smith 2015), and processes of mobility and sanctuary associated with refugee protection mechanisms (Lang 2002). However, much of the literature on refugees and human rights tends to leave aside the importance of a framework for understanding the Karen as politically active participants in their own day-to-day living, as well as the flexibility to account for what is essentially a complex and opaque set of categories into which Karen in the

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borderlands fall, particularly for those who do not consider themselves a refugee and who live outside of the refugee camps. The last key area of literature is that which falls under historical ethnographic studies, particularly focusing on the documentation of Karen culture and ethnicity. These tend to be fairly orthodox accounts written by colonial administrators and missionaries (Marshall 1997 [1922]; Sco 1924; Smeaton 1920) or early Karen historians (Saw Aung Hla 2000; San C. Po 2001 [1928]). While I draw on ethnographic accounts at various junctures in this book and engage in ethnographic methods, this study differs by seeking to li the discussions of culture, identity and sociality into a broader sociopolitical framework that moves beyond a sole concentration on the immediacy of interaction. Each of these areas has made important contributions to debates focusing on the Karen in the borderlands, and in a sense I draw on all three and also build upon them. But this book differs in a key conceptual way. It argues for an approach that can account for the geopolitical and the conceptual qualities of the space as they relate to the construction and projection of Karen activism, making an argument that is framed through the concept of a ‘borderlands’, in part by engaging with material in an interdisciplinary manner. Rather than employing a narrow geopolitical definition of borders and borderlands as respectively representing an outward manifestation of state sovereignty and as grey areas of control, my approach to borderlands draws benefit from a variety of disciplines, including social theory across international and cultural studies, nationalism and refugee studies, political geography, mobilities and anthropology. By blurring genre boundaries, we can move beyond the limitations in the narrower disciplinary approaches to the Thailand–Burma borderlands and develop a more critical apparatus that demonstrates the complexity needed in understanding the space. An example of this genre crossing is to say that the Thailand–Burma borderlands is a loosely bounded geographical place associated with a nation-state boundary, and a conceptual space whose boundaries are associated with subjectivity, mobility and self-identification. At times, the borderlands is a space in which alternatives to the state discourse are practised and creative cultural production is created. At other times, it could be viewed as a site of marginalisation and unequal power distribution. The key to understanding the Thailand– Burma borderlands is not to restrict the view of it from a singular disciplinary perspective, but rather to see the borderlands as a spatial entity that is the accumulation and product of these interrelationships. This is what the concept of ‘borderlands’ can bring to this book and to studies of the Karen.

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Research Methods Given the complex mix of agents and relations along the Thailand–Burma border, negotiating a method of data collection was a key preoccupation of this research. A large part of my information gathering was conducted through traditional ethnographic practices of interviewing and participant observation. Ethnographic techniques primarily helped me to understand the pa erns of social relations and identity formation that occur in the Thailand–Burma borderlands. The book equally draws on document analysis, both historical and contemporary forms, as well as the examination of cultural expression. I will elaborate on these processes below. Over the period from 2005 to 2011, I conducted a number of field trips to the Thailand–Burma border for up to five months. My knowledge of and connection to the Karen in the borderlands must also be taken in light of my ongoing professional engagement with the border area, reaching back to 2002 and sustained by repeated return trips to the border over the last fi een years. Over the course of the fieldwork trips, I conducted indepth, semi-structured interviews with Karen refugees, displaced persons and leaders. This included a number of Karen leaders who articulated a broader sociocultural picture of the Karen within a historical context as well as Karen working in organised political se ings such as nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society groups. The principal point of reference for my work was that the participants self-designated as Karen, although other forms of identification used included being artists and activists, refugees and migrant workers. These were people who lived in the borderlands out of necessity and who had developed, over time, a unique articulation of its connection to their daily lives and to their political status. This group of people mostly derive from one of the most significant populations in and around Mae Sot: villagers who have fled the conflict inside Burma and sought refuge in Thailand. Many of the participants had been housed in one of the nine Thai government-recognised refugee camps, which at the time catered to over 140,000 refugees.14 This particular population of displaced Karen had at least one thing in common: they have all been displaced from Burma. For one participant in the research, displacement had occurred twenty-seven years before; for another, it was only ten months prior to our meeting. While some could not remember the circumstances of their displacement, instead relying on the stories of older relatives, all had been forced to flee their homes due to Burmese military offences or intense and unwanted military a ention and persecution. Most are, or had been, considered a refugee at some point in their lives, and many had spent some time in

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one of the various refugee camps on the Thailand–Burma border. Of the participants from Burma, all were Karen, with a mix of Animist, Buddhist and Christian religious identifications. All but two participants lived in Mae Sot illegally, meaning they had no nationality, no Thai ID, no formal access to health or education services, and were constantly threatened by the possibility of deportation or imprisonment if they were caught. Over half the participants had lived and been educated in the refugee camps, although all but one now lived primarily outside the refugee camps. Many of my participants also had links to the KNLA. Some were former members of the KNLA and others had siblings or parents who were members. Many expressed a political affiliation to the KNU, although their allegiances in a practical sense were much more complex and included local community identification, pro-democracy identification and affiliations with sociopolitical movements such as globalisation, anti-capitalism and environmentalism. Early on in my fieldwork, I was in Mae La refugee camp. Through an interpreter, I asked an older Karen woman if she liked to weave. She replied ‘I don’t like it, but I don’t not like it’. The ambiguity and brevity of the answer points to a crucial point of communication in Karen culture. Communication is communal, nondirect and informal.15 It requires per-

Figure 0.1. Weaving in Mae La refugee camp, 2005. Photo by Rachel Sharples.

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sonal interaction, a familiar se ing, an interest in the participant’s broader story and subtle probing. It is in this type of se ing that productive discussions can occur. When a Karen friend joined the group and they began weaving together, I learnt a lot more through their informal cha ing. I learnt that the men o en le the camp to find work, but that the women could not do so because of family commitments. Weaving alleviated their boredom. It also provided them with an income to pay their children’s schooling, and for clothes and food. The problem with my question was that it was framed in terms that were not relevant to the women’s lives. It was not a question of liking or not liking weaving; it was a ma er of practicality and necessity in the day-to-day living of a refugee camp. It was an important insight – on different forms of communication, but also the need to constantly evaluate and refine your research practices. My semi-structured interviews ranged from one to two hours. Many involved the sorts of informal chats I illustrated above. Most included multiple return si ings that allowed me to follow up ideas and ultimately engage at a deeper level with the material. In addition to these interviews, I also spoke informally with many other community members throughout the course of my fieldwork and these interactions played an integral role in the development of my arguments. A key element of these interviews and observations was that they gave me an insight into how the borderlands was ‘lived in’, moving me out of the theoretical realm to provide real experiences and real situations. Direct quotes from these interviews can be found throughout the book, providing a rich context to my own observations and arguments. The majority of my interviews were conducted in English, the participants speaking adequate, even fluent levels of English due to their education in the refugee camps and their ongoing participation in activist circles where they advocated to an international, English-speaking audience. I gave the participants the option to conduct interviews in Karen or Burmese as well, and as a result some interviewees spoke Sgaw Karen16 with an interpreter present. These interviews were either recorded or written, and the interpreter sat with us in order to conduct real-time translation. Translation was also required for the cultural artworks, particularly the songs discussed in this book. These songs were originally wri en in Karen, and I worked directly with the authors to arrive at an adequate translation of their works. One further note on language and translation: working across languages requires more than just direct translation. Speaking a non-native language gives rise to inconsistencies in communicating and understanding. Participants o en relied on pauses, mumbling and prolonged searches when they could not find the right word. For the clarity of the reader, I

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have removed these u erances from the interviews presented in this book. Many of the Karen participants actively encouraged me to ‘clean up’ their English, not wanting to sound uneducated or unclear in what they were saying. Given my ongoing connection with the participants and my work in the Thailand–Burma borderlands more generally, I feel there is a real need to accommodate these wishes. With this in mind, I have tidied up things like grammar, false starts, repetitions and ‘umms’ and ‘errs’ from the interviews presented here. I regard these as minor amendments, in keeping with participants’ wishes, to keep the focus on the message, not the nuances of their expression. As researchers, this is a heavily contentious area of ethnographic practice. However, I draw on the work of academics such as bell hooks (1990), who subscribes to the notion that the very act of telling or retelling someone’s story, even your own, is an act of construction, as well as Jayati Lal (1999) and Anna Tsing (1993), who warn against the ‘othering’ of participants, a position that reinforces their being outside the norm while privileging myself as an ‘elite observer’ representing Western academic ideals (Tsing 1993: 22). In telling the stories captured in this book, in commi ing them to audio and wri en formats, we construct a version of the events. And this is OK, because I am not looking for something that is ‘true’ or ‘pure’, but rather something that can develop an understanding of how a space is lived in, how relationships are negotiated and what ‘messy’ articulations can tell us. There is no true version of events, just many ways of seeing these events. This duality in construction also, I think, highlights the nuances of a cross-cultural relationship that can develop between the participant and researcher (Tsing 1993: 22). Jayati Lal’s work on ‘situated locations’ is a helpful tool here. This is a methodology that a empts to break down the divisions between subject-object, self-other and researcher-participant by recognising that most people ‘occupy multiple and fluid locations’ (Lal 1999:79), that challenge the assumption of an ‘objective outsider’ or an ‘authentic insider’. In many of the examples I use across this book, I occupy an unfamiliar location; I am an obvious outsider. But it was surprising to me to realise that how many of my participants occupied that space with me (as an outsider in Thailand) or how our roles were o en reversed (for example, at a Thai military checkpoint) or were in many cases variable depending on the circumstances (as I became more familiar with and in the space). The ambiguity and fluidity evident in these positions helped break down some of the more traditional assumptions and divisions around researcher-participant roles. In addition to these informal semi-structured interviews, I produced extensive notes based on what I was seeing in the borderlands. Rather than

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being a seemingly objective documentation of culture, events, dress, activities or social structure, these notes served a participatory, analytical purpose. They became a useful tool for deepening my understanding of what I was observing. These notes included observations of cultural activities, insights into the interview and research process, daily documentation of living along the Thailand–Burma border and postinterview analysis. This element of observation was incredibly important in validating what I was being told by participants in our interviews and through their artistic expression. It also filled in the gaps that were not covered in the interviews, giving me a more complete understanding of the space I was studying. I refer to these notes directly in the book; at other times, they take a more complementary, less visible role, in that they add another layer to my understanding of what was occurring in the borderlands. Throughout this book, there are references to stories of people and events, drawings, cartoons, songs and poems. These were initially unexpected contributions to the thesis, but they have since brought a crucial element to the thesis arguments. They are included for a number of reasons. The artistic expression formed a complementary source to participants’ personal narratives and became an alternative form of analysis to more conventional sourcing of information such as interviews, participant observation and reviewing existing literature; they also provided rare academic insights in their own right. The analysis of cultural expression is a much-underutilised area of study when it comes to the Karen and the Thailand–Burma borderlands. I quickly realised that the production of artistic expression was a living contribution to an ongoing dialogue around political and cultural construction. A thought, feeling or experience embalmed in a piece of artistic expression provides a powerful insight into the author’s thematic construction in a given time and place and can tell us much about the political and cultural environment in which it was created. More than that, if artistic expression embodies shared cultural symbols (Geertz 1976), then it can also be viewed as a product of collective experiences that contribute to cultural transformation. Anna Tsing states that the stories inherent in these types of production show ‘sites of discursive contestation’ (1993: 8). In other words, they are comments on the meaning and practices of social transformation, particularly as they relate to the construction of power. The pieces of artistic expression included in this thesis not only document Karen identity, culture and life, but also contribute to a shared experience of cultural and political construction specific to the Thailand–Burma borderlands space. The inclusion of artistic expression provides a rich context to understandings of social and cultural formation. First, it visually represents an individual’s construction of a theme at a given moment, building the in-

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dividual into a collective narrative of the borderlands. Second, it provides an object with meaning because of the symbolic forms that are familiar to the collective who experience it. This meaning is subjected to collective experiences, creating symbols that are familiar to the communal fabric and therefore explicit to cultural construction. Through cultural symbols, we can understand art and through art, we can see a practising culture. A piece of art is therefore a legitimate source of knowledge for understanding the political and cultural constructions that represent both individual and collective portrayals of culture.

The Structure of This Book Given these first examinations of the terms and literature of this book, it is worth reiterating the main contentions of this book and the structure in which it is presented. This book examines notions of identity, culture, solidarity and space as they relate to the practices of displaced Karen and refugees. It frames these constructs within the context of a borderlands space: the Thailand–Burma borderlands. The book is thematically organised around two key arguments. First, the Thailand–Burma borderlands is a distinct space framed by a tension between a modern territorial domain, characterised by the modern demarcation of the Thailand–Burma border and the consolidation of state control over it, and the intersection of a particular form of social relations, characterised by a fluidity of movement (of information, resources, ideas, culture and identity) that intensifies the possibilities available to displaced Karen, particularly in terms of political agency and mobilisation. Second, these social relations take on the form of an interchange that occurs across the national border. This interchange is defined by the nature of sociality in conjunction with a territorial domain (the Thailand–Burma border) and is framed by three modes of social practice that inform Karen activism in the borderlands. While modes of social practice constitute a larger theoretical domain than I cover in this book, the phrase is used here as a means of collectively describing key pa erns of practice of displaced Karen in the borderlands space. As such, they are examples of modes of practice relevant to this book rather than definitive categories. These three modes of social practice are: (1) scales of resistance and pa erns of activism that strengthen Karen agency and challenge institutional forms of governance; (2) paths of connectivity and networks of solidarity, developed through international networking, new media and political consciousness; and (3) processes of cultural recovery, constituting a public projection of ‘remembered places’, cultural reification and imagining a vision of the future.

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This book is therefore organised in the following way. This chapter introduces the book and defines the theoretical parameters and the contextual material of the research. Chapter 1 develops a theoretical framework for the Thailand–Burma borderlands as a space of political and social transformation that challenges the hegemonic message of the state and the bounded nature of state mechanisms. There is a tendency for states to treat borders as static and stable, and to use borders as a means of determining belonging and not belonging. This chapter explores how these theories are applied to the national border and operate as the dominant discourse in which the geopolitics of the border is understood. It pits these traditional understandings against a framework that can be er account for mobility and connectivity – the underlying forces that give meaning to the activities of displaced Karen in the borderlands and ultimately the distinctive nature of the borderlands space. I deconstruct the assumption of border politics as ma ers of nation-states, and the construction of the inhabitants as stateless and deplaced. I set up an alternative theoretical framework in which the borderlands can be understood as a space of activism, connectivity and cultural revival. In borderlands there is an interchange that occurs across the national border – of people, ideas, culture, information, resources and identity. The mobility of displaced Karen in the borderlands, their capacity to construct alternative narratives to the state and establish spaces of solidarity from which to project these is a highly underrated and underexplored aspect of the space. Chapter 2 develops the conceptual framework by applying it to the modern configuration of the Thailand–Burma borderlands. It establishes the contemporary context of the borderlands as it relates to an intensification of control by the nation-state. The increased penetration of both the Burmese and Thai nation-states to consolidate control over the border has intensified the political nature of the borderlands space. This is achieved through an uneven process of increased militarisation on the Burmese side of the border and increased regulation on the Thai side. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 are a pivotal point in the volume. They constitute the empirical chapters of the book and build upon the argument developed over Chapters 1 and 2 to argue that, in sharp distinction to this, displaced Karen create a borderlands space based on an interchange that occurs across the national border, which in this particular context is framed by fluid and contested social relations. For the purposes of this book, I group these social relations into three dominant modes of social practice. Chapter 3 argues that scales of resistance and pa erns of activism emerge from a tension between the operations of institutional governance and a more informal political power that develops through the contested social relations of displaced Karen, namely that displaced Karen contest

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these institutional forms of governance because they do not adequately capture the nature of their political self. Instead, they pursue forms of activism and subvert institutional norms of political belonging, and in doing so develop an alternative political space that strengthens Karen agency and mobilisation. Chapter 4 argues that new paths of connectivity and networks of solidarity are formed through activism that is framed by shared experiences of displacement and persecution. These networks are formed and strengthened where activist practices intersect with particular mechanisms of social power, in this book categorised as international networking, new media and political consciousness. These networks also become a key conduit for the projection of a Karen political narrative based on shared experiences of persecution, thus becoming a major factor in the construction and projection of Karen identity in the borderlands. Chapter 5 argues that the borderlands facilitates the recovery of a Karen cultural identity that becomes part of a projected Karen identity. This cultural identity is characterised by a selective recovery of cultural icons and origin myths that reinforce the idea of a Karen nation, and are framed through a lens of shared experiences of displacement and persecution. This cultural recovery takes place through three key processes relative to the borderlands space: a public projection of ‘remembered places’, cultural reification and imagining a vision of the future. A brief conclusion draws these threads together and reflects on the changeable nature of the borderlands space. If this space encompasses mobility, contestation and transformation, what might this space look like in the future? And how might it change how displaced Karen interact with the state mechanisms on either side of the national border? It is worth reflecting on what impact this may have on the sociality, spatiality and identity constructs that occur there into the future. While I have begun this book with a strong emphasis on the act of a poem being read, it serves a metaphorical purpose for introducing the broader cultural and political narratives that are evident in the borderlands. The Thailand–Burma borderlands is comprised of complex layers of sociopolitical relations that, upon closer scrutiny, shed insight into why and how a displaced person from Burma residing in the borderlands can construct and project a poem about persecution. This piece of activism is particular to the borderlands space and encompasses many of the arguments I make in this book. The porters spoke this poem from the relative safety of the borderlands. We know about it because the porters were able to speak it, but also because a group of Karen activists were able to access it, translate it into English and further disseminate it through global networks. This process both utilised and was a beneficiary of new technol-

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ogies and networks that enable larger connections around human rights material. In voicing their poem, the porters are contributing to a rich contextual canvas that serves to illustrate the complexities of a modern spatial identity, particularly one that is framed by the experience of persecution and displacement and the struggle to have the political self recognised. The fact that these acts, and the form they take, can only occur because of a range of factors that make up the space in which they are constructed and projected illustrates the importance of understanding the nature of the borderlands space.

Notes  1. This poem was wri en by Eh De Li on the Thailand–Burma border in 2003 and was translated by Nyi Nyi in 2005. The poem was originally documented by local staff working for a community organisation, Burma Issues, an organisation I also worked with between 2002 and 2004.  2. See also any number of reports produced by the Karen Human Rights Group (KHRG), Amnesty International or the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB) Human Rights Documentation Unit (HRDU), to name a few of the organisations that have documented these abuses and the process of flight over the years.  3. Song tiaew is the Thai word for a sort of taxi. It is a ute with bench seats in the back and an overhead covering. You typically pay the driver to take you to your designated location. It is a common form of public transport in Thailand.  4. Refugees in Mae La camp o en refer to the main thoroughfare through the camp as the ‘highway’. It is the largest path through the camp and connects the various zones. It experiences heavy foot-traffic and could sustain a small vehicle. However, the word is used in some jest as it is also an uneven dirt path prone to bogs, running water and deep crevices.  5. There is much literary discussion around the origins of the Karen. See Harry Ignatius Marshall’s The Karen People of Burma (1997 [1922]) and Jonathon Falla’s True Love and Bartholomew (1991) for extensive accounts of these debates.  6. Across this book I use the names of towns, cities and states that are used by the participants in this book. These mostly constitute the names prescribed prior to a 1989 decision by the Burmese military to change the name of the country from Burma to Myanmar and the names of many of its key cities. There is obviously both a logistical and ideological basis to this. My main reason for doing so is because these are the names used by the participants in this research and out of respect to these participants and in order to provide consistency across the book, I have decided to retain the names they use. However, in the first instance and where relevant, I have put the names used by the Burmese government in brackets.

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 7. Burma is made up of twenty-one administrative divisions. This includes: seven states – Chin, Shan, Kachin, Karen (Kayin), Arakan (Rakhine), Mon and Karenni (Kayah); seven regions – Irrawaddy (Ayeyarwady), Pegu (Bago), Magwe (Magway), Mandalay, Sagaing, Tenessarim (Tanintharyi) and Rangoon (Yangon); six self-administered zones – Danu, Kokang, Naga, Pa’O, Pa Laung and Wa; and the capital, Naypyidaw Union Territory. The states are named a er the seven significant ethnic groups in Burma, but while a large portion of the ethnic population may live in the state that bears their ethnic name, they are by no means restricted to residing there. For example, large pockets of Karen people can be found in the Irrawaddy Delta, Mon State and Tenesserim Division, as well as Karen State.  8. Around 60–70 per cent of Karen consider themselves Buddhist, while the remainder consider themselves Christian (25–30 per cent) and Animist (5–10 per cent) (BERG 1998). This is a significant variation to the general population of Burma. The 2014 Census reported 89.9 per cent Buddhist, 6.3 per cent Christian, 2.3 per cent Islam, 0.8 per cent Animist and 0.5 per cent Hindu. The high reported cases of Christianity among the Karen can be a ributed to the missionary influence in Karen State.  9. Tatmadaw is the Burmese word for the Burmese Army. 10. Similar campaigns were conducted against other ethnic armies such as the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO) in Kachin State and the Shan State Army (SSA) in Shan State. These ‘scorched earth’ campaigns were a strategy employed by the Burmese military as far back as the 1950s and continued well into the 2000s. 11. The KNLA is the military arm of the KNU. 12. Martin Smith (1999) gives a comprehensive account of the impacts of the ‘Four Cuts’ policy. 13. As an example, there are many reports documenting human rights abuses put out by the Burma Ethnic Research Group (BERG), the KHRG and Amnesty International. There are also studies available on the implementation of refugee policy on the Thailand–Burma border, particularly put out by the Thai Burma Border Consortium (TBBC) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). For further discussion on refugee policy in the borderlands, see also the April 2008 edition of the Forced Migration Review. 14. At the end of my field research (April 2012), the figure supplied by the TBBC, Bangkok, was 140,356. The current camp population is 93,206 (November 2019). TBBC is responsible for providing food, shelter and non-food items to refugees in the camps along the Thailand–Burma border. They compile monthly statistics of the camp populations. 15. Violet Cho is a Karen journalist and refugee, and one of the few people to give some academic form to this type of Karen communication. She does this by articulating a research methodology based on the Sgaw word Tapotaethakot. According to Cho, the closest English translation for Tapotaethakot would be ‘cha ing’, though this does not entirely capture the nature of the word. Cho’s work is a useful step towards a be er articulation of Karen communication pa erns and associated methodologies. Cho sets out seven principles for

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Tapotaethakot, which I summarise here: (1) respect participants and treat them according to the rules of kinship; (2) meet informally and have conversations (including sharing food) rather than having formal interviews; (3) be open, direct and upfront about the research and its purposes; (4) be a community member, involved in and supporting community initiatives; (5) recognise and value people’s experience and experiential knowledge; (6) recognise and make use of oral tradition and storytelling as legitimate forms of knowledge; (7) recruit research participants through personal and family relations, and through community leaders in an informal way (Cho 2011). 16. The Karen language has three main dialects: Sgaw, Pwo and Bwe. Sgaw Karen is mostly associated with educated Christian Karen, while Pwo is common among Animist and Buddhist Karen. The creation of the Sgaw Karen script is credited to an American Baptist missionary, Jonathan Wade, in the 1930s, primarily for the translation of the Bible. It is closely based on the Burmese script, as is the Pwo Karen script that was adapted from the Sgaw script sometime afterwards. It is o en cited that the Karen have an ancient, now lost script (Falla 1991: 220), possibly called Leit-Hsan-Wait, which due to the strange shape of the alphabet markings is o en referred to as looking like chicken scratchings. Today, Sgaw Karen remains the most visible Karen language, mainly due to its connection to the missionaries and their domination over the production of wri en publications in the 1800s, and its adoption by the Karen revolution as their official language.

1  Movements across Space The Thailand–Burma Borderlands as a Social Construct The Thailand–Burma border is characterised by what I don’t see It is an endless, invisible line with barely a physical marking Confronted by this invisible line, the decision not to cross relies on an implicit understanding A socio-political contract between an individual and the state; a contract broken daily This tenuous sense of power makes the border porous Like a thinly stretched membrane, pockets of people push their way through Crossing the border to sell goods, live illegally, visit family or flee internal conflict This contentious position highlights the salience of borders in our contemporary world What is the meaning of the border For the individuals who peer across it daily And the nation-states who claim control over it. —Author’s fieldnotes, December 2008

Kaw Kwe began ‘visiting’ Thailand in the 1960s. He would cross by boat or, where the river wasn’t too wide, he would wade across. He lived about an hour’s walk from the Moei River, in a small Karen village. He wasn’t the only one making the journey of course – many did. They would cross

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to visit friends and family, trade goods or buy things that were not available to them in their own oppressed and economically isolated country. In the 1960s there was no ‘Friendship Bridge’ that connected the two countries and no checkpoints. The mechanisms of the border were barely discernible. It was common to cross back and forth, and Kaw Kwe continued to do so until a Burmese military offensive in 1984 forced him to flee to Thailand permanently. He came, he said, because of his family. He wanted them to have the opportunity to be secure and to get an education. If it was just him, he would have stayed and probably joined the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA). His reasons for fleeing are common to those in the borderlands: fear, destruction, death and, if you survived it, a need to provide your family with something be er and safer. Kaw Kwe now calls himself a ‘frequent visitor’ back to Burma, crossing not through the official checkpoints, but in much the same way as he did in the 1960s, by foot, far from the authoritative gaze of the state. Kaw Kwe has lived in many places along the border, in Thai villages, in temples and in at least three different refugee camps. He has spent most of the last thirty years documenting human rights violations against his people, requiring many return trips to Karen State. I asked Kaw Kwe whether he recognised the border as determining who belonged where. His answer provided a very different perspective on what the border is or is supposed to be. He said he felt happy when he stepped back into Karen State. He could feel the hospitality of his people and he did not have to be afraid of the Thai police. He made no mention of checkpoints or passports, negotiating different languages and signs, or different currencies, customs or food – none of the typical mechanisms we associate with crossing an international boundary. For him, the border represented a point where he either felt at home in his homeland or uncomfortable in a foreign land. Kaw Kwe’s story is not uncommon; it represents the very pragmatic and ongoing engagement the borderlands inhabitants have with the arbitrarily demarcated boundary imposed by the states. In this chapter I put forward a conceptual framework for the Thailand–Burma borderlands that can account for some of these real-life experiences of those who have an everyday engagement with the border. For it is here that we start to see a tension between the hegemonic message of the state and the bounded nature of state mechanisms, and the transformative potential of the space, socially and politically, for those who engage with the border in a far more relational way. Where states tend to treat their borders as static and stable and to use borders as a means of determining belonging and not belonging, the practices of those who challenge this hegemonic narrative have a more translational element that is informed by an interchange that occurs across the national border – of people, ideas, culture, information,

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resources and identity. There are two seemingly contradictory things occurring here: rigidity and flexibility; closed borders and free movement; consolidation and transformation. But in fact these things coexist. My interest lies in the points where they intersect, because it is in this tension that we can see both the complexity and the possibility of borderlands spaces.

A ‘Borderlands’: Theories of Territory and Mobility A typical modern take on national boundaries, and the spaces that straddle them, is to view the border as a geopolitical construct. Borders are sites and symbols of power, which represent the spatial limits of state power and the manifestation of political control (Donnan and Wilson 1999). The territorial line (border) is seen as an objective fact, a manifestation of territoriality and sovereignty that is fixed to the form of the nation-state (Donnan and Wilson 1999; Newman and Paasi 1998); it is a line that separates two mutually exclusive territories (Grundy-Warr 1993; Rajah 2002). As a geopolitical construct, it can also be a site of shared cross-border activity, particularly in relation to the economic, political and military activity of the adjacent states (Grundy-Warr 1993). While these a ributes seem largely conceptual, the territorial line has practical applications that impact displaced Karen in the borderlands. The most notable are how the border acts as a definitive point for greater regulation, particularly over movement through regular channels; how processes of documentation are a ached to the mechanisms of the border, such as customs, ID and passport entitlements from which displaced Karen are largely excluded; and how increased militarisation is seen as a necessary and justifiable action of state sovereignty, the ramifications of which are felt most profoundly by Karen in the border areas. In circumstances such as these, the border is relevant and has very real impacts. Despite the flows across the border that I discuss in this chapter, it is important to note that the border remains present in this cross-border exchange; it has outward constraints such as those mentioned above, but it can also be internalised, in that it has both a material and an ethereal presence for displaced Karen. While a geopolitical approach to borders centres the national boundary as a distinction between two autonomous territories, my interest lies in an approach that can capture a spatial configuration that acknowledges shared cross-border exchange and that can see this space as mobile, relational and constructed through the everyday. This position recognises that cultural and political activity does not necessarily stop at the border,

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but rather that there is considerable status and meaning acquired in the cross-border engagement.1 There have been useful and creative takes on border spaces, particularly as they draw us away from the notion of straight lines containing homogenised identities: ‘squiggly fences’ (Fall 2010), ‘fences and neighbours’ (Newman and Paasi 1998), ‘jigsaw like geographies’ (Billé 2019), ‘buffer zones’, ‘unnatural boundaries’, ‘in the margins’, ‘zomia’ (van Schendel 2002) and ‘borderlands’. These are all a empting to articulate a more realistic portrayal of how borders are engaged with and operationalised beyond the limitations of a rigid national boundary. In the context of the Thailand–Burma border, I elaborate on this last concept of ‘borderlands’ to describe the space as a social construct that more readily captures the relational nature of the Thailand–Burma border and reflects how displaced Karen engage with the Thailand–Burma border on a daily basis. As a spatial construct, the ‘borderlands’ encompasses the interactions and constructions that occur in a relationship of people and discourse, and is further defined by a more abstract notion of multiple simultaneous stories (Massey 2005).2 While the notion of a borderlands as a relational space, defined by practices that span the geographical dimension, has been increasingly debated in anthropological and sociological studies of borderlands (Anzaldua 2007; Horstmann 2004; Krishna 1996; Gille 2001), and to a certain extent geography literature (Donnan and Wilson 1999; Massey 2005; Newman and Paasi 1998; Staeheli 1994), there has been only limited discussion of this in terms of the Thailand–Burma borderlands. However, there are a number of seminal works that have begun this important discussion. Alexander Horstmann (2004, 2011, 2014) and Decha Tangseefa (2006) have developed studies that look at the Thailand–Burma borderlands as a microcosm of human society. Both have called for a greater study of the border and its conceptual impact, and suggest that borderlands are symbols and spaces of political and cultural change that can challenge the national narrative and hegemony of the state. Sang Kook Lee has looked at how cross-border movements facilitate connections between those back inside Burma, those in and around the refugee camps, and transnational communities (2012: 279). Lee sees the borderlands as a new domain from which Karen nationalism and identity can be constructed and projected. One of the most influential works on refugee exchange and agency is Sandra Dudley’s Materialising Exile (2010). While using the refugee camps as her spatial focus rather than the borderlands per se, Dudley examines the material and aesthetic constructs of displacement for the Karenni. At the heart of Dudley’s study is how the Karenni make sense of their experience of displacement from Burma and emplacement in the borderlands.

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I build a social constructionist view of the Thailand–Burma borderlands, in that I argue that the borderlands is a manifestation of space that is produced in and through the relationships that occur across the national border (Massey 2005; Newman and Paasi 1998; Soguk 2007; Staeheli 1994). As such, it is a space that must necessarily encompass the negotiations of humans and therefore requires flexibility, adaptability and interpretation. Borders are of course subject to great historical shi s at both the local and global levels, meaning they are able to be reconceptualised even as they maintain their rigid structure. Boundaries change, as does the natural environment3 – rivers dry up, rock formations collapse and agriculture practices can change the very nature of the landscape and therefore the characteristics of a place. The demographic of a population of a place also changes, as do the political structures and decision-making apparatuses that administer and control the parameters of a border. What this means is that spaces are embedded with rich, complex layers that intersect and relate to the changing nature of the locale in which they operate, but that also cannot be separated from the contested space ‘out there’ that a empts to reformulate the narrative of the place. Put simply, even today’s most hard-won place may not be recognised as a place in the future. For me, the term ‘borderlands’ is therefore used as an analytical device to account for the social relationships that occur across the geographical boundary that is the Thailand–Burma border and that can also account for the notion of the contested social interactions that occur in the space. Most of the social interaction discussed in this book is observed from the Thai side of the border, but the content of these interactions is also intrinsically linked to the relationships and activities that occur on the Burmese side of the border. These cross-border interactions have ramifications at both a global and a local level, but their origins lie in the very real connections established between forces on either side of the Thailand–Burma border. In other words, one needs to understand the actions of those on the Thai side of the border in relation to their interconnection with what occurs on the Burmese side of the border. This position draws on Baud and van Schendel’s argument that both sides of the border be treated as one unit of analysis (1997: 216). While many displaced Karen are geographically positioned on the Thai side of the border, their imaginings, identity constructs and processes of cultural reification are commonly drawn from the Burmese side of the border. Of course, additional research conducted from the Burmese side of the border that looks at engagement with the Thailand–Burma border and the notion of borderlands should be a priority. Areas such as the provision of cross-border services and resources from Thailand, the impact of commercialisation on local Burmese communities, trade implications (at

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a state administrative level right down to informal activities at the local level, including mobility and mutual exchange across the border), the impact that flows of technology and communications have on Burmese communities – the list is extensive. This type of research promises to add significant material to the study of the Thailand–Burma borderlands, offering different interpretations of the space. It could be said that borderlands practices are just one set of practices out of many in that space and do not constitute a monopoly over the space in question; in other words, they are not for everyone at all times. One could argue the space from an ethnonationalist political perspective, a refugee perspective, a state perspective and an activist perspective. These and many other subjective positions are equally legitimate interpretations; some are contradictory and at times they can be both restraining and emancipating. It is this contested nature and the opportunity for multiple articulations of the space that guides my definition of the ‘borderlands’ to be able to carry a sense of diversity and plurality (including the many ways in which life is lived in the borderlands that exist beyond the themes investigated in this book). This becomes the crux of the borderlands as a site of social and political transformation, the criterion that places it as distinct to other imaginings of the space. The Thailand–Burma borderlands is not mentioned on any map. It is not a fixed place, although it has loosely collated geographical boundaries associated with close proximity to the international boundary between Thailand and Burma. By this definition, I would not, for example, classify a person living in Bangkok as living in the Thailand–Burma borderlands, although they may be connected into the borderlands through the social and political networks that emanate from global flows of information and communications technology. It is also important to note that ‘borderlands’ is not a term commonly used by the Karen themselves. A Karen person is more likely to refer to the space they currently inhabit in more conventional terms relating to their physical location, such as they live in a refugee camp such as Mae La or in a township such as Mae Sot. Others may refer to their spatial circumstances in more abstract terms, such as that they live as a refugee. While it may not enjoy currency in the everyday vernacular, this demonstrates how as an analytical tool, the concept of ‘borderlands’ helps illuminate some of the key claims of this book, namely the interconnection between space and identity formation. The use of the term allows me to talk about the complexities of space, contestation and identity formation in ways that a more homogenised notion of the space does not allow, not least of which is its capacity to open up the discussion to one of flows across space.

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My interest therefore lies in a specific take on the spatial configuration of the borderlands space, namely the impact of cross-border activities and their interrelated nature. This moves beyond a preoccupation with autonomous state spaces that see the Thailand–Burma borderlands as strictly geographical in form, as at the periphery of political and economic activity, or as a manifestation of interstate and even intra-state relations. Instead, I advocate a more thorough investigation of the borderlands as a conceptual space that can span the geographical dimension, which looks at the political, social and cultural constructs that occur across the nation-state boundary and in relation to its nature as a changeable spatial entity. This book therefore develops a notion of the Thailand–Burma borderlands as a site of social and political transformation that gives meaning to the space by focusing on a particular community – displaced Karen from Burma who now reside on the Thai side of the border.

Narrating a Borderlands Space Of particular interest to my research is the narrative that emerges from those who engage with the border on a day-to-day basis and in ways that defy the homogenising rigidity of the state narrative. In order to understand these alternative narratives, one needs to examine the context in which they operate. The Thailand–Burma borderlands is characterised by a contestation that occurs through two differing articulations of the borderlands space (there could of course be more, but these are the two articulations of interest to me). This stems from a tension between a modern territorial domain, which is characterised by the modern demarcation of the Thailand–Burma border and the consolidation of state control over it, and the intersection of a particular form of social relations, which is characterised by a fluidity of movement – of people, ideas, culture, information, resources and identity. The first articulation of this tension deploys operations of the nation-state to create a homogenised space that is defined by borders as manifestations of political authority. This is a direct result of cartographic activities that occurred across Thailand and Burma in the mid- to late 1800s, where the boundary was first conceived as a continuous line on a map, ‘as demarcating an exclusive sovereignty wedged between other sovereignties’ (Anderson 1991: 172). The mapping of the border was the result of diplomatic negotiations between the governments of Great Britain and Siam, and these cartographic developments saw the border become a site and symbol of state power and control, and fixed to notions of

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territory and sovereignty (Donnan and Wilson 1999; Newman and Paasi 1998). Of course, state borders are not immune to flux and change; they are not a static given. State boundaries are permeable, despite the best efforts of governments to secure their borders. Illegal trade, irregular movement of people through trafficking or migration, disputes over territorial boundaries, and negotiations over shared infrastructure such as dams and roads all highlight the ongoing challenge states face to their borders. One could also argue that a flexible approach to the rigidity of borders is in fact necessary to the functions of the state. How else could states manage formal global processes of migration, travel, trade, communications and technology? Regardless of these practicalities or realities of managing a state’s borders, the intent is one of containment and control, to own the space and its inhabitants. In contrast, displaced Karen o en interpret the borderlands through a set of intersecting social relations that can be mapped across the national border rather than being confined by the territorial boundary. These relations are defined by their fluidity – movements of people, ideas, culture, information, resources and identity – which brings a sense of possibility and opportunity to the space. So what might this interchange across the national boundary look like? And how does this develop a narrative of the border that is relational and mobile? The Thai–Myanmar Friendship Bridge connects Mae Sot in Thailand to Myawaddy in Burma. It is a large concrete monolith that spans 420 metres across the Moei River. Its pillars rise over 20 metres to the underside of the bridge. On either side of the bridge are checkpoints and customs that monitor your entry and exit from the two countries. If you stand downstream from the bridge, you are likely to see groups of kids riding inflatable tubes between the two countries, oblivious to these border controls. Go upriver, round the bend and out of sight of the bridge and its state mechanisms of border control, and you will likely see women and men from Burma, wading across the river with large woven baskets on their heads, full of produce they will sell in the markets in Mae Sot. They will return at the end of the day with Thai goods they can use or sell in Burma. Go even further up the river and you will see long boats with their popping staccato engines, traversing the muddy brown river with people, food, materials, arms or any type of product that moves illegally between the two countries. There is no outward indication in these actions that these individuals have crossed a national border; they traverse the space through fairly ordinary interactions and exchanges, for play, work and familial connections. The Karen have been practising a form of circular migration like this for centuries, moving back and forth as work and family

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required. Rarely did this type of movement result in permanent migration. To a certain extent, this is also reflected in contemporary times and can be seen in the movement of displaced Karen across the border into Burma to conduct human rights documentation or community-organising activities before returning to Thailand for access to resources. U Kyi explained: ‘It’s something like a strategy plan. You stay here [Thailand], you plan here, you arrange everyday here and then you go inside.’ U Kyi repeats this cycle many times over the course of a year. It is also evident in the way in which young people from Burma cross the border to get an education in the refugee camps and then return to Burma in the holidays. But of course, this seemingly free movement is not how the national border always functions; it would be naive to see these as solely benign interactions. The state has increased militarisation of the border (through checkpoints, passports and military patrols) at the same time as displaced Karen increasingly cross the border by unofficial means. In this way, the more militarised a border becomes, the more likely it is that illegal migration will increase. You don’t stop movement; you merely redirect it through other less regulated pathways. Naturally, increased militarisation of the border creates greater risks for those seeking to traverse it. The woman wading across the river is at risk of being picked up by Thai authorities or being reported for selling produce illegally and then being detained, fined or deported. In this context the border has a sense of liminality, both present and not, visible and not, and ambiguous in its reach and impact. Some of these acts capture both defiance and desperation. For a time in 2005, a group of displaced people from Burma lived on the stretch of ‘noman’s land’ under the bridge. No-man’s land is a flat expanse that ends at the bank of the Moei River and is only a couple of hundred metres long at most. This flat expanse is a sort of indeterminate zone, immediately preceding your arrival up a steep bank and into Thailand. This group had wedged themselves against the pillar closest to the Thai border control, se ing up structures of domesticity such as cooking mechanisms, washing facilities and temporary shelters. They were there for months and then one day they were gone. This piece of land, this in-between space has become part of the border architecture. At one point there was talk of building a casino on it, establishing a special economic zone that could take advantage of the geographical uncertainty of the space. At various points the authorities have scorched the area, obliterating any opportunity for displaced peoples to camp or hide in the overgrown entanglements. People fish from the site, they set up temporary camps and they exchange goods on the black market. It is a grey zone that represents both uncertainty and possibility. It acts almost as a threshold, a tipping point between perceived safety and the certainty of persecution.

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Figure 1.1. Group of displaced persons gathered under the Thai–Myanmar Friendship Bridge, 2005. Photo by Rachel Sharples.

There are also ecological a ributes to borders that challenge the fixed territorial notion of state sovereignty. Most of the 2,400 km-long border between Thailand and Burma is indiscernible to the naked eye. For approximately 120 kilometres on either side of Mae Sot, the border follows the Moei River, but for the most part the national boundary is obscured by thick, mountainous terrain. There are two points of interest about such boundaries. One is that the ‘invisible’ nature of the boundary relies on a sociopolitical contract between the individual and the state that the individual will not cross this divisible line, a decision that displaced Karen defy on a daily basis in order to meet their social and political needs. Like a thinly stretched membrane, people massage and cajole its elasticity, drawn to its porous nature to forge their way through. Whether it is the Karen woman crossing the border to sell her goods or the community organiser who crosses back into Burma to deliver training, the border is penetrated on a daily basis. The second is that as an arbitrarily applied colonial construct (Winichakul 1994) it is susceptible to both political and environmental disruption. In other words, neither people nor the environment may care for this politicised view of the world. For example, Kaw Kwe, who I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, interprets

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the border in the same way as he has done for decades, something that he crosses with li le thought to the border mechanisms aimed at stopping him. There are particularities to the Thailand–Burma borderlands that make for an interesting environmental interpretation of the border. This dynamic was evident in a Karen hta I was told by Nyi Nyi: ‘As long as the Salween flows the buffalo’s horns will not go straight.’ It can be interpreted to mean that the Salween River will always flow as a buffalo’s horns can never be straightened. Both Thailand and Burma have social, economic, cultural and bordering operations a ached to the river’s ongoing existence – it encompasses key trade, livelihood and resource operations. In this instance, the hta is used to provide more than cultural interpretation; it is a guide on future obligations and responsibilities, almost like a sociopolitical directive. Loo Ne also mentioned this hta. He talked about the joint responsibility Thailand and Burma had to protect and preserve the river. At the time I was told this hta, it was being used to campaign against the plans of the Thai and Burmese governments to dam sections of the Salween River. Damming the river would cause the Salween to stop flowing and would be a direct violation of the mutual agreement captured by the hta. It would also, if the river dried up, be an ecological disruption to the presence of the national boundary. These stories bring both real and abstract interpretations to the national border. It has a spatial component that is negotiated on a daily basis through pragmatic and operational mechanisms, but it is also has spatial aspirations; in some instances, it embodies a sense of hope. In the introduction of this book I referred to a poem wri en by a prison porter who had sought refuge at the Thailand–Burma border. At that point I asked a number of questions: how does this largely invisible line on the ground come to represent differing states of security? Why did these porters tell their story here, on the Thai side of the Thailand–Burma border? I posed these questions as a way to understand the perceived nature of a border’s aspirational qualities – for example, which can account for a crossing that takes someone from a state of fear, persecution and insecurity to one of refuge and safety. Of course, this position does not always hold. Fighting can follow people across the border, and risk and instability remain, albeit from a different perpetrator in the form of the Thai authorities. Other forms of insecurity can emerge, such as employment, housing, food and shelter. But here the border has a real tangible element to it: it constitutes a point that represents opportunity, a change in circumstances and refuge. This is the closest the border comes to being a distinct line on the ground; it places you beyond the reach of the Burmese state, or at least that is the perception.

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However, this dynamic is complicated. While the border offers a point of refuge, it does not constitute permanent relief, nor is it a solution in itself. Po Khai talked about a song he had wri en where he refers to the Karen people as inhabiting the dead valley between two mountains, the two mountains being Thailand and Burma: And now the Karen people live in the dead valley but our life is not in death, we’re not dead but we feel dead. Even though we’re not dead, every day we do not have peace and happiness. Every day they are sick and worried. They never have happiness, they always live their lives with tears.

Po Khai is interpreting the borderlands as a liminal space, a temporary holding area devoid of hope, crushed by the towering mountains on either side. But this is not just a physical thing; Po Khai is acknowledging that the borderlands can be a space that reminds the Karen of loss and of despair – it represents unresolved trauma and persecution. It is not a space in which the Karen would choose to stay. This sentiment is reflected in the words of many of the Karen I spoke with in the borderlands. Moo stated: ‘Other countries will be nice for a while but later we will get thirsty.’ U Kyi called Thailand a ‘temporary place’. Many of the refugees I talked to in Mae La refugee camp told me they wanted to return to their homes in Burma, as long as it was safe. Across all these statements is the theme of impermanence and that crossing the border into Thailand cannot on its own resolve the loss of land, culture and community. What is of interest to me is what can occur in this space when such desperation sits uncomfortably beside the hope that comes with the opportunities of the space. In many ways, the valley of death metaphor, the temporary a ributes of the space, the holding pa ern, all act as motivation for the activities of displaced Karen. It is a situation that will be tolerated while the work of resolving Burma’s conflict is done.

The Spatial Configuration of Exchange and Transformation Interesting things happen in border spaces. In part, this relates to countermovements to a nation-state’s political authority over territory and national identity. In contemporary Burma, the territorial boundary has been treated as a manifestation of political authority. The boundary embodies a system of power relations. However, in practice, this political authority is o en distributed unevenly, particularly at the peripheries of the nation-state, which are the point of interest for this book. In Burma, the state’s power has typically lain at its centre; the further from the centre, the weaker that power has tended to be (Lieberman 1978; Adas 1981). This

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means that individuals and communities at the peripheries were able to develop some level of autonomy as well as allegiance to multiple sovereignties – in other words, the margins were o en messy political spaces. This is in direct contrast to state sovereignty which tended to apply a flat delineation to its territory where power was dispersed evenly to the very edges of its national boundaries (Anderson 1991). One ramification of this has been a state tendency to heavily militarise border areas in an a empt to contain and control dissidents and the disaffected who naturally reside or a drawn to these areas. This process has tended to ‘produce and invent’ a population at the margins of the nation-state (Horstmann 2004: 3), which is o en isolated from political power (Conversi 1999). This assertion can certainly be made of the Karen, but also for many other ethnic groups that occupy Burma’s border areas and struggle to have their political demands met, such as the Naga, Karenni, Shan and Rohingya. It is a reasonable affirmation that Burma’s territorial edges are inhabited by those disenfranchised by the centre’s power – those who have been pushed there by their failure to conform to centrist demands for belonging to the nation or those who inhabit the periphery as a strategy to evade both state capture and state formation (Sco 2009: 9). Given the Karen inhabit these political and metaphorical margins, I propose we look at the borderlands not from the centre, but from the margins itself. By viewing the space from the margins,4 it is possible to examine the borderlands as a site of empowerment and not just marginalisation. This gives some priority to the actions of displaced Karen that centre their position as social and political subjects. This approach offers insight into not only how those inhabiting the margins interact with the state, but also how they construct relationships and identities that test nation-state boundaries and disrupt forms of political control. Thongchai Winichakul has a empted to advance this view by calling on the writing of a history at the interstices, ‘the history or the locations and moments between being and not being a nation, becoming and not becoming a nation’ (2003: 11). Winichakul is acknowledging the existence of histories that can contribute to our understanding of how national identities and nation-formation occurs. The Thailand–Burma borderlands is of course a location where such a dynamic operates, where subjects at Burma’s peripheries conduct activities and construct identities that are contingent upon but also mindful of the uneven power relationships between themselves and the nation-state. I would argue that the Thailand–Burma borderlands is therefore predisposed to be a site of social and political transformation. In many ways this is a result of its marginalisation from the state’s centre and its capacity to operate outside of state control in a range of forms. This is not

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to negate the increasing constraints on border communities due to the state’s a empts to contain and control the margins, particularly through militarisation and heavy regulation; yet, to a large extent, the activities of the Karen in the borderlands are enabled by the fact they occur in the grey areas of state control. This status as marginal to the state sets the conditions for a range of factors that contribute to the borderlands as transformative. It seems pertinent to show how some of these social and political transformations occur, particularly through processes of exchange across the national boundary. Global processes have exposed displaced Karen to new ways of approaching their persecution and displacement. This constitutes a form of activism where the Karen have utilised a range of mechanisms that span international boundaries – advocacy, international networking and new technologies to name but a few – to project their political claims and challenge the dominant narrative of the Burmese state. In turn, this exposure to international audiences feeds back into Karen political claims and the construction of a Karen identity based on persecution and exile. Displaced Karen therefore become active agents in narrating their own stories of persecution and displacement, as well as seeking solutions to the conflict. They have been able to develop this through connections that rely on both an outward exchange across international borders and an inward exchange that connects displaced Karen with the Karen still residing inside Burma. These exchanges draw on resources and practices that are present in the borderlands, but also, through their enactment, have transformed the nature of the space. Another example can be found in Karen displacement. The Karen have been forced from their homes, yet they continue to find connections to their homeland (both physical and psychological) by crossing back into Burma to visit friends and family, to work, to conduct trainings and to provide necessary services such as education and health. This connection to home can be found in other processes such as the reconstitution of Karen culture and identity. This reconstitution process commonly takes forms such as ‘remembered places’, a symbolic anchor around which the Karen can mobilise, the re-establishment of cultural practices on the Thai side of the border in a learned environment rather than everyday practice, and cultural recovery that prioritises a connection, both physically and metaphorically, to a Karen homeland. All of these processes require a fluidity of movement – ideas, people, identity and culture – across the national boundary. The processes of exchange evident in these examples are transformative, in that they develop social and political practices that give meaning to the borderlands space, and animate the space through their relational and connective mobilities.

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There is also a transformation of the physical space itself. Mae Sot is a culturally diverse town, largely due to a combination of historical pa erns of migration and contemporary population influxes. Historically, Mae Sot has been a sleepy border town, isolated from the mechanisms of the central government and administratively autonomous in practice. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was at the centre of the Karen resistance movement, marked by its capacity to provide a safe haven and resources for those resisting the central Burmese government and largely beyond the interest and reach of the Thai government. This was able to occur in part because of its marginalisation to both states. From the mid-1980s, Mae Sot had been defined by large refugee influxes. Over time, key towns along the border have become synonymous with the refugees, bringing large contingents of nongovernmental organisation (NGO) workers, researchers, journalists and their accompanying bureaucracies and influences. Mae Sot today is a key economic hub, a gateway to neighbouring Burma and the larger Southeast Asian economies. Declared a special economic zone in 2013, Mae Sot has seen an exponential rise in development and crossborder trade. In 2012, in the a ermath of Burma’s 2011 election, border trade through the Mae Sot checkpoint was estimated to have risen by 80 per cent. In some cases, land prices have increased tenfold, department stores and high-rise residential buildings now dominate the skyline, and light industrial zones are catering to manufacturing businesses. This economic boom has in many ways disrupted the dominance of the international aid regime that had defined the town for the last three decades. It also shows the increasing power of state intervention into a space that has traditionally benefited from its marginalisation to state mechanisms. Mae Sot is in transition; we are seeing the latest transformation or version of the town emerging. In many ways, Mae Sot’s transformations are a response to larger economic and political trends, but they are also a response to localised practices: for example, the way in which movement occurs in the borderlands between Mae Sot and the camps; the impact of Western influences and other cultural influences on Karen identity; the visible diversity that exists in the town, whether its cultural dress like the presence of Longyis (a wraparound cloth worn by men) and Thanka (a ground-bark paste o en used as a cosmetic) or the diversity in food and shops. The key point here is that the borderlands space is sensitive to these factors; it responds as required, adapting, changing and transforming in order to survive and in some instances thrive. In following these trajectories, in looking at their points of intersection, we get the clearest picture possible of the transformative potential of the space. What becomes of interest is not the town or the refugee, but the social relationships that develop

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Figure 1.2. The market in Mae Sot, 2005. Photo by Rachel Sharples.

between them, because it is this interdependent production that transforms the space and provides the unique characteristics of the Thailand– Burma borderlands. These relations o en occur across national spaces. As a result, the borderlands is a space that can be understood as si ing both inside and outside of the state, both embracing and resisting systems of belonging, and as unquestionably shaped by its uneasy association with the geographical proximity of the Thailand–Burma border. This tension between the state’s modern territorial claims to homogenise the space and intersecting social relations that are defined by processes of exchange and contestability gives definition and context to some of the key spatial

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elements of the borderlands: its preoccupation with territoriality and mobility, rigidity and fluidity, connections and disjunctures, dominant and alternative narratives, and, overarching all this, contestability. Together, they develop the notion of space that constitutes an interchange that occurs across the national border, but that is also informed by the national border – a space that enables and thrives on these tensions, where contestability provides new ways of seeing and articulating the borderlands space, and where displaced Karen are afforded opportunities not available to them back inside Burma.

Notes

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Parts of Chapter 1 first appeared in ‘Movements across Space: A Conceptual Framework for the Thai–Burma borderlands’, Rachel Sharples, Journal of Borderlands Studies, copyright © Association for Borderlands Studies, reprinted by permission of Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group, www.tandfonline.com on behalf of Association for Borderlands Studies. This idea on the dynamic relationship between the mapped border of the nation-state and relationships that occur across it, and at times in defiance of it, draws on the work of Sankaran Krishna (1996), who in her writing cautions against the overemphasis on cartographic or state sovereignty discourses that she sees as potentially abstracting the lives of the people who are impacted by and engage with the border on a daily basis. I have wri en elsewhere about the relational nature of the Thailand–Burma borderlands (Sharples 2018), particularly as it relates to Massey’s definitional work of space, and the relevance of looking at space through Massey’s three propositions: that space is a product of interrelations; that it is a sphere of multiplicity; and that space is always under construction. Such an approach to space gives rise to the notion of contested social constructions that produce potentially dissonant narratives of the space, a key component to the concept of borderlands that I argue for. My argument for the role that the natural environment plays is strongly influenced by Massey’s observations around ‘the natural world that will not stay still’ (2005: 130–37) as an example of place as a temporary constellation. By ‘view from the margins’, I mean to look at the margins as sites of political, cultural and social production in their own right. My motivation for establishing this conceptualisation is that a view from the margins offers new forms of knowledge, in that it takes the debate away from the urban centre where it has been traditionally focused. My conceptualisation of a view from the margins draws heavily on the work of Hastings Donnan and Thomas Wilson (1999), James C. Sco (2009), Anna Tsing (1993) and Thongchai Winichakul (2003). See Pitch Pongsawat’s dissertation (2007) for a thorough examination of some of these pa erns of migration and development along the border.

2  From Buffer Zone to Friendship Bridge The Contemporary Context of the Thailand–Burma Borderlands The River Moei is no more than 10 metres wide under the bridge. You could wade it. Many people do. On one side is Myawaddy, the other side Mae Sot. One side Burma, the other Thailand. Such difference is divided by only a small stretch of water. Once you’ve crossed the water and before you reach the official Thai border, There is a vast piece of land, no-man’s land. There was once talk of building a casino on it but for the most part it remains overgrown: dirt and high grass. In this no-man’s land is a group of people from Burma. They live under the bridge on bamboo-woven mats. They have no roof covering save for the under carriage of the bridge, 20 metres above them. They look as if they are ready to move, to run, at the slightest hint of a soldier. From either side. Three bridge pillions separate them from a lone Burmese soldier. He sits under the bridge on a deck chair, his rifle propped by his side. I wonder at the position these people from Burma have placed themselves in.

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They are closer to Thailand than they are to Burma. They have wedged themselves against a pillion, blocking themselves from the soldiers view and his gun. He must know they’re there. They certainly know he is there. They live in no-man’s land. They have no country, no papers. They live on the periphery; hope and a future in their sight yet so far from reach. They could lean across and touch Thailand but they cannot go there freely. To go back they must face the soldier’s gun. On their le is the checkpoint barring them from Thailand, On their right a machine gun barring them from Burma. —Author’s fieldnotes, October 2005

The Thailand–Burma border is over 2,400 kilometres long. It has, since the demarcation of the modern border in 1868, been an internationally recognised, geographically mapped boundary.1 Yet large tracts of this boundary remain indistinguishable to those on the ground; vast stretches of mountainous terrain and variegated waters blur the boundary of one country from the other. A history of relatively free movement and, at times, the porous nature of the border typify the characteristically pragmatic, noninstitutionalised approach to this international boundary by many of the Karen, Burmese and Thai who engage with it on a daily basis. This has begun to change in recent decades. A series of events beginning in the early 1980s has had a significant impact on the ways in which those on the ground engage with the border. Over this period, operations undertaken by the two nation-states abu ing the border were increasingly restrictive, with efforts to control movement and trade as well as curtail political activism. The increased interest of both the Thai and the Burmese states in how the border operated brought with it a corresponding political weight that was instrumental in the form of politicisation that had occurred along the border since the early 1980s. This can be characterised as an uneven process of increased militarisation on the Burmese side of the border and increased regulation on the Thai side. This penetration into the space is based on both self-serving motivations and, in this case, a response to the perceived political instability and threat to nation-state authority that comes from the arrival of vast numbers of refugees. This la er event saw the arrival of significant numbers of Karen refugees to the border in 1984, seeking a place of refuge from Burma’s internal conflict. This was the catalyst for a heightened political a ention that came to be focused on the border. This influx of refugees was followed by a series of events that further intensified the political nature of the borderlands. These include the re-emergence of the Burmese state from twenty-seven years of political

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and economic isolation, the growing bilateral relationship between the Thai and the Burmese governments, and the deteriorating security situation in the borderlands. At the same time, the humanitarian aid apparatus became entrenched in the political structure of the borderlands, bringing a further complexity to the political dynamic that characterises the space.

Refuge The arrival of significant numbers of refugees to the Thailand–Burma border in the early 1980s has significantly shaped the contemporary nature of the borderlands space. This is shown by a shi in border politics, moving away from fairly localised systems of authority in dealing with earlier, sporadic refugee arrivals towards a more formal refugee policy that became entrenched in the operations of the nation-state. This shi is mirrored in the initial Thai government responses to the first refugee arrivals compared to the political position that has come to define the current institutional policy towards refugee populations. Although quickly and heavily politicised, the border began, at least in the context of contemporary Karen engagement with it, as a place of refuge. In January 1984 the Thailand–Burma border took on particular significance for Karen living in the mountainous regions on the Burmese side of the border. To cross this international border meant relief from Burmese military a acks on their villages. In the many interviews conducted as part of this research, few spoke of crossing the international border in terms of national jurisdictions. Some participants had crossed the border more than twenty years before, others less than a year before, but most told the same story: they were driven by fear and the hope of safety and refuge. That these things resided across an international boundary in Thailand were consequently significant, but were incidental to their flight. For many, the aim was not to seek asylum in a third country, but rather to find short-term relief from encroaching Burmese military a acks and then to return. The arrival of displaced persons to the Thai border was not a sudden phenomenon. Evidence shows that smaller numbers of Karen had fled into Thailand following persecution prior to 1984, se ling unofficially in Thai villages in the borderlands and o en moving back and forth as the conflict permi ed.2 At this time, the Karen were mostly accepted into Thai communities with an informal hospitality and li le disruption to their existing structures (Lang 2002: 90), a process made easier by a history of trade relations, familial connections and similar economic conditions across the border regions. At that time, the territory straddling the Thailand– Burma border was politically remote from Bangkok and the Thai govern-

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ment showed limited interest in the movement of displaced populations that was occurring there. However, the dry season offensives of 1983–84 were distinct in their intensity, requiring new more a entive responses from the Thai government. The Burmese military a acks on areas of Pa’an District, adjacent to the Thai border, were an a empt to take control of territory dominated by the KNU and consolidate a permanent presence for the Burmese military along the Thailand–Burma border. As a result of these a acks, about 10,000 Karen fled across the border just north of Mae Sot in late January. The sheer size of refugee numbers looking for relief in Thai communities forced the Thai government to respond. Thailand’s Ministry of Interior (MOI) initially asked the Commi ee for Coordination of Services to Displaced Persons in Thailand (CCSDPT), an umbrella group already working with Indochina refugees on Thailand’s northern border, to provide basic support to the Karen refugees. Reports at the time suggested that the Thai government wanted to avoid the international a ention which would follow a call for assistance from the UNHCR. They were eager to deter any pull factor that would bring more refugees to the border or set up a system that would encourage those already along the border to stay. The Thai government was also reluctant to get involved in another largescale assistance programme similar to the one it had encountered with the Indochinese refugees (BERG 1998: 52; Dunford 1993: 10). As a result, initial support was provided by a small group of NGOs, called the Burmese Border Consortium (BBC)3 which operated under the CCSDPT. Accounts of this time suggest that these newly arrived Karen refugees were quick to organise themselves in a proactive and self-reliant manner (BBC 2004; Lang 2002). Many Karen were initially accommodated in local monasteries or rented houses in villages around Mae Sot. Most expressed the view that the fighting would be short-lived and that they would soon be able to return home. Saw Ba was one of those refugees who arrived at the border in 1984. He was forced to flee when the Burmese military undertook a major offensive against his village near Myawaddy, close to the border. Saw Ba was five years old and he remembers watching artillery fire light up the sky, the sound of gunshots cracking through the night air. He arrived at the border with various members of his family and he told me how Karen villagers negotiated with the Thai authorities to secure a piece of land at Huay Kaloke, just north of Mae Sot, on which they could build temporary shelters. He described his early days on the border to me: When I first arrived to the border we stayed in the wat [temple] at Huay Kaloke. Then we moved to stay in the houses of Thai villagers, and later still we rented a house in Mae Sot. I think we stayed like this because most

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of us thought the fighting would end and we could return home. But then it dragged on and we needed a more permanent solution so we organised with the Thai people to provide some land for us at Huay Kaloke and that’s when the refugee camp was set up.

By the time a small contingent of NGOs arrived on the border in March, they were greeted with a village-like atmosphere, with highly organised but rudimentary housing, schools and other structures, and an administration system already in place. Interviewed for a BBC publication on twenty years of working along the border, Jack Dunford, a member of one of the first delegations to assess the border and later the director of the BBC, recalls the logic behind their decision to support a coordinated approach to aid provision in the camps: We had found something on the border that was quite different to other refugee situations we had seen, in which whole societies had been torn apart. Although the Karen had already been struggling for a long time, their communities had remained intact, and their own social and governing structures were still in place. It made sense to support and recognise the Karen Refugee Commi ee. (BBC 2004)

The Karen Refugee Commi ee administered the various camps while the BBC initially commi ed to supporting 50 per cent of the refugees’ food needs. At this stage the Karen continued to plant rice crops back over the border in Burma to feed their families, while others worked for local Thai farmers to gain an income and supplement the food support they received from the BBC. The system required li le intervention and minimal support in the beginning, and the Karen were largely le to manage it themselves. Over the next four years, the BBC continued to consolidate a refugee support system that had a coordinated approach based on self-reliance, a system generally perceived to be a successful one (BERG 1998). The system allowed the Karen to replicate communal and administrative structures not dissimilar to those they had practised back home in Burma. This represents a relatively unique refugee situation, for it extended the boundaries of Karen communities into Thailand by providing some continuity to home and cultural practice. It gave the Karen an opportunity to continue to practise their culture rather than lose it through assimilation into Thailand or becoming aid-dependent on foreign NGOs. These issues of course became more complex as the conflict drew on, but at the beginning at least, it seemed easier for the Karen to continue aspects of their previous lives, particularly in terms of agrarian-based employment and cultural practices. While this may seem like a situation that reinforced a level of political autonomy, this position should be viewed with some caution. The Karen experienced the trauma and disruption commensurable to any situation

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where forced displacement occurs. They were vulnerable to Thai policy and dependent to some degree upon NGO assistance. However, the small amount of political autonomy allowed to them through the administration of the camps was enough to maintain (and for many enhance) their commitment to a political resolution and return to their homeland. By 1988, it had become increasingly apparent that the conflict in Burma was not dissipating. The Burmese military continued their drive to occupy KNU territory, destroying Karen villages as they went. More and more refugees fled across the border into Thailand. By 1988, there were almost 20,000 refugees housed in the camps along the border (BERG 1998: 52). In these early years the Thai authorities allowed the Karen to establish camps wherever they entered Thailand, so that in 1993, for example, there were thirty-one refugee camps along the border housing people from the Karen, Karenni and Mon ethnic groups (Dunford 1993). The border camps became a refuge from daily harassment, extortion, death and destruction. But the sheer size of the problem, seemingly without end, suggested that low-profile assistance to refugees and their informal administration systems would not be able to continue in its present form. While the initial arrival of refugees in 1984 was greeted with muted hospitality and a humanitarian response, the unravelling magnitude of the problem suggested that the system would necessarily have to change. Burma’s refugees were beginning to become an uncomfortable political uncertainty for the Thai government and it was keen for the refugee problem to disappear. NGOs providing assistance to the camps saw the need for their services increasing rather than declining. Camp sizes and locations had multiplied, so too the number of humanitarian organisations providing services to the camps, pu ing pressure on capabilities to maintain the self-governing structures of the camps. The temporary place of refuge was starting to take on a more fixed notion of permanency, at least for the near future. Underpinning all this was the continued flow of Karen villagers across the border and into the refugee camps in Thailand. Also, by the late 1980s, there were indications that the Thai government would pursue a different political approach in relation to its neighbour, as evidenced by a series of events that consolidated the penetration of both the Burmese and the Thai nation-states’ control over the border.

Political Intensification of the Border While my focus here is on events that have occurred since the early 1980s, it should be noted that the Thailand–Burma borderlands has a fairly sustained, if mixed history of political activity over many decades, especially

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in the period a er independence. The 1960s and 1970s in particular saw the development of fairly formal political alliances in opposition to General Ne Win’s central military government.4 Over the postindependence decades, the remote ethnic areas of the country a racted many other political and revolutionary parties willing to oppose the central military government, all with varying degrees of effectiveness and longevity.⁵ These alliances, and many of the groups that formed them, had their bases in the border areas adjacent to the Thailand–Burma border, and for many, Thailand provided material and financial support for their ongoing activities (M. Smith 1999). However, there were certain elements missing from these earlier periods that distinguish the post-1980 events I talk about here. Most significant is the Thai government’s lack of a formal refugee approach pre-1984 and Burma’s political and economic isolation under Ne Win’s Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) – a position that was largely sustained until 1988. The emergence of these and other events post-1984 gave the contemporary period its own unique political qualities in the history of the borderlands. The increased penetration of the state to consolidate control over the operations of the border can be a ributed to a number of shi s in the political landscape: the emergence of the Burmese state from twenty-seven years of political and economic isolation; growing bilateral relations between Thailand and Burma; deteriorating security along the border, including the depreciation of KNU military power, replaced by a far more powerful Tatmadaw and a larger humanitarian aid apparatus aimed at servicing refugee needs. While the Thailand–Burma border had been demarcated for some time, the early 1980s saw heightened political a ention given to securing it for nation-state operations. This changing political dynamic saw the entrenchment of state policies on both sides of the border: in Burma manifesting itself in heavy militarisation aimed at controlling the border areas; and in Thailand through a tightened regulatory framework. While they differ in form and approach, both worked to exclude displaced Karen from the formal political structures on both sides of the border.

The Re-emergence of the Burmese State As Burma’s ethnic conflict continued and more and more refugees arrived on the Thailand–Burma border, the political nature of the borderlands began to change. The borderlands became more than just a place of refuge; it was increasingly a site of political struggle, defined by events both inside Burma and along the border that saw an increased penetration of the state

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into the borderlands space. The first significant events that instigated this change occurred in 1988 and 1989. Although they originated far from the border, taking place in Burma’s capital and larger towns, these events were to have a significant impact upon the practices that occurred in the borderlands. Up until 1988, Burma had conducted an isolationist approach, both politically and economically, under Ne Win’s ‘Burmese Way to Socialism’. Ne Win’s BSPP was in power in Burma for twenty-seven years, a time characterised by the country’s mostly sealed, enigmatic status, which was o en perceived as decaying and romantic, yet prone to bouts of brutality and suppression. This period of isolation and political mismanagement took the country from one of Southeast Asia’s wealthiest to its poorest. As a result, and in protest against soaring prices and goods shortages, much of 1988 was dogged by protests in the capital and other provincial towns, culminating in what is now known as the ’88 Uprising on 8 August 1988. The government response was draconian and brutal. The death toll on 8 August alone is commonly estimated at 2,000–3,000 (Fink 2009: 56; Lintner 1994: 344; M. Smith 1999: 4) and across the entire year more than 10,000 (M. Smith 1999: 16).⁶ Videos and images of these events were smuggled out of the country and many survivors fled to the Thailand–Burma border, where they told their stories to the media. For the first time in more than thirty years, the international community caught a glimpse of what was happening inside this isolated country. Under this cloud of civil protest, Ne Win surprised many in July 1988 by resigning and calling for a multiparty political system and elections to be held. The initial response from the BSPP was to reject Ne Win’s proposal, but a er more than a year of political unrest, elections did eventually take place in May 1990. The result was spectacularly underestimated by the military, with more than 80 per cent of the vote going to Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party. Despite the outcome of the vote, it immediately became apparent that the Burmese generals were not about to relinquish power. In the midst of this instability, the military made another surprising move, hastily establishing a new era of ‘open door’ economic policy. This strategy a racted the a ention of Burma’s neighbours, particularly Thailand, which was quick to take advantage of this new position. The Thai Army commander-in-chief at the time, General Chavalit, visited Burma, where he purchased twenty logging concessions from the Burmese generals, sixteen of which were in insurgent-held areas on the Burmese side of the Thailand–Burma border (Lang 2002). Thailand itself had banned logging in May 1989 a er years of indiscriminate destruction of forests had depleted their own resources. It was the beginning of a new era for the Burmese generals, who were at-

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tracted to the potential of a capitalist economy. Coupled with Thai Prime Minister Chatichai Choonhaven’s foreign policy directive for ‘politics [to] take second place to economics’,⁷ it seemed that an ‘open door’ economy was instrumental to Burma’s re-emergence on the global stage. The logging concessions negotiated by General Chavalit and the Burmese generals were the beginning of a series of economic agreements that were to have a significant impact on Burma’s border areas. The Burmese Army moved into areas traditionally under the control of the KNU under the pretext of preparing for and protecting the logging agreements made with Thailand.⁸ Other global companies and governments also entered into economic development agreements with the Burmese military. Most notable was the Unocal-TOTAL deal to extract gas from the Andaman Sea, including the development of a pipeline which runs for 700 kilometres from Nat E Tong in Thailand to Daminseik on the Tenasserim coast in Burma, which a racted international condemnation for its displacement of thousands of Karen villagers and the use of forced labour in its construction.⁹ Almost in defiance of the reports of human rights abuses a ached to these economic projects, international investment in Burma rose exponentially. It was a largely untapped market with li le regulation. The benefits for the Burmese military were significant: the agreements gave them credibility and legitimacy in the international arena, and also provided much-needed financial resources that were funnelled into the military, at that time considered to be the second-largest army in Southeast Asia (Selth 2010), rather than developing the services and needs of the country (Burma is listed as one of the UN’s Least Developed Countries). The economic development of the border area continued throughout the 1990s, decimating the KNU’s economic control and significantly depleting its control over territory. For decades, the KNU had controlled the border trade by controlling the territory and resources that sat adjacent to the border. In 1983 the KNU estimated an income of 500 million kyat (A$69 million) through its border trade posts (M. Smith 1999: 283). While rice and ca le was traded across the border into Thailand, radios, watches and other manufactured goods went back across the border into Burma, all with a flat 5 per cent tax on them that went straight into KNU coffers (Bryant 1997; M. Smith 1999: 283). Further income came from timber mills and tin mines, jointly run with Thai businessmen. Up until the mid-1990s, the KNU was able to fund a large proportion of its armed insurgency from these profits. However, a combination of the logging concessions handed to Thailand in 1989 and the KNU’s continued deforestation for its own revenue purposes soon depleted much of this valuable resource. The KNU’s revenue was further decimated in 1998, when the Thai–Myanmar Friendship Bridge was opened between Myawaddy in Burma and Mae

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Sot in Thailand, effectively moving trade between the two countries to this official checkpoint, while at the same time weakening the unofficial trading posts under the operation of the KNU. A er almost three decades of economic and political isolation, Burma emerged to embrace the financial benefits of economic engagement, quickly making agreements with international companies to develop gas, oil and teak reserves. In a tactical manoeuvre the Burmese military had asserted their right to negotiate economic investment within their sovereign borders with two potential advantages to them: first, they strategically positioned themselves to gain financially from foreign investment; and, second, they were able to move in and significantly deplete the ethnic insurgencies that had traditionally controlled the border areas rich with natural resources. This also led to the Burmese military’s growing interest and presence in the border area adjacent to Thailand. The Burmese military gained further international standing as they began to develop a political relationship with their neighbour, Thailand. This growing interstate relationship was to have a significant impact upon Thailand’s longstanding but capricious relationship with the Karen, largely weakening the status of the Karen and reorientating the political dynamic in the borderlands.

Growing Interstate Relations The realities around the longevity of the conflict and the continued presence of refugees in Thailand became a significant pressure on Thai government responses. The early informal hospitality soon lost its lustre. This was due to a number of changes in Thailand–Burma relations, namely the increasing pressure Karen refugees were placing on Thailand’s own underresourced services, the changing economic alliances from local to government level and, perhaps most significantly, the growing bilateral cooperation between the Burmese and Thai governments. The development of this diplomatic relationship, while o en volatile, had a significant impact on the intensification of the political nature of the borderlands because it increasingly prioritised state engagement over what had previously been more autonomous local allegiances. This allowed the state to consolidate control over the operations of the border and at the same time a empt to weaken the more localised relationships developed with ethnic groups like the Karen. In many ways, as Burma negotiated its tumultuous independence years, characterised by ethnic unrest and political instability, Thailand developed a relationship with the immediately adjacent ethnic border areas that was an extension of the historical distrust and animosity between

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Thailand and Burma.10 Thailand pursued a policy that was an uneasy balance between practical, local-level support of the ethnic groups with whom it shared a border and a more tentative (at least post-1988) official relationship with the Burmese generals. This ambiguous position led anthropologist Gehan Wijeyewardene to observe: ‘Until very recently one could say that though the Thai have not satisfied any of the parties concerned, they had not unduly offended them either’ (Wijeyewardene 2002). However, there are a number of aspects of contemporary border politics that contributed to a clear shi in Thai border policy, particularly in terms of Thailand’s treatment of Burma’s ethnic groups along its border. By the late 1980s, Thailand was clearly reordering border politics to favour stronger relations with the Burmese generals, a position that was obviously detrimental to its traditional relations with localised minority ethnic groups. One indication was the mounting pressure placed on Thailand to curb the activities of minority ethnic insurgent groups and political activists basing themselves in the borderlands. As a result of the constructive engagement policy Thailand was pursuing with the Burmese generals, the pressure was immense. Burma has consistently declared that Thailand should not allow its territory to be used by ethnic insurgencies as a springboard to a ack its neighbours.11 Thailand has at least paid lip service to these demands by making declarations around the prioritisation of its friendship with Burma. These calls were largely a result of the influx of 15,000 Burmese students to the borderlands, most having fled Burma’s major cities a er the ’88 Uprising. Many of these students found protection in the camps of the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), consequently forming their own organisation, the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front (ABSDF), and later basing political organisations-in-exile in Mae Sot and other towns in the borderlands. While the Karen resistance movement remained a predominant force in the borderlands, the post-1990 period saw even further political expansion as the newly elected and subsequently harassed members of parliament, particularly from the NLD, also fled to the borderlands and established alternative political movements and resistance groups. In addition, united ethnic nationalities groups based themselves there and special interest groups around law, trade, political prisoners and the environment were established, some replicating their organisations from inside Burma, others starting from scratch. Most significant at this time was the fact that the democratic goals of the students and exiled parliamentarians came into direct contact with the political claims of the ethnic groups. In effect, over a period of less than a decade, the borderlands saw the arrival of repeated waves of political agents. The students, exiled parliamentarians, ethnic insurgents and refugees may all have differing expe-

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riences and goals, but in the borderlands they found the necessary space to articulate an alternative political voice and find an audience for their messages. Their presence contributed to a political reshaping of the borderlands. The space became an intensified political environment, which provided opportunities for displaced Karen to develop their own activism and strengthen their own political voice and identity. The actions of these political groups brought greater international a ention to the political and humanitarian crisis along the border, as well as providing skills to strengthen the political engagement of those involved in the struggle. However, Thailand was under increasing pressure from the Burmese military to curb the activities of these groups. Calls to stop the ethnic insurgents entering Thailand have led at various junctures to Thailand undertaking repatriations, imprisonment and intimidation of Karen, Burmese and other ethnic groups residing on the Thai side of the border.12 Under pressure from the Burmese government, the Thai government essentially affirmed its sovereign authority over the Karen by restricting their presence in Thailand. However, despite this policy shi , Thailand o en displays a lingering nostalgia for its relationship with the Karen and at various times has employed a flexible application of the policy on the ground. Its treatment of the Karen is rarely consistent. At times it suits the Thai authorities to allow the Karen to move freely and act as a buffer to the ongoing distrust between Thailand and the Burma, or to negotiate development opportunities. At other times it suits them to treat the Karen as pariahs and to enforce restrictive conditions upon their presence in Thailand. These are indications of the complexity of Thailand–Burma borderlands actors and their relationships: loyalties can be transient, relationships continue to evolve, political allegiances are o en based on best interests, and the border operates through a diverse mix of economic, political and military input. It is these types of scenarios that indicate the tensions that can arise when the operations of the nation-state, which apply a more hardened and homogenised spatiality to the borderlands, intersect with the social relations of a range of agents that pursue a more fluid and contested engagement with the borderlands space. Another indication of a changing border politics was Thailand’s removal of the ‘buffer zone’ policy. Under this policy, Thailand had maintained a relationship with the Karen, as they provided cross-border intelligence on Burmese politics and defended the Thai border against Burmese military a acks and communist crossovers. This was particularly evident at the height of the communist insurgencies in the 1970s and 1980s, when Western governments opposed the expansion of communism into some developing countries. From the mid-1970s, the KNU strategically positioned itself as an anti-communist group.13 The Karen were also

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a convenient black market trading partner in arms, teak and other natural resources that dominate the border area, offering Thailand one of the only ways to access these natural resources during Burma’s period of economic isolation. There is some debate about when this buffer policy first emerged. Burma analyst Bertil Lintner traces it back to a relatively inconsequential event in 1953, when a Burmese military aircra bombed a Thai village, mistaking it for a KMT base (Lintner 1992). As a result, tacit negotiations between senior Thai officials saw the beginning of this unofficial ‘buffer’ agreement as a means to protect themselves against their unwieldy Burmese neighbour. By the 1990s, the policy had largely run its course, mostly because communist insurgencies were no longer deemed to be a threat to Thailand and the ethnic insurgencies had lost much of their military power, making them less effective as a buffer and therefore a protector of Thai soil. Finally, in a 2002 radio address, Thaksin Shinawatra, the Thai Prime Minister at the time, became the first Thai leader to acknowledge that such a policy had existed when he officially announced that Thailand would stop fostering the buffer zone made up of ethnic groups along the border.14 He quickly denied making the statement and was accused of damaging the already fragile relations between the two countries. Nevertheless, it was a clear indication that Thailand was turning its support from the ethnic insurgent groups along the border so that it could foster a stronger relationship with Burma’s central governing power. The growing bilateral relationship between the Burmese and the Thai governments is one of the most significant elements in the border’s changing political dynamic. Despite the o en temperamental state of this relationship, the informal, longstanding relationships between the Thai authorities and ethnic minority groups were seriously weakened by this change in policy. This posed a challenge for ethnic minorities living in Thailand. It saw greater restrictions placed on political groups and local NGOs, which suddenly found their presence in Thailand to be more ambiguous and less welcoming. This had ramifications on the ability of these groups to conduct their activities. It also meant that the Thai government was more likely to make economic agreements with the Burmese generals rather than the ethnic minority groups, reducing income-generation opportunities and therefore much-needed funding, and depleting the power of the insurgencies. A border by its very nature is a site of political power (Donnan and Wilson 1999), but these events of the late 1980s saw renewed political interest from the two nation-states that shared the border. This penetration into the border by both the Thai and the Burmese states offers some insight into how much the political dynamics of the border could and would

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change as a result of this burgeoning bilateral relationship. The border was increasingly being used as a political tool by both governments, complicating its position as a place of refuge for displaced Karen. It is from these events and circumstances that we begin to see the extent of nation-state penetration into the borderlands and the establishment of a key contemporary framework for the borderlands space. A greater presence and interest by both nation-states over the operations of the borderlands brought about a corresponding coercive regulation that was to impact the social practices of displaced Karen and the way in which they engaged with the space. But, importantly, these events also helped to develop the conditions from which the social practices and identity constructs of displaced Karen begins to emerge. As a key agent of the borderlands space, the operations of the nation-state form a key influence over the nature of those social relations.

Deteriorating Security in the Borderlands There are a number of factors specifically related to the borderlands that also affect its political status. Of particular significance is the issue of security. The deteriorating security situation, particularly inside Burma, has changed the political nature of the borderlands through an increased militarisation on the Burmese side of the border and increased regulation of the Thai side of the border. In 1989 Burma’s military spokesman, Colonel Aung Thein, in response to questions about negotiating with the ethnic insurgent forces inside Burma, was quoted as saying: ‘We shall continue to fight them until they are eliminated.’15 The ensuing decade showed the seriousness of this threat. From the mid-1990s onwards, the Burmese military presence in Burma’s ethnic border areas was highly visible and increasingly dominant. In the space of five years, the Burmese military had become a real and dangerous presence in the border region, particularly to Karen villagers and displaced persons. Such a change in status suggests the extent of political manoeuvring that was occurring at the time, but it also characterises a new phenomenon in the borderlands. Prior to the offensives of the mid-1980s, Burma’s conflict, with few exceptions,16 was mostly contained within its international boundaries. The increasing presence of the Burmese military in the previously KNU-dominated border areas was a sign of changing military power. The way it o en spilled over the border into Thailand also meant that Thailand became increasingly, though reluctantly, embroiled in Burma’s ethnic conflicts, at times proving disadvantageous to Thailand’s constructive engagement policy with the Burmese generals. For example, in May 2002 Burma closed its entire border with Thailand a er military

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skirmishes between Burma’s minority ethnic groups and Burmese soldiers spilled over into Thailand. Burma accused Thailand of supporting the Shan State Army, an armed ethnic group from Burma, which was fighting against the Burmese military. Burma called on Thailand to take a clear stance on its relationship with Burma’s ethnic minority armed groups. The border remained closed for five months. The fallout included a serious breakdown in bilateral relations, millions of baht (Thai currency) lost in trade and tourism, detention of soldiers and villagers who strayed across the border on both sides, and the resurgence of decade-old disputes over land. When the border finally reopened, the Thai Foreign Minister Surakiart Sathirathai commented: ‘The Burmese government now understood Thailand’s policy of non-interference in its neighbours’ domestic affairs and bilateral relations were back to normal.’17 However, the Burmese Army’s biggest military achievement was the taking of the KNU Headquarters, Manerplaw, in 1995. A key contributing factor to this was the internal split in the KNU between disaffected Buddhist members and the largely Christian leadership of the KNU. Led by the Venerable U Thuzana, a Buddhist monk based in Pa’an District of Karen State, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) was quickly formed, and the Burmese Army utilised this disunity to join forces with the DKBA and take large tracts of KNU-controlled territory, including Manerplaw (M. Smith 1999: 446). This split defined the Karen conflict for at least the next decade, highlighting the failure of the KNU’s ethnonationalist narrative of Karen identity to accommodate large elements of its Buddhist membership. The loss of Manerplaw was an enormous physical and psychological blow to the Karen resistance movement. With the exception of small pockets of soldiers undertaking guerrilla tactics, the KNU was largely forced across the border into Thailand, losing not only territory but also any ability it may have had to protect Karen villagers. The extent of Burmese military power at this time meant that they were reportedly able to cross into Thailand and launch offensives against Karen military camps in 198918 and against the refugee camps between 1995 and 1998, burning down both the Huay Kaloke and Don Pa Kiang camps.19 Some reports suggested that the a acks from Thai territory were carried out with the aid of Thai authorities.20 At the very least, Gen Boonsak Kamheangridirong, the Thai National Security Council chief, accepted that the Thai authorities had been ‘inactive’ and that security ‘should have been stronger, particularly in our intelligence gathering’.21 Nyi Nyi described living through the burning down of Huay Kaloke refugee camp. He spoke of the despair he felt at the time when he realised that even in Thailand, their place of refuge, they were not safe from

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the Burmese military. He spoke of how the Thai military, tasked with protecting them, had failed to stop the a ack. For many Karen who cross the border into Thailand, there is an expectation of the security that is denied to them inside Burma. But the security that has eluded them in Burma will o en elude them in Thailand as well, though it has taken on a different and on occasion perhaps more dangerous form, for in Thailand, Karen refugees are denied the ability to choose and control forms of protection. Inside Burma they employ various resistance strategies to ensure their security, such as hiding food and household items for retrieval a er Burmese military a acks, employing evasive techniques to get out of dangerous military demands such as portering and finding creative alternatives to resist human rights abuses by the military.22 In Thailand they are completely reliant on others to provide their security, having been denied rights and choices in terms of how they live and protect themselves. At the same time, the very circumstances that were creating the refugee exodus not only continued, but were reaching ever-greater proportions. Waves of refugees arriving in Thailand were almost always related to Burmese military offensives on the other side of the border. There was an influx of 10,000 refugees in 1995 a er Burmese military offensives led to the capturing of the KNU Headquarters Manerplaw and the fall of Kawmoorah, another major base. Most se led in the Mae La Oon and Mae Ra Ma Luang camps. In 1997 thousands of refugees arrived from the Mergui-Tavoy area. They were fleeing a combination of Burmese military offensives and largescale international development projects such as the Yadana gas pipeline. A new ‘temporary site’ was established to house the refugees, called Tham Hin refugee camp, which over twenty years later still housed thousands of refugees. More recent occurrences include the arrival of more than 3,000 refugees as a result of military a acks upon the IDP camp Ler Per Her23 and the surrounding villages.24 Those arriving in the camps tell a range of devastating stories: from being forced to porter for Burmese military ba alions, to increasing militarisation, crop and land destruction or confiscation, extrajudicial killings and torture, food shortages and starvation, and the culture of rape among military personnel. The Burmese Army’s militarisation of its border areas directly contributes to refugee influxes and causes significant concerns for neighbouring Thailand, which bears the brunt of this movement. These security concerns are not confined to the Burmese side of the border. Reports of deaths of Burmese migrant workers were increasingly evident in the Thai media in the 1990s and 2000s. These included fourteen Karen found drowned in the Moei River in 200225 and fi y-four migrant workers found suffocated in an enclosed container truck that was transporting them to resort locations in the south of Thailand.26 In both

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instances the deaths were reported as the deliberate actions of Thai employers or people smugglers. A number of reports from refugee camps include accusations of rape by Thai soldiers and security personnel. In many instances these rapes go unreported or are never investigated.27 In 2002 two Thai schoolchildren were killed when gunmen opened fire on a school bus in Ratchaburi Province. Some reports suggested that the shooting was a result of a business dispute between the bus driver and the gunmen, while others claimed that it was the work of the KNLA or the Burmese government.28 In 2007 and 2008 even the KNU leadership was shown not to be safe in Thailand. KNU Secretary General Pado Mahn Shah was killed in his home in Mae Sot in February 2008, reportedly in a revenge a ack by members of the Karen Peace Council (KPC), an armed group that broke away from the KNU in 2007. The KPC lost one of its own leaders, Saw Ler Mu, killed by a bomb that was placed under the hut he was sleeping in, reportedly the work of the KNU.29 Rumours abounded a er Mahn Shah’s death of other targeted a acks on KNU leaders, which caused many to go into hiding.30 These a acks, while not a complete list, highlight the many concerns Karen and Burmese in the borderlands have for their security in Thailand. It was the end of the 1990s that the chaos in Burma had its most significant impact upon security in Thailand and Burmese–Thai relations. In October 1999 Burmese students stormed the Burmese embassy in Bangkok and took forty hostages. In a perhaps surprising move the Thai government gave the students a helicopter ride to the border in exchange for the release of the hostages. The Burmese government was highly critical of how the Thai government handled the situation, and this almost certainly had some impact on its response to the next hostage drama. In January 2000, members of the God’s Army, a rebel group that broke away from the KNU and that was perhaps best known for its child leaders, twin brothers Johnny and Luther Htoo, seized a hospital in Ratchaburi Province. This time the Thai government was not so accommodating – the siege ended with nine of the dissidents killed.31 The deteriorating security situation on both sides of the border highlights the complex nature of Burma’s internal conflict and the limited control both nation-states have exhibited in resolving the conflict. The events mentioned in this section, and many others similar to them, show that the change in the political dynamics of the borderlands had done li le to improve the safety of displaced Karen. In fact, the greater level of political interest in the borderlands and its operations has brought about many restrictions that reinforce the vulnerability of displaced Karen. Heavy militarisation on the Burmese side of the border means that displaced Karen continue to be subjected to Burmese Army a acks, death, arbitrary

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arrest, rape and torture. Greater regulation on the Thai side of the border means that displaced Karen are increasingly prone to exploitation and, due to their illegal status, are excluded from the services and entitlements that may help protect them. The actions of the nation-state on both sides of the border have only perpetuated this state of existence. Further contributing to this state is the heavy militarisation in Burma’s border areas combined with the increasing bilateral relationship between Burma and Thailand (manifesting in greater restrictions on the Thai side of the border). Together, these policies seem to have increased the security concerns of displaced Karen living on both sides of the border. While this lack of security continues to manifest in refugee flows, cross-border skirmishes and exploitation, it seems that political stability for all players in the borderlands will remain elusive. It is this state of ambiguity that reinforces many of the political characteristics of the borderlands that have emerged since the early 1980s and define the nature of this nation-state political layer in the borderlands.

Humanitarian Aid As the number of refugees along the border increased, the refugee apparatus grew in terms of its complexity, bringing a new humanitarian political dynamic to the border as well. This type of politicisation is entrenched through both an ideological framework of humanitarian assistance and a practical implementation of aid policies and activities. Over the last thirty years, the humanitarian aid programme has become embedded in the political landscape of the borderlands. It provides a vital service, administering to the needs and entitlements of highly vulnerable populations, but through its policies and activities, it has also changed the long-term political dynamic of the borderlands by bringing a more regulated, policydriven approach to the space. Humanitarian aid in some form has existed along the Thailand–Burma border since the arrival of the first official refugees in 1984. In these first years it was quite low-key, so that in 1988 only three NGOs were officially working along the border providing relief assistance to the Karen. These NGOs were the BBC, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the Catholic Office for Emergency Relief and Refugees (COERR). In 1991 an agreement with Thailand’s MOI allowed these NGOs to increase their reach so as to also include two other persecuted ethnic groups that were arriving on the border: the Mon and the Karenni. Eventually, other NGOs began working in an informal capacity until a further agreement with the MOI was reached in 1994, which formalised their working arrangements and

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established a greater number of NGOs working along the border. This agreement also increased the aid mandate, allowing NGOs to provide food, clothing and medicine as well as education and sanitation.32 Under the CCSDPT umbrella group, there are currently thirteen NGOs working on the border on issues as diverse as education, healthcare, family planning, landmines, drug and alcohol recovery, and child support. This does not include a myriad of other independent NGOs working on migrant, refugee, environmental and human rights documentation issues, to name but a few of the policy areas in which they are involved. As many of these NGOs work in an informal capacity (they are not registered with the Thai government), there is limited consistent coordination or regulation of their work. The 1991 and 1994 agreements had profound effects on the refugee population. On the one hand, it increased the services available to refugees in the camps, particularly in relation to education opportunities and healthcare services. But on the other hand, coupled with the deteriorating security situation mentioned above, it also introduced a more restrictive and regulated camp environment. The informal camp environments and the easy hospitality that first greeted the refugees of 1984 were gradually replaced with fenced enclosures and highly regulated conditions that, despite a empts by some NGOs to reduce aid dependency and maintain community management, weakened the autonomy and agency of the Karen who lived there. Saw Ba described the changes he saw in the refugee camps during this period: In 1989 I le Huay Kaloke refugee camp and went to Manerplaw. When I came back in 1995 I noticed that many things in the camps had changed. The camp was fenced and Thai military police guarded the camps. Movement in and out of the camp had become seriously restricted. These conditions became even worse a er Huay Kaloke was burnt down in 1997. I suppose there were more Thai police to protect us but as more Karen fled to the refugee camps I think the Thai authorities wanted greater control over the camps, they wanted to deter other Karen from entering Thailand.

Thai authorities introduced tighter controls in the camps; camp passes were enforced that restricted NGO and refugee movement in and out of the camps, and NGOs were now required to submit formal project proposals to the MOI for approval, as well as to provide quarterly programme reports to district authorities. The increased number of NGOs brought with them an accompanying humanitarian apparatus: staff, both local and international; an increased injection of capital, financial and material; international exposure to the plight of the Karen and Burma generally; and a bureaucracy that increased regulated service provision and introduced new political terminology to describe the border’s hu-

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manitarian situation. This terminology has been both enabling and limiting in its application. The Thailand–Burma borderlands humanitarian status is somewhat unusual for an international refugee situation. This is mostly due to the combination of Thai government and NGO roles in providing humanitarian assistance rather than through UN bodies such as the UNHCR. In terms of minimising the effects of displacement and maintaining the autonomy of refugee populations, this relative uniqueness has provided strengths to the programme. The CCSDPT, for example, has consistently called for the promotion of sustainable livelihood initiatives and income-generation opportunities. It has long suggested moving humanitarian assistance from an approach based on relief to one based on development (CCSDPT and UNHCR 2011). The CCSDPT and the UNHCR have put together a number of joint plans and strategies over the period from 2005 to 201433 that would provide refugees with increased self-reliance, including skills training and higher education opportunities, participation in income-generation projects and employment opportunities. These plans have been designed as a dialogue with the Thai government, whose support is a necessary component for the feasibility of the plans. Currently, there are a number of small-scale projects operating in the camps, particularly around developing livelihood, nutrition and agriculture initiatives. Any long-term consolidation of these programmes is now challenged by the withdrawal of many NGOs from the borderlands to work inside Burma, and the increasing pressure to close the camps and repatriate the refugees. In the early years of refugee arrivals at the border, the lack of formal structure and regulation in relation to receiving refugees certainly helped the Karen. Had the UNHCR been involved in the refugee response from its earliest inception, it is doubtful whether they would have been able to achieve this community management of the camps. However, given rising concerns around protection, particularly from the mid-1990s onwards, there is some value in the argument that the involvement of the UNHCR might have ensured greater and earlier protection of refugee populations. The UNHCR has both the capacity and mandate to protect vulnerable populations, which NGOs could not. Regardless, this absence of UNHCR involvement in those early years is certainly one of the more unusual aspects of the border’s status for refugee asylum. The UNHCR was absent from any meaningful participation in the day-to-day administration of the refugees along the Thailand–Burma border for the first fourteen years;34 even now, its involvement is mostly tasked with monitoring security and service provision, and administering the rese lement and repatriation programmes. This absence is in part due to political manoeuvring by the Thai government. The UNHCR’s core mandate to provide protection and

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assistance to refugee populations is reliant upon requests by both the host and/or sending country for UNHCR involvement, something both Burma and Thailand had been reluctant, particularly at the beginning, to provide. Despite the best a empts of some NGO providers, refugees and displaced Karen continue to hold a mostly passive-recipient position in the humanitarian assistance apparatus. The way in which humanitarian aid is administered – governed by centralised ideologies and largely reliant on the directive of Thai government policy – leaves li le room for aid providers to explore long-term enabling and empowering programmes. Aid providers are forced to negotiate an uneasy path between assuaging Thai government concerns and fulfilling their own mandate to provide protection and support to refugees in the camps, and, for some, a moral obligation to support those outside the camps. Aid agencies have been in the borderlands for more than two decades and are adept at negotiating these government-level requirements; however, there has been limited success during that period in terms of generating more autonomous and participatory programmes that would provide displaced Karen with skills and employment opportunities outside the camps and empower their political voice to take control of their displacement experiences. The humanitarian aid apparatus may be entrenched in the political fabric of the borderlands, but in being so it has contributed to an apolitical passive-recipient picture of displaced Karen in the borderlands. Challenging this state of apolitical passivity underlies Karen practices of agency and activism. Yet, at this point, it is necessary to reiterate the importance of the role of the state, not only because it is a fundamental component of the borderlands space, but also because the activities of displaced Karen are intrinsically tied to these state operations. In the following chapters I juxtapose these state operations with key modes of social practice of displaced Karen. Through these practices, the Karen develop a more informal political power based on contested social relations, and this informal power sits in tension with the aspirations of state administration and governance.

Notes  1. While officially demarcated in 1868, it should be noted that the modern demarcation of the border is a result of agreements undertaken between the governments of Siam and Great Britain over a period of decades in the mid- to late eighteenth century. As such, there has been no comprehensive, formal border demarcation between the governments of Burma and Thailand, leading some researchers to suggest that this has led to the continuing ‘flashpoints’ between the two countries over the issue, particularly in areas around the Three Pagodas Pass (M. Smith 1999).

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 2. In 1974 General Ne Win began his official ‘Four Cuts Policy’ (cutting off Karen soldiers from crucial links to food, finances, communication and recruits) in Karen State. This led to a mass displacement of Karen villagers. In 1974 a group of 8,000 Karen crossed the Salween River to the Thai side of the border. Over the next four years, some returned to the Burmese side of the border, or back to their villages. It was a pattern repeated throughout Karen State’s northern districts (see BERG 1998: 27). One participant in this research, Loo Ne, also talked of a group of refugees fleeing Nyuanglebin District in 1976 because of a Burmese military offensive and settling in a Karen village on the Thai side of the border (Loo Ne, interview, 2007).  3. In 2004 BBC became a registered charity and changed its name to the Thailand Burma Border Consortium (TBBC). It then changed its name again in 2015 to The Border Consortium (TBC). The different acronyms are used depending on the period of time being referred to.  4. Some examples of these political alliances include: a number of ethnic nationality groups allying themselves with the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) to form the National Democratic United Front (NDUF) (between 1959 and 1975) and in 1970 the National United Liberation Front (NULF) was formed between former Prime Minister U Nu’s insurgent Parliamentary Democracy Party and the ethnic nationality groups of the KNU, the New Mon State Party (NMSP) and the Chin Democracy Party (CDP).  5. For an extensive discussion of these ethnic political alliances and revolutionary parties, see M. Smith (1999).  6. Figures of the death toll for the uprising in 1988 are contentious and variable. The figures I use here are widely cited by authors with extensive research reputations for their work on Burma, but as far as I know, an accurate figure have never been able to be verified. The Burmese military government states that the death toll was less than 100; this is widely considered to be a gross underestimation.  7. Chatichai made the comment in an address to the Foreign Correspondents Club in Bangkok on 22 December 1988, as reported by Marc Innes-Brown and Mark J. Valencia (1993).  8. ‘Burmese Pound Karen Bases to Clear Log Routes’, Bangkok Post, 8 May 1989.  9. Reports at the time detailed the pipeline’s construction, including the use of forced labour, human rights abuses and the destruction of local villages and livelihoods. These reports were highly attentive to the stories of villagers who were directly impacted by the pipelines construction; see Earthrights International (1996, 2000). In 2004 Unocal finally settled with fourteen villagers who had taken them to court based on a case that Unocal should be held accountable for the human rights violations that occurred during the construction of the gas pipeline. The settlement was undisclosed, but in a joint statement Unocal and Earthrights International (which represented the plaintiffs) stated it would ‘compensate plaintiffs and provide funds enabling plaintiffs and their representatives to develop programs to improve living conditions, health care and education and protect the rights of people from the pipeline region’. See L. Girion, ‘Unocal to Settle Rights Claims’, LA Times, 14 December 2004. p. A1. 10. Elements of this historical distrust are touched on throughout this book. Some contemporary examples of this distrust include the buffer zone policy and periodic closure of border checkpoints between the two countries, the most recent of which was the closure of the Mae Sot-Myawaddy Friendship Bridge between July 2010 and December

64 11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

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2011. Historical examples include a litany of invasions by both sides – for example, the Burmese conquest of Ayuttuyah in 1767. Burmese Prime Minister U Sein Win told the nonaligned summit in 1976 that neighbouring countries should ‘faithfully undertake not to provide one’s territory as a spring board of attack on its neighbours both covert and overt’ (Moscotti 1978). For example, in 1997 the Thai Army’s 9th Division was accused of preventing refugees from entering Thailand and in other cases pushing them back into Burma, claiming there was no fighting. After a number of such refoulements and accusations of harsh treatment in the refugee camps, concerned embassies set up a roving border team to report on conditions for Karen along the border (BERG 1998). A further example occurred in 2002 with reports of the forcible repatriation of thirty-one Burmese (comprising student activists and exiled members of the NLD) via the checkpoint at Sangklaburi. See ‘RELATIONS WITH BURMA – Officials Send Back Activists Held at Border’, Bangkok Post, 23 August 2002. This was a significant shift in KNU policy. For most of the 1960s and 1970s, there had been increasing tension between two of the KNU’s most prominent leaders: Mahn Ba Zan, who followed a socialist policy based on Marxist objectives, and Bo Mya, who pursued a capitalist nationalist agenda. In the end Mahn Ba Zan was made subject to a banning order by the Thai Army for his ‘left-wing sympathies’, seriously restricting his movement in Thailand and eventually forcing him to resign as KNU President. Bo Mya became the new KNU President and was quick to reinforce the KNU’s position as a guard to prevent links between communist movements in Burma and Thailand (M. Smith, 1999). See Y. Tunyasiri and P. Charoensuthipan, ‘BORDER TENSIONS: Buffer State Policy against Burma to End’, Bangkok Post, 9 June 2002. See also ‘The End of the “Buffer Zone”: Thailand Security Policies towards Burma’s Armed Opposition Groups’, Burma Issues, 15 September 2005. ‘Rangoon Rejects Offer for Peace Talks with Rebels’, Bangkok Post, 26 May 1989. A number of declarations by Burmese generals in the 1970s alluded to the prevention of insurgents launching subversive attacks from neighbouring countries, including guidelines from the MOI aimed at preventing ‘refugees from using Thai territory to stage hostile or subversive acts against their home countries and to maintain good relations between Thailand and neighbouring countries’ (Moscotti 1978: 87). Yet rarely did this fighting spill across the border to the same levels seen in the late 1980s and early 1990s. ‘THAI–BURMESE BORDER – Surakiart is Confident of Reopening’, Bangkok Post, 26 August 2002. ‘Burmese Pound Karen Bases to Clear Log Routes’, Bangkok Post, 8 May 1989. See: S. Kasem, ‘CROSS-BORDER RAID – Two Killed as Karens Hit Refugee Camp’, Bangkok Post, 12 March 1998; S. Kasem, ‘BORDER – Renegades exchanged for villagers – Locals say officials gave in too easily’, Bangkok Post, 17 March 1998. See ‘BORDER – UNHCR Slams Burma over Raid on Refugee Camp’, Bangkok Post, 13 March 1998; and Lintner (1991). ‘THAI–BURMESE BORDER – NSC Admits Security Lapse Led to Refugee Camp Attack’, Bangkok Post, 21 March 1998.

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22. Villagers inside Burma’s conflict zones have employed various strategies, often evasive and almost always defensive, both for daily survival and as a form of resistance. These ‘everyday forms of resistance’ are significant indicators of agency, a proactive, creative and sometimes revolutionary way to subvert military and political power. It acknowledges the strategies of vulnerable populations to be active rather than passive in their marginalisation. For more on this concept of everyday resistance and agency, see Scott (1985); KHRG (2008); and Cusano (2001). 23. Ler Per Her was an IDP camp situated on the Burmese bank of the Salween River. Many families and individuals at Ler Per Her had already been displaced from villages further inside Karen State. Refused entry to Thailand, they had simply re-established themselves on the Burmese side of the banks of the Salween. In June 2009 a combination attack by the Burmese military and the DKBA forced most of Ler Per Her’s inhabitants across the river into Thai communities at Mae U Su and Noh Bo, causing one of the largest refugee influxes of the previous few years. 24. Refugee influxes as a result of Burmese military attacks on Ler Per Her were reported extensively. For example, see L. Jagan, ‘Thousands of Karen Seek Safety in Thailand’, The Irrawaddy, 18 June 2009, http://www2.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=16077 (retrieved 22 November 2019); and Yeni, ‘On the Run’, The Irrawaddy, 6 August 2009, http://www2.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=16497 (retrieved 22 November 2019). 25. J.S. Moncrief, ‘Karens Found Dead in River’, The Irrawaddy, 9 February 2002, http:// www2.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=2204 (retrieved 22 November 2019). 26. ‘Suffocation of 54 Burmese Workers: No Surprise’, Inter Press Service, 11 April 2008. 27. For example, see Asian Human Rights Commission (2002); and S. Paung, ‘Rape Claim at Refugee Camp’, The Irrawaddy, 8 February 2006. 28. T. Broadmoor and S.L. Nance, ‘Bus attack Leaves Many Questions Unanswered’, The Irrawaddy, 5 June 2002, https://www2.irrawaddy.com/article.php?art_id=2332 (retrieved 20 January 2020). 29. ‘Myanmar Gains in Leader’s Death’, Online Asia Times, 16 February 2008. 30. S.Y. Naing, ‘KNU: More Leaders Targeted for Assassination’, The Irrawaddy, 16 February 2008, http://www2.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=10428 (retrieved 22 November 2019). 31. ‘Profile: God’s Army’, BBC News, 24 January 2000, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ asia-pacific/616772.stm (retrieved 22 November 2019). 32. NGOs sought formal permission from the MOI to increase their assistance to all ethnic groups along the border after receiving requests from the Karenni Refugee Committee (in 1989) and the Mon National Relief Committee (in 1990) to assist refugees from their respective groups who were also arriving at the border. On 31 May 1991, the MOI gave written approval for the provision of assistance to all ethnic groups based on the same conditions under which they had been administering support to the Karen refugees. This was limited to food, clothing and medicine. By 1994, there were an increasing number of NGOs working along the border with tacit MOI approval but no formal mandate. An agreement with the MOI in May 1994 allowed formal recognition and approval of the services and programmes that these NGOs were conducting.

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As part of this agreement, the MOI allowed an extension of the current NGO service provision to include education and sanitation (see TBBC 2008). 33. Comprehensive plans were made in 2005 and 2006 and were presented to the Thai government and donors. These plans were updated in 2007 with the production of the ‘UNHCR/CCSDPT Comprehensive Plan 2007/08’ (CCSDPT and UNHCR 2007). In 2009 the UNHCR and the CCSDPT put together a five-year strategic plan and revised the plan in 2011 and 2013 to produce the Strategic Framework for Durable Solutions (2011, 2013). These plans are designed to provide a dialogue with the Thai government in terms of how to best implement a solutions-based, development approach to the protracted refugee situation along the border. 34. While I state that the UNHCR has not had a meaningful involvement in the day-to-day administration of the camps, this is not to say that the UNHCR has not had a long-term presence along the border. While the UNHCR has had an office in Bangkok since 1977, it took no formal role in the operations of the Thailand–Burma border refugee situation until 1998. At this time, negotiations with the Thai government allowed the UNHCR a limited role in observing and monitoring refugee rights and protection, although the actual carrying out of these tasks continued to lie with the Thai government and NGOs. The UNHCR took on a more substantial role in 1999 when it tentatively established a resettlement programme, although the administration of this programme did not take full effect until 2004.

3  By the Shade of a Tree Scales of Resistance, Patterns of Activism Why do we Karen people have to suffer from our grandparents through to now? I am not satisfied with this. We want to have our dignity. If people ask us the population of the Karen we can tell them but if people ask about our education we can only say ‘we have none’. Looking back I would say my life is like this. I would go and stand in the shade of a tree near my home that I le in Burma. This tree, the insects had eaten the inside of it out and worms gorged themselves on the leaves. If I stay under this tree then the shit of the worms would drop on me and eventually the branches will fall off and hit me. So I have to leave the shade of this tree. If I go back I want to stand in the shade of a tree that provides coolness and it should be a tree that we plant ourselves. —Moo, Tham Hin refugee camp1

My discussions with Loo Ne always involved si ing cross-legged on a hard floor. We met many times, sometimes in a makeshi office in Bangkok, sometimes in a dishevelled house in Mae Sot or other precarious locations in the borderlands. Loo Ne was a unique personality. He was educated, articulate, worldly, equally at home speaking before a UN commi ee or with a group of displaced persons in the jungle. He mentored younger Karen, advocated for the oppressed, and worked tirelessly to resolve Burma’s

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conflict and the persecution of his people. When he felt the ‘comfortable’ trappings of an urban life were dominating his existence, he would take himself off to the jungles of Karen State to remind himself of what the fight was for. He was a flawed character, but then who isn’t? He also was not afraid to speak his mind and he had strong opinions about how humanitarian assistance was administered, and in particular the rese lement programme, the catastrophic nature of human rights abuses inside Burma, and what it would take to end this sixty-year conflict. When I first met Loo Ne, he moved between Bangkok and Mae Sot, depending on his work. Somewhere along the way he had obtained a Thai ID card, which had apparently involved a dubious scheme of taking the identity of Thai people who had died; I didn’t ask too many questions. It meant that he was able to move more freely than many other Karen I interviewed. He also spoke Thai fluently, which helped. But it had not always been like this. By UNHCR standards, Loo Ne is a refugee. His village was a acked by the Burmese military in 1976 and his family became displaced persons – they ‘roamed the forest’, in Loo Ne’s words. In 1984, a er another brutal military campaign, they fled across the border into Thailand – he was only ten. They lived in a Thai village for a while and then, like many others who had fled across the border at this time, they were moved into a refugee camp where they received support from international church groups. Loo Ne remembers receiving a small box each month, with what seemed like an eclectic mix of goods: photos, ham, some snacks, sardines and books. But Loo Ne does not consider himself a refugee. He told me bluntly that he is not registered as one. Yet it is more complex than that. He told me that the word ‘refugee’ means ‘powerless’ and when I asked how he would describe himself, he did not hesitate; he said ‘human rights defender’. Words ma er to him. As it was applied through the larger humanitarian framework, being a refugee meant you were passive, you were reliant on others and you were helpless. According to Loo Ne, it meant that he was a victim, which is true, but also that he had no agency to rectify the injustices directed at him. A ‘human rights defender’ captured his active engagement in his persecution, his willingness to be a central player in narrating the story of Karen persecution and displacement, and advocating for resolutions. ‘Human rights defender’ was a more representative identity of the choices he had made: to live outside of the refugee camps in order to utilise be er opportunities for his work, to document and advocate the ongoing human rights abuses against the Karen, to be a voice for his peoples’ persecution, and to stay in the borderlands and continue the struggle even in the face of immense pressure from the rese lement programme. Loo Ne, and many others like him in the borderlands, choose to apply rich, complex and layered understandings to themselves. They operate

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both within and outside of the humanitarian apparatus, in ways that both embrace and disrupt the normative discourse of a homogeneous ‘refugee story’. Loo Ne’s story is just one of many that shows the complex and nuanced reality of a refugee’s life. Stories such as his capture two distinct but interrelated discourses that shape the activism of displaced Karen in the borderlands. The first is a state discourse of containment and control that aims to assert the sovereignty of the state and punish those who are seen as deviants to the maintenance of this national order. This is operationalised through the persecution and displacement of the Karen, who are deemed to be a threat to this power. It is particularly relevant to the actions of the Burmese state, where it is applied through heavy militarisation, but is also linked to the actions of the Thai state, where it manifests as coercive regulation meant to establish restrictions over space and movement, and ultimately segregate and exclude displaced populations in refugee camps. The second is a humanitarian discourse that homogenises the refugee experience in order to establish a system of identification and regulation over refugee populations. My interest lies in how this manifests as what Didier Fassin calls a narrative of ‘compassion rather than justice’ (2012). When operationalised, this narrative creates a ‘refugee’ who is the victim of persecution and who must be saved by external forces through the provision of basic services such as food, shelter and clothing. These two systems of governance are distinct and seemingly opposing in their intent: one seeks to persecute a targeted population, while the other seeks to protect that vulnerable population. But they are also interrelated, in obvious ways such as the humanitarian apparatus is clearly responding to the circumstances caused by state operations of persecution, and also in more complicated ways, for in their operationalisation, both produce outcomes where the Karen are excluded from being politically active subjects in their own stories. Over the course of this chapter, I examine these two governance structures and then provide empirical evidence of the form and substance of Karen resistance to these discourses. Greater recognition of these resistances, and the pa erns of activism that form them, indicate a reframing of the discourse around refugeedom, where the Karen are seen as active participants in political resolutions to their own persecution and displacement.

Spaces of Governance Heavy militarisation by the Burmese state over the last four decades has caused significant humanitarian concerns: displacement, refugee flows into neighbouring countries, destruction of land and livelihood, arbitrary

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imprisonment, killings, rape and forced labour, to name but a few. This humanitarian crisis has brought about a humanitarian response. Over the last three decades, dozens of humanitarian organisations have provided essential services to those who have been displaced because of the conflict inside Burma. Significantly, this humanitarian response pursues a humanitarian discourse of compassion in order to obtain some sort of action. This discourse is largely framed through a narrative that emphasises the Karen as ‘victims’ of a brutal, oppressive military, and therefore in need of external humanitarian aid and support in order to survive. This humanitarian position emphasises humanitarian concerns, to alleviate suffering and to provide essential resources like food and shelter, and services such as health and education. These are important and necessary objectives. However, the basis of this humanitarian discourse can lead to the act of suffering overshadowing the political injustices that cause the suffering. Didier Fassin writes of this as ‘mobilising compassion rather than justice’, invoking the trauma rather than recognising the violence (2012: 8). Refugees are asked to repeatedly tell their stories of trauma, a form of justifying their suffering. These stories are used to appeal to people’s sense of compassion, and ultimately to obtain funds or encourage other forms of action. In many ways it is less politically objectionable to fund projects that support food, shelter and capacity-building projects than to address the political causes of the trauma. This of course allows a series of acts that address the immediate concerns of survival, a perhaps more socially palatable response than addressing the structural causes of the oppression and violence. This insight was evident in the comments of displaced Karen themselves. Loo Ne talked of the dangers of seeing the situation of the Karen as purely a humanitarian case rather than seeing its political origins. He describes a scenario where the suffering can become the burden of yet another generation of Karen: While I was in the camp I visited my home a few times and learn about the situation. Compared to when I was a child and when I grew up the situation is still the same, there is no change. It makes me feel like we need to do something for this situation, we can’t just stand by and let this thing happen. It’s not a natural disaster, it’s a well-planned strategy from the military dictator. So if we stand by and let it happen then it will never end and the next generation like I said before when I was a child, when I grew up it still stays the same situation and I understand the future it will also happen the same. It made me feel like a er I finish school in the camp then I need to go out where I can do something more.

This focus on compassion rather than justice can have disempowering consequences. It removes the political agency of the Karen to direct their own circumstances and narrative. In the Thailand–Burma borderlands,

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the Karen are creating a space in which their political struggle against state exclusion and persecution can be waged. The victim narrative hinders this by ignoring the political and focusing solely on the humanitarian aspect of their struggle. Lisa Malkki states that ‘in universalising displaced people into “refugees”, in abstracting their predicaments from specific political, historical, cultural contexts, humanitarian practices tend to silence refugees’ (1997: 225). The Karen are projected as victims of the conflict, reliant on others for their education, health and food needs, silenced subjects and therefore a ‘humanitarian case’ (Sharples 2016). In such scenarios, suffering is addressed at the individual level, a case that can be resolved through interpersonal rather than structural interventions. This of course ignores the sociopolitical origins of the suffering, the injustices that cause the distress, and consequently any long-term solutions to the larger issues of persecution and displacement. The effects of victim discourses can do great harm, particularly when they become the operational default. I have seen this played out in a number of ways in the borderlands. One is that the humanitarian case, the refugee, is expected to show humility, to be beholden to those who provide the humanitarian support. This perpetuates a fixed narrative of the refugee as helpless, immobile and subservient, a narrative that justifies the ongoing essentialisation of the humanitarian apparatus. If a refugee were to show other a ributes – resilience, entrepreneurship, initiative – this narrative would be threatened. In the refugee camps this o en took the form of external judgements on material possessions such as mobile phones and motorbikes, or if you le the camp to pursue employment opportunities, it meant that you ceded any rights you might have to aid agency support mechanisms such as food. Such positions reinforce the idea that a refugee must perform a certain stereotype, a ‘universal’ refugee experience that provides a performative dimension to how a refugee must look and act. Loo Ne talked about the ambiguity of the term ‘refugee’ from a different perspective – the disjuncture between the promise of a rights-based approach to seeking asylum and the disempowering ways in which this is practised: Before I learn a li le about the rights, a refugee is someone who runs away, who had to live under government control, you’re not allowed to study or go out. It’s more like you are rightless, stateless people, living in another country. But now I understand that a refugee is someone taking temporary refuge under the care of another government because your government has done something bad or you’re politically accused of something by the government. But you still have to be taken care of or protected by the country you’ve taken refuge in. But if you ask the refugees in Thailand, they won’t tell you it’s a rightless life. They will say they are a sheep without a shepherd. No one to care, just living there. You will eat what they bring you.

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Over the course of my work along the Thailand–Burma border, I also heard the substance of this ‘victim’ narrative reflected in the comments of some displaced Karen. A displaced Karen man squa ing in front of a makeshi shelter in the jungle was asked about his experience of fleeing the Burmese military. He replied: ‘This is our fate, it’s God’s will.’ A Karen woman in the refugee camp, when asked about the poor state of the rice they were receiving, replied: ‘We are broken people, we deserve this type of rice.’ Another Karen woman described her village deep inside Karen State: ‘They believe it is their fate to live like this. They don’t blame anyone for this situation, they don’t blame the Burmese military or the KNU, they just accept.’ These responses suggest a fatalist mindset, an overwhelming representation of passivity and helplessness. Such narratives, and the larger structures that feed them, construct the Karen as apolitical, removed from the circumstances that caused their predicament and incapable of rectifying it. Saw Ba described it like this: Sometimes we make a joke that we are like a pig in the garden or something like that. People come and feed you, you only eat and sleep and when you got outside the garden people beat you. There is no freedom. It’s not like you are human … you don’t have any future, any choice.

This victim narrative is a discourse that can work to subjugate a people. It develops a power inequity, where the ‘church’ or the ‘humanitarian’ are portrayed as saviours, and the Karen as being in need of saving. One has the power and the other must rely on the powerful. This narrative is reinforced through missionary and now humanitarian discourses, even where this might not be the intent. Loo Ne talked about some practices of the rese lement programme that work to further entrench the idea of the Karen as passive victims and unable to resolve their own circumstances: There are different reasons why I think the rese lement programme is not really a solution to the problem for the community in Burma. I also don’t choose to go because it seems like those who have access to the rese lement programme are the educated – they at least have finished high school in Burma or in the camp – and these people are working for the community as a head worker, social worker or teacher. If all these people are leaving to the third country, then who will work for our people. This is a problem.

In this sense, the rese lement programme is a system that has decimated the capacity of displaced Karen to be active agents in resolving their own persecution and displacement. As Loo Ne points out, there is a perception that the skilled are targeted as part of this programme. The impacts of this targeting are not unknown, begging the question of intent. In part, it is due to Western countries wanting the best and brightest for their rese lement programmes, but it also highlights a larger structural intent,

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in that it produces an increasingly unskilled and vulnerable population le behind in the camps. Whether it intended to or not, the rese lement programme has reinforced a system that removes Karen power. Within such a system, the Karen are treated as victims, helpless and dispersed to the charity of third countries. One could argue that this narrative of victimisation has its origins in the missionary texts from the 1800s.² Tropes from these texts are o en repeated in the borderlands in contemporary contexts: that the Karen are ‘uneducated’, that they are ‘backward’, that they are ‘shy’, that they are ‘prone to being preyed upon by others’ and that they are ‘simple but loyal’. In many ways they have become part of the Karen identity and a way of validating their current circumstances. That many Karen now believe and repeat these narratives of victimisation and helplessness is one of the more destructive outcomes of missionary influence in Burma and a significant challenge for how humanitarian aid has been framed and delivered. Of course, the humanitarian apparatus is not the only system of governance in the borderlands that has an impact on refugee’s lives. Political authority is also exercised through mechanisms of the state, particularly through systems of control typical of a modern sociopolitical landscape. This includes mechanisms that control population movements such as checkpoints, border controls, surveillance and customs, as well as institutions of law and enforcement such as detention centres, prisons, and police and military operations. A typical mechanism of control in the borderlands is the deployment of national identification cards that embody national belonging (citizenship) and more legislated protective measures. The national identification card (particularly when it has associated citizenship) can exacerbate inequalities. In the Thailand–Burma borderlands this commonly manifests itself in the form of who gets to move freely, who has access to services, who feels safe and secure, and what level of treatment you receive from the authorities. The identification card can therefore be a tool of power, utilised to further oppress and marginalise already-vulnerable populations through their exclusion from the associated entitlements. It is wielded with such effect on both sides of the border by both the Thai and the Burmese states. The Burmese government have used national identification cards to deny many Karen inside Burma access to services due to their ethnic status. However, a recent initiative by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and the Myanmar Ministry of Labour, Immigration and Population (MoLIP), has rolled out an official identification card programme for Karen refugees displaced by the conflict in Burma. The NRC estimates that it has distributed 500,000 identification cards in southeast Burma in the period 2012–17,³ recognising the importance of civil documentation to people’s

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access to health, education, travel, bank accounts and, more broadly, a sense of belonging. While this is vital work, this barely touches on the enormity of the problem. There are a range of reasons why many more people inside Burma continue to go unrecognised: displacement, isolation, legal obstacles relating to adequate documentation, ethnic discrimination, heavy militarisation in armed group areas and lack of political will. Without this recognised identification, displaced Karen are excluded from state health and education services as well as secure employment opportunities. In Thailand, national identification cards are used to categorise and regulate citizenship and therefore nation-state membership. A person with a Thai identification card can move freely throughout Thailand, navigating checkpoints with relative ease. Failure to produce such a card o en results in harassment and fines or, in the worst-case scenario, detention and deportation. Access to the card means inclusion, and with this comes safety and entitlements. In addition to the Thai identification card, the UNHCR completed the rollout of a biometric identification card system in 2015 for those registered in the refugee camps. The cards contain personal biometric data that can verify personal identity such as fingerprints, handprints or iris scans. This can be a crucial tool for refugees who have o en fled with no identifying documentation. The cards allow recipients to receive social and medical assistance from UNHCR facilities and in the Burmese context are a way of tracking protection and assistance services for refugees returning to Burma. But there are risks involved in this. An obvious one is who controls this personal data and who it can be shared with. Work conducted by Dragana Kaurin (2019) suggests that informed consent and proper conveying of information on refugee rights around their digital data are a serious problem in current biometric practices. The current system lacks transparency, cultivates distrust of the humanitarian sector and lacks adequate education about the purpose and use of the data collected (Kaurin 2019: 17). These factors pose considerable risks for already-vulnerable populations who have no digital agency in how their data is being used and to what purpose. Of particular concern would be if, and how, this information was shared with the Burmese authorities. Even if there were benefits to the programme, many inside the camps and almost all who reside outside the camps would fail to meet the criteria for these cards, and it does not provide rights or access to services inside Thailand. A point commonly made by those who I interviewed was that the precarity of their legal status and living conditions was intended. The Thai authorities deliberately pursued operations that were meant to instil fear and uncertainty, in turn forcing displaced Karen to deploy self-

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regulating behaviours. Saw Ba indicated that he self-regulated his movements around Mae Sot because he feared that the Thai police would arrest him, which o en meant containing himself to his house for long periods of time. Displaced Karen have significant reasons for limiting their movements. In 2005 Kaw Kwe and Po Khai were stopped by the Thai police in Mae Sot. They were asked to produce Thai ID cards, which they did not have. One of the policeman walked around the bike, firing off questions and threats in Thai. Then one of them kicked Kaw Kwe. This is where Po Khai, who is telling the story, gets really outraged. Kaw Kwe is a Karen elder, someone who in both Thai and Karen cultures commands respect. To be kicked is a humiliation and an affront to cultural dignitaries. Both Kaw Kwe and Po Khai ended up being detained at the Mae Sot detention centre and had to pay a fine to get out. Over the course of my fieldwork in the 2000s, there were periodic deportations of displaced Karen, those not lucky enough to be released by paying the fine. The Thai authorities would o en drop them across the border in Myawaddy; many would turn around and cross straight back into Thailand, while others were ‘disappeared’ into the Burmese system. Displaced Karen in the borderlands have come to expect such detentions and fines, and they modify their behaviour in order to avoid them. Karen refugee camps are another significant and obvious example of the state’s a empt to contain and control displaced populations. Here, strategies of segregation are deployed through the delineation of spaces that remove displaced Karen from the rest of the population. Both the state and the humanitarian apparatus design and maintain these spaces as sites of exclusion. The Thai military and other paramilitary groups are responsible for securing the camps (Ball and Mathieson 2007) through strict regulatory controls over the perimeter of the camps and associated access to the camps. This has the effect of restricting refugee movement outwards and the movement of external bodies inwards. Work by Saltsman (2014) and Volger (2007) has shown how these mechanisms are both restrictive and discretionary. They include procedures that increase bureaucratic measures to register the camp populations and determine resource allocation and entitlements; they support an externally applied and performative dimension to the refugee identity; and they include the inconsistent and marginalising ways in which policy and laws are followed and implemented. The application of these mechanisms is most visible in how access to food, building materials and se lement services is determined, effectively controlling the population through the administration of a homogenised refugee story. This is framed by a process of justification of status where you must prove you are a refugee, a victim of persecution, in order to receive the associated benefits. These operations isolate camp

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populations, denying them access to state services and protections, and forcing dependency on humanitarian organisations for basic needs. Systems of governance in the Thailand–Burma borderlands a empt to contain and control displaced populations through mechanisms that reinforce their exclusion from the nation-state. They are o en applied in ways that are arbitrary, inconsistent and at the discretion of local authorities. They also reinforce a dominant narrative of the Karen as a ‘humanitarian case’, as victims and as passive in their own story of persecution and displacement. Displaced Karen are adept at retelling the refugee experience in ways that challenge these mechanisms of segregation, control and exclusion. These challenges, or resistances, constitute a growing body of activism that centres the Karen as active political subjects. So what is the nature of these acts of resistance?

Scales of Resistance Kaw Meh has a rather crudely administered ta oo. It is a grid, three by three, each square holding a Burmese le er. Kaw Meh calls them the nine most powerful le ers in the Burmese alphabet. The statement is accompanied by a laugh, but I do not doubt that he has some measure of belief in this. A KNLA soldier did it for him, in the depths of the jungles of Karen State, when he was sixteen. By the time I saw it, it was looking a li le sad and faded, the edges bleeding outwards across the skin. But in fact, it had power, potency and mysticism, or at least that was the intent. The soldier had used a monkey bone for a needle. The dye colour came from the ash of paper burnt over a lamp and then added to liquid. Typical of these types of ta oos, a ceremonial ritual included a kind of spoken spell, an animist tradition that in Kaw Meh’s case was supposed to protect him from the Burmese military’s bullets. It is a story that Kaw Meh’s friends like to retell and always ends with a comic punchline. Kaw Meh got sick from the monkey bone needle and ended up in hospital for a week. And eventually, he was shot by the Burmese military, not fatally obviously, but the bullet landed in his bu ock, not far from that ta oo. It is a good story, but it also provides some important observations on cultural constructs and forms of resistance. Karen ta oos are rarely done without some sort of cultural or political reasoning. Some are revolutionary; they reference Karen leaders or the armed resistance. Some are protective – Monypwa and Chin women o en have extensive ta oos that cover their faces. I was told this was done to make themselves look ugly to the Burmese soldiers. Some ta oos refer to the person’s religion. Many are infused with mysticism and cultural beliefs; one Karen man I knew had an

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ogre ta ooed on his arm and his friends used this to account for the many times in his life when he fell into a kind of crazed stupor. Ta oos are, in many instances, an example of cross-cultural influences; the complex factors that inform both the cultural constructs and practices of those in the borderlands. Kaw Meh is a Karen man, infusing Burmese language into his flesh, embedding it with animist mysticism, deploying it against an oppressive Burmese military – a political statement of resistance and defiance. These ambiguities do not go unnoticed, but they are not treated as exceptional or contradictory. They are o en pragmatic choices representative of the nexus between cultural and political constructs of an activist marginalised group of people displaced from their homeland and their traditional cultural practices. In addition, they are also a mechanism that can in some respects account for the loss, trauma and uncertainty in their lives. Acts of resistance then can be obfuscated, adaptable, metaphorical, meaningful and not always structured by or responding to an externalised incident. History is riddled with resistances that constitute overt acts such as public protests, armed resistance or social movements. This type of resistance is organised and public – loud, visible and violent. Burma has its own examples, the most notable being the ’88 Uprising and the 2007 ‘Saffron Revolution’.⁴ Both constituted very public, very visible and largely nonviolent demonstrations against Burmese military oppression. Both elicited devastatingly violent responses from the Burmese military, with thousands of civilians being killed and imprisoned. But such outward displays of protest are the exception in Burma, not the norm. Decades of closed society and military domination and oppression have largely suffocated the capacity for overt action against the military. As a result, resistance in Burma is more likely to be covert – disruptive, unse ling and part of everyday practice. These covert acts are more nuanced and with differing outcomes, and are best approached along a spectrum that looks at scales of resistance.⁵ Scale, in terms of political action and outcomes, allowed me to examine the actions of displaced Karen in two significant ways: first, in terms of the se ing, the spatial configuration in which networks of power are produced; and, second, in terms of political opportunity, as in the effects of production and resource distribution on sociopolitical action. An obvious way in, particularly in terms of my claim around covert forms of resistance, would be to examine acts that fall at the lower levels of the se ing scale, say acts of the individual or community. James C Sco ’s definition of ‘everyday resistance’ – acts of evasion and insubordination that are informal and covert (1985) – seems relevant here. Sco focuses his everyday resistances on the social experiences of indignity, control, sub-

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mission, humiliation, forced compliance and punishment (1990). These types of resistance are common in Burma, though are subject to li le focus. A report by the Karen Human Rights Group (KHRG 2008) is one of the few a empts to document these types of strategies in line with Sco ’s everyday resistances: negotiation, bribing, lying, refusing, confronting, false compliance, counternarratives and evading (1985: 92–114). An example of ‘everyday resistance’ can be found in the practice of rebuilding that o en occurs a er Burmese military a acks on Karen villages inside Burma. Villagers will return to the site of their destroyed village and build their houses again, or rebuild them elsewhere in the forest. They talk of such processes of rebuilding occurring half-a-dozen times in their lives. They construct makeshi schools in the jungles in order for their children to continue their education. They hide belongings in the forest so that they can flee quickly and return or re-establish themselves elsewhere. While not open confrontation, these are acts that maintain morale and a sense of dignity in the face of adversity. They are evasive and covert, but they are also acts of resilience and defiance. They rely largely on the acts of individuals or small communities, and require few resources to produce. This type of resistance can also be found in how refugees operate within the camps. On one of my first visits to Mae La refugee camp, U Kyi led me along the ‘highway’, the main thoroughfare through the middle of the camp. Despite its name, the highway was inconsistent terrain – at times hard-baked earth, muddy rivulets of water, tree roots and rocks, bamboo bridges and stepping stones across small creeks. Along this highway there were houses and shops providing basic Thai corner store necessities – curry packets, chips, dried biscuits, fish sauce. On Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, there was a fresh food market where residents could buy fish, goat, chicken and a variety of vegetables. All the produce was bought from Thai sellers outside the camp and then sold to the camp residents. For a camp that is surrounded by razor-sharp fencing and an abundance of checkpoints, the movement of goods across this barrier seemed to be relatively free. U Kyi told me you can get anything in Mae La: televisions, satellite dishes, drugs, mobile phones, ba eries. Mobile phones, motorbikes and the internet connect Mae La to the outside world and introduce elements of a modern sociopolitical landscape. Like any small city, capitalism abounds, largely unchecked. There were fourteen churches in the camp at that time; the Buddhist monastery and the Christian church stared bleakly at each other from the two main hills in the camp. Both required the navigation of a steep set of stairs, challenging any but the most devoted. There were a number of schools, servicing the children in the camps, but also those who came from inside Burma to get what was perceived to be a be er and safer education

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in the camps. NGOs provided education in the camps up to the equivalent of finishing high school. But the refugees have few options a er this. They are stateless and cannot access the Thai higher education system. They are reliant on being rese led to a third country in order to go to university. Houses were mostly made of bamboo, though some had wooden floorboards. Some were multiroom huts; others were no more than a room with a roof. Most of the huts were in such close proximity that you could reach out and touch your neighbour. NGOs had set up a sanitation system to pump water from the surrounding cliffs. This also serviced a number of communal wells where people washed and collected water. The camp’s administrative structures divided the camp into localised sections with accompanying leaders and mini-bureaucracies, similar to the village structures le behind in Burma. One of the unique characteristics of the refugee camps along the Thailand–Burma border is the way in which the refugees have managed to live in the camp space in ways that replicate these familiarities. Despite the limitations mentioned above, refugees create social structures that support their community and they develop economic practices to maintain their livelihood. They continue to practise cultural traditions, and develop their skills and capacities through education and training. They have partial control over this through the camp commi ees that administer the camps and are run by the refugees themselves. This structure (and the associated practices) defies state operations that a empt to isolate and disempower the populations. Instead, the refugees challenge the notion of the ‘passive refugee’ by actively pursuing activities and opportunities that describe their agency. In doing so, they are disrupting the accepted narrative of what it is to be a refugee and what a refugee is able to do. This is an important challenge to the normative assumptions a ached to the label of ‘refugee’; it questions both the label’s legitimacy and its value. This was particularly evident in the comments of Loo Ne, whose story began this chapter. Loo Ne fled Karen State as a young child, arriving in Thailand in the mid-1980s. He had spent most of his life along the border living between the refugee camps and the Thai community. He was actively involved in activities that sought to resolve the conflict inside Burma and provide security for the Karen people. Loo Ne thought the label of ‘refugee’ ambiguous, particularly as it failed to deliver on the promise of protection: I don’t really call myself a refugee because if I’m a refugee then I am entitled to rights as a refugee. If this was the case then I would accept it but people who register under [the] UNHCR or with the Thai authorities they are not really refugees. According to the declaration a refugee has a right to work, the right to study or have an education. If you’re born in Thailand a er 1990

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and you’ve lived here for more than seven years then you should be able to apply for citizenship. We don’t have any of these rights.

Refugees o en defy the restrictive confines of the camps. They do this for a range of reasons, from complex needs associated with eking out a survival to political motivations to pursue activities that can resolve the conflict inside Burma. Saw Ba talked about his political motivations for leaving the camp: When you stay in the refugee camp, let’s say it is difficult. Before I stayed in the refugee camp for a year as a teacher. It is good to help people in the refugee camp. But the other thing is I didn’t have an interest in working with the refugees. There are many people, educated people that can already take care of them. This is one thing why I decided to go outside the camp and get more experience working with the people inside Burma.

The camps are largely designed to facilitate an existence of dependency; aid organisations provide basic food and shelter supplies, but limited income-generation opportunities. Moo commented on this when she equated living in the refugee camp to living like an animal. In this confined space she ate, slept and went to the toilet. There was room for li le else. She said that ‘it is like we are a herd of ca le’. If she a empted to leave the camp, to seek employment or food, then she risked being detained by the Thai police. This is a deeply dehumanising place to be. Not only is it humiliating and dispiriting, it also creates an incredibly dangerous environment for refugees, for it fosters a permeating idleness that threatens the social and cultural fabric of the community. Many of the refugees I interviewed expressed concerns around problematic drug and alcohol use, domestic violence, self-harm, risk-taking behaviours, lethargy and gang-related incidents among the youth. These concerns were echoed by Saw Ba, who said: When people come, around forty or fi y of them to the camp, they have nothing to do so it becomes boring. They feel not happy. When they stay inside on their farms they have things to do, activities. Spiritually, physically it is good for them. But when you stay in the refugee camp, you only cook and eat and sleep. Spiritual and physical is not good. Mentally also. Things are changing. Your habits, you smoke all the time, it is difficult.

‘Theatre for Social Change’, a community theatre programme run by the Karen Student Network Group, was addressing these issues head-on when I spoke with them in 2005. They ran programmes throughout the borderlands aimed at educating the refugee camp communities around social justice issues and the rese lement programme. Inevitably, they also covered larger global themes such as peace, justice and political and economic in-

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fluence. Their premise was that the root of oppression was social domination, and this could be wielded by anyone – the Burmese military, the KNU, your neighbour, friends or family. They saw oppression mostly manifest itself in the social sphere and it was here that they wanted to make change: There are many big problems in our community, like drugs, domestic violence and poverty and we want to change people’s views about these issues through theatre. We want our community to open their eyes and see how these things come about. We aim, through theatre, to link these issues and causes together, to see how all these things are interconnected and finally to solve these social problems.

The theatre group encouraged the notion of the ‘active’ person, empowered through education to be a politically active member of society, capable of resolving their own problems. During the mid-2000s when I was working in the borderlands, only a handful of international NGOs were addressing the enormity of these social challenges. In the years since, organisations like the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and a number of Australian and American universities have delivered social work training in the camps to be er equip the refugees themselves to deliver these services. Other organisations have run treatment programmes in the camps. While these psychosocial challenges have complex causes, including the long-term, systematic and ongoing trauma a ached to refugee’s experiences of persecution and displacement, it is undeniable that a considerable contributing factor is the prolonged containment of refugees in an oppressive camp environment. Challenging these constraints, both the physical environment and the oppressive mechanisms associated with the state and the humanitarian apparatus, is therefore an important form of resistance. Another effective resistance technique used by displaced Karen is evasion. Over the course of my fieldwork, I was told stories about how villages were increasingly relying on women to take on the roles of village head. The reasons for doing this varied. Older women hold places of respect and esteem in Burma. I was told that women were able to avoid the excessive, unrealistic demands that were o en placed upon male village heads. I was told that the women were able to negotiate and confront, particularly young soldiers, through a sort of maternalistic berating. Male village heads were held responsible for and were the first to be killed if anything went wrong. Understandably, many men were reluctant to take the role on. It was therefore a considered, strategic decision to appoint village heads who were women. They were ‘playing’ the Burmese soldiers and, according to many accounts, to great effect. Reports like that of KHRG have substantiated these claims by documenting the practice (2008).

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There is of course danger and risk involved in such techniques, and the stakes are incredibly high. I do not want to romanticise this type of resistance or minimise the very real concerns involved. It is well documented that the Burmese military used rape as a weapon of war (HRFM 2005; SWAN and SHRF 2002) and that women suffer horrific outcomes in conflict situations because of their gender. A woman becoming a village head has the potential to make her a target of military power. But it is also important to recognise the agency that can occur in these types of resistances. Power is construed across uneven terrain, gender works here to render the power of the military mute, at the same time as it has the capacity to reinforce the military’s power, suggesting that ‘individuals can be simultaneously powerful and powerless within different systems’ (Hollander and Einwohner 2004: 550). Taken individually, these examples constitute small, informal acts of defiance. It may be difficult to see them as indicative of any larger political, organised resistance, but en masse they contribute to a growing Karen political presence offering an alternative refugee narrative to that of the state and the humanitarian aid apparatus. This alternative narrative provides a counterpoint to what it means to be a refugee, as well as advocating for political and social change in terms of how a refugee or displaced person should be treated. Some of the most pertinent examples of evasion as a tool of agency can be found in the way in which displaced Karen use humour as a form of control over their predicament. There is a village in Karen State that has a reputation as the source of humorous stories. These stories are well known along the border – you only have to mention the village name and it elicits laughter, and everyone has something to say about it. There are two points of interest in relation to these stories. One is the content of the stories, from which important cultural and political meaning and intent can be interpreted. And the second is the way in which these stories circulate among the Karen, both inside and along the border. They provide an opportunity for humour in an otherwise dark and hellish se ing. They encapsulate a sense of dignity and belonging and they are an important outlet for pain, sorrow and anger. Importantly, they also act as a conduit between those displaced to the border and the larger Karen population still inside. They operate in a spatial configuration that utilises both local and global mechanisms of production to effect sociopolitical action. In 2005 Loo Ne told me two pertinent stories emanating from this village. The first involved a Karen woman who lives in a small bamboo house by a stream. A er the rainy season, it becomes muddy, its depth obscured by the muck. One day a soldier appears, dressed in uniform and carrying his gun. He asks the woman if it is safe to cross the stream. The woman says yes, so he begins to cross. The further in he goes, the more

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the water rises around him. By the time he reaches the opposite bank, he is completely soaked, as are his pack and his weapons. He calls across to the woman: ‘Look at me, I’m completely soaked. You told me it was OK to cross.’ ‘Yes’, said the woman. ‘Because I see ducks cross the stream all the time and they have much shorter legs than you so I assumed you would be able to cross no problem.’ Loo Ne laughs as he delivers the punchline. He then tells me another. One day the military ba alion asks the people to collect firewood and bring it to the base. One villager arrives and he has brought small twigs. The next villager arrives and he has also brought small twigs, and the next, and so on. The ba alion commander gets angry and asks why they have only brought small sticks. The villagers tell him he only asked them to bring wood, not what size he wanted. The ba alion commander tells them he needs big logs for the fire. So the villagers go back to their village and cut down some of the big teak trees and drag them back to the military base with their bullock carts. ‘Are you crazy’, he yells at them. ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ ‘You said you wanted big logs’, the villagers replied. As stories, truth is irrelevant here. In fact, truth is the least interesting element of these stories. Loo Ne first told me these stories in 2004. He retold them to me in 2005. Essentially both tellings contained the same message or outcome, but there were subtle differences. The woman in her house became a man working in the field. The story of the twigs extended to a return with logs, like their wit and defiance extended beyond the original action. It is the uniqueness and some might say weakness of oral testimony. No telling is the ever same; it is an organic process, tweaked and changed depending on the context of the telling. Slim and Thompson stated: Yet these ‘untrue’ stories, just because they show more clearly how people make sense of their lives through combining and re-ordering memories, and sometimes even adding touches to them, can o en be the clearest indicators of their consciousness, their ways of thinking and sense of self. (Slim and Thompson 1993)

This ‘untruth’ becomes part of the research for it indicates a teller’s understandings, opinions and leanings. The teller may highlight something they see as important; they embellish a certain element of the story depending on the audience or the message they want to convey. Their memory may simply determine a different significance for the events. However, there are recurring themes across these stories. The Karen are the underdog, the oppressed and the persecuted. But they are able to exert their power through humour and creativity. They make the Burmese military look stupid, but they do not present the Karen as more intelligent,

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just more wily, cunning and pragmatic. They also do not mind mocking themselves, as is evident in the following story. A villager is told that he must go and be a porter for the Burmese military. He is too tired and does not want to go, but he does not know how to say no without ge ing killed. His wife feels bad for him and offers a suggestion. He should shave his head, wear a nappy and pretend to be a baby. So when the military appear at his house, his wife pretends to breastfeed him and soothingly pats his bo om. The military continue on their way. These stories contain a narrative of noncompliance, creative ways of ge ing out of, or around, what they have been told they must do. And such narratives are important, for, as Michel de Certeau has stated, ‘stories “go in a procession” ahead of social practices in order to open a field for them’ (1988: 125). These acts of cultural resistance, their inherent narratives, create the conditions for social action; they drive the resistance. These acts of resistance are produced at small-scale levels, o en at the margins of state control, but where they can have profound impact. Acts such as these go largely unnoticed in the literature on Burma. They are certainly missing from the discourses of the state and humanitarian apparatus. For the Burmese state, this is a calculated omission meant to reinforce a narrative of national unity, to deny a spatial configuration of resistance. For the humanitarian apparatus, it is more a byproduct of the failure to acknowledge Karen agency in their story of refugeedom. In part, they go unnoticed because they are unlikely to have impact on largescale social or political transformation. But this ignores the very important impact on empowerment that such scales deliver, particularly at the individual and the community levels. The problem in both the state and humanitarian discourses is that they create a narrative of Karen persecution and displacement where the Karen become apolitical, removed from their own experiences and stories and also incapable of effecting social and political change. While many of these acts of resistance are embedded with narratives of persecution and oppression, the Karen are not passive recipients or observed relics. They are at the centre of the production and projection of these narratives, and, through their activism, the drivers of a proactive message of resistance to structures of governance that work to silence their political agency. They operate in a system of unevenly distributed resources, in a spatial configuration that utilises both globalised and localised scales of resistance, to create the context in which their struggle can be understood. These scales of resistance form pa erns of activism that underpin Karen claims to political agency. The danger in ignoring these scales of resistance is that while we may acknowledge the circumstances of the persecution and look for resolutions, we are rendering those who experience the persecution mute in the process.

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The mechanisms of governance I have discussed so far too o en take the form of an exclusion that is exercised through operations of containment and control that remove refugee and displaced populations from the rest of the population, both materially and metaphorically. In Burma, the state actively pursues systematic operations of persecution and political neglect that further isolate vulnerable ethnic populations, the Karen included. This is evident at a bureaucratic level, where the state has failed to resolve ethnic representation, develop adequate, long-term economic policy and address social fragmentation, as well as deliberately pursuing nationalist and racist policies and institutional denial of basic rights to education and health. It is also evident at the operational level, where the state has failed to protect Karen civilians against militarisation and Burmese military a acks.⁶ In the borderlands, the humanitarian apparatus, while recognising this persecution and actively denouncing it, creates a system of dependency that in a sense relies on this continued persecution. I am not suggesting that this is a mutually beneficial relationship, but it does point to the need for humanitarian organisations to take a stronger position on resolving the political causes of the conflict and the existence of refugee flows to begin with. In the absence of such recognition, displaced Karen find their own ways to develop and advance their political claims. They build a movement of empowerment across the scales of resistance they employ. These resistances, particularly as they embody informal and ‘everyday’ actions, need to be recognised and supported. They constitute a shaping of social action that defies both military oppression and the exclusionary practices of state. They also defy a humanitarian narrative of victimisation and passivity. They position the Karen as politically active subjects, who manage their own stories to position an alternative narrative of persecution and displacement. It would be a mistake to see these acts of resistance as purely a response to military persecution and oppression. The Karen are resisting ethnic subjugation, the practices of state exclusion and persecution, and the failure to recognise they are politically active subjects. They are resisting domination on a number of fronts and from a number of sources. They are using tactics they have utilised for centuries: evasion, humour, counternarratives, performance and continued cultural practice. Karen resistances to these systems of governance highlight the need for resolutions that recognise the political injustices that are the cause of their persecution and displacement. This includes the recognition of a Karen political voice that can express their own understanding of being a refugee and experiencing the humanitarian apparatus, that can advocate around human rights abuses and that can agitate for the political and social change that is needed in Burma. This Karen political voice can

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(and does) change the discourse around refugeedom. Here, language and actions ma er. Loo Ne, talking in relation to the rese lement programme established by the UNHCR in the refugee camps, stated: They look at us and just see us as Human Beings; they don’t see us as a Nation. That is why the rese lement programme was born … I feel like the ‘Rese lement programme’ is taking away the power of our people … I would like to encourage the countries also to find a solutions and help end the civil war in Burma. Let us work together to remove the military dictator and bring back democracy to Burma.

To be human, and to be treated as human, is an important feature of human rights covenants and is a laudable aim. But in this statement, Loo Ne is identifying himself as a politically active subject, more than Agamben’s (1998) ‘bare life’, more than ‘refugee’. The danger is that in treating the Karen as a purely humanitarian subject, we allow the political, social and cultural causes of Karen persecution to go unresolved. The acts of resistance laid out in this chapter highlight how the Karen seek to redress this concern, namely by actively (though not always overtly) resisting the oppressive mechanisms of governance and seeking ways to resolve Burma’s conflict. Saw Ba articulated this motivation when he stated: Yeah, communication is important because for me, it’s like this. Here [outside the camp] you can stay freely, you can move, you can go anywhere, you know the situation very well. When you stay in the refugee camp you cannot see, you cannot hear. Here, if you want to call or communicate with other people, you can talk easily with other people, you can search the internet … I find ways I can do something. It is a big problem what has happened in Burma and I can find a way to solve this problem.

The very fact that Saw Ba chooses to live ‘illegally’ in the Thai community so that he can pursue activities that work to resolve the oppression of his people is an act of resistance. Saw Ba refuses to be defined by his refugee status, he refuses to be a passive victim, he does not succumb to the idea that he must rely on others to resolve this problem for him. He does not just want compassion – he wants justice.

Notes  1. Wri en narrative by Moo, female, translated by Saw Na, Tham Hin refugee camp, 2005. Moo’s narrative was originally documented by local staff working at Burma Issues.  2. See, for example, San C. Po (2001 [1928]), where he calls the Karen shy and backward, and o en lacking in the spirit of competition, or prominent mis-

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sionary Harry Ignatius Marshall (1997 [1922]), who mentions that the Karen are shy, cautious and prone to being preyed upon by others. See ‘Half a Million Identities’, Report by the Norwegian Refugee Council, 8 June 2017, h ps://www.nrc.no/news/2017/june/half-a-million-identities (retrieved 25 November 2019). The 2007 Saffron Revolution was a series of economic and political protests that took place from August to October 2007. While the protests included a range of individuals, Buddhist monks became a focal point of the revolution when thousands of them took to the streets in peaceful protest, so the saffron robes of the monks became symbolic of the protests. The protests were a response to the government’s decision to remove subsidies on fuel prices in August 2007. This was in addition to the sharp rise in prices for basic commodities that had occurred over the previous year and stagnant economic growth for the Burmese economy more broadly. The Burmese military responded aggressively to the protests and dozens of protesters were arrested, with estimates of up to thirty people being killed. These protests took place at a time when civil unrest in Burma was severely restricted and came with great risk to individuals. My arguments here are particularly informed by the work of Lyn Staeheli and others on the spaces and scales of resistance. These include a range of papers that examine the se ings and structures in and through which marginalised and oppressed peoples resist, and the opportunities for political empowerment that can emerge. For further discussions around Lyn Staehelis’ and others’ work on these issues, see the issue of Political Geography 13(5): September 1994. For further discussion on claims of systematic persecution and political neglect, see the reports put out by Amnesty International, the KHRG, HRW and various ethnic political parties such as the KNU, the NMSP and the KIO.

4  This Story Is Not for Myself Paths of Connectivity, Networks of Solidarity I said to my mom not to worry about my future, because I know what is my future. My future is not property and not living in good conditions. My future is to be against any injustice and oppression. To live in harmony with our world environment and build up a peaceful society. I know I have friends who will support my dream but I have to show them the dream I would like to implement. —Saw Ba, extract from email to author, 2007

There is an old Burmese fable Kaw Kwe told me he had learnt in school. An elephant lumbers through the forest and comes upon a small bird. ‘Please don’t destroy my nest and family’, the li le bird says. The elephant ignores the bird’s plea and destroys the nest. Sometime later the li le bird calls on his friend the crow. The crow comes down and pecks the elephant’s eyes out. Then his friend the fly comes down and lays maggots in the elephant’s eyes. As a result, the elephant becomes blind and dies. In its recounting, this seems to be a metaphor for the power of the li le guy, the creative ingenuity of the underdog, and in a way it is. When I asked Kaw Kwe about its meaning, he described it as follows. The li le bird is the Karen, oppressed because of its size and lack of power. The lumbering brutish elephant is of course the Burmese military. The Karen

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(the li le bird) have to think creatively about how they fight the Burmese because they are small and cannot win through the use of force. So they employ the help of the crow (the international community) and the fly (their own people), and by working together, they unseat the Burmese military. The li le guy wins. But this is more than just a ba le story. The Karen use hta (oral storytelling similar to proverbs or fables, and traditionally used to pass on knowledge) to explain all kinds of phenomena: the weather – if an ant hill is close to the ground, then it will be dry, but if it is high, then it will be wet; warnings – if your chickens are squawking loudly, then this means the Burmese military is approaching. Hta is also used to explain Karen character, tradition and norms – for example, there are ‘ancestor hta’ used for weddings and funerals, for eating and drinking together, for interactions between men and women. Hta can also be used to explain context. For example, the hta above can explain a key tenant of the borderlands space, the character of the activism that occurs there – the symbiotic relationship between the persecuted and oppressed Karen and the international communities and organisations that support their cause. This hta provides a framework by which we can understand the networks of connectivity and, ultimately, solidarity with which this chapter is preoccupied. It is a living hta that deals with the changing nature of the Karen situation, the relationships that form, and the borderlands space in which it all operates. For many Karen people who arrived at the Thailand–Burma border, they had a shared experience of persecution and displacement. The journey to the border was o en one of trauma, physical hardship and repeated a empts to evade the operations of heavy militarisation in Burma. In such instances the Thai side of the border was seen as a place of safety and refuge. But far from being the journey’s destination, for many the border became a sort of extension of the journey, a space in which these common experiences and stories could be told and retold, nurtured, refined and noted – and at times also concealed or embellished. These stories, in a sort of cyclic motion, were projected outwards to a global community as well as returning in a much changed form to the territory in which they were born: Karen State in Burma. The opportunity for this process to occur is significantly reliant upon a key component of the borderlands space, an interchange that occurs across the national border: particularly noninstitutionalised physical movement across the border, global flows of information, and the transfer of skills and knowledge. These processes allow stories to be built in such a way that they develop paths of connection and ultimately networks of solidarity, gathering momentum and support as they are further disseminated in both local and global se ings.

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One of the arguments this chapter makes is that new networks of solidarity are formed through pa erns of activism that are framed by shared experiences of displacement and persecution. These networks of solidarity are formed and strengthened where activist practices intersect with particular mechanisms of social power – for example, through international networking, the use of new media or critical awareness that occurs through political consciousness. While networks of solidarity can form through a range of sociopolitical processes, I am interested in how solidarities are defined as they relate to or form through activist practices. I focus on activist practices because these constitute a dominant form of political activity in the borderlands and are now deeply embedded in the nature of this space. With this in mind, the chapter is structured around the grouping of these solidarities into three key practices that are framed by an overarching political narrative of Karen persecution and displacement. The first practice is access to international networks and mechanisms that have helped displaced Karen create greater awareness around claims of persecution as well as enhancing the capacity of Karen to develop and present a political voice. The second practice is the use of new media. Similar to engagement with international networks, new media provide an opportunity to create greater global awareness of Karen persecution, but, in addition, they also act as a platform for the projection of a Karen political narrative of persecution. New media have also created opportunities for greater connections between Karen groups with shared interests and activities in the borderlands. The third practice is where specific activities of the Karen are designed to develop a level of political consciousness and critical thinking that helps strengthen the ability of displaced Karen to convey a strong political message on the ongoing persecution of Karen inside Burma. This political consciousness fulfils a larger need to develop the capacity of local Karen communities both inside Burma and along the border.

International Networks The opportunities for political agency significantly increase for displaced Karen once they reach the Thai side of the border. The barriers that stifle political agency on the Burmese side of the border – isolation, poverty, militarisation and political homogeneity, to name but a few – while still present in Thailand carry less urgency and political significance for displaced Karen. A key contemporary element of the borderlands as a political space is the capacity to use international audiences and mechanisms

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in ways that are not available to Karen in the conflict zones inside Burma, particularly as a platform for advocacy to the international community. The borderlands space provides displaced Karen with the opportunity to tap into global networks that can increase awareness of Karen claims of persecution and, importantly, help develop solidarities around these claims. This interaction with a global community enhances the political capacity of displaced Karen by providing greater opportunities to develop and present a Karen political voice. This exposure to a global community comes from a diverse range of sources and relationships specific to the space. These include the increasing tourist trade along the border and a mostly sympathetic media willing to focus on instances of Karen persecution, as well as the presence of international aid agencies that have provided greater exposure to international mechanisms and ideas. But perhaps the most prominent form of global engagement for displaced Karen comes through a more sophisticated access to UN mechanisms, sympathetic governments and funding sources, as well as information flows and political platforms. Inherent in this access is a heightened form of advocacy; by this I mean the active support of an idea or argument, mostly (though not always) conducted in the public domain. In the borderlands this most commonly takes the form of a call for political action against continuing Burmese Army a acks on ethnic areas or a plea to take more immediate steps, such as providing humanitarian assistance to those affected by the conflict. Advocacy at the international level has been further enhanced by the capacity of emerging technologies to connect the borderlands with the greater global community. Many Karen spent a considerable amount of their lives in the jungles of Karen State or the confines of the refugee camps along the Thailand– Burma border. Their emplacement in the borderlands offers very different political opportunities, particularly in terms of political agency and activism. Karen activists and community organisations have increasingly engaged with international bodies in ways that have developed the capacity of displaced Karen to present their experiences and link them to political injustices, as well as bringing international a ention to the ongoing persecution and displacement of Karen within Karen State. Furthermore, these political injustices act as platforms around which the Karen can come together and form networks of solidarity. Some of these methods of engagement include submi ing wri en reports to regulatory bodies and submissions to commissions such as the UN Commi ee against Torture and the Commi ee on the Rights of the Child, as well as the United Nations Human Rights Commission. As traditional forms of human rights documentation, they cater to a mostly international audience in need of objective factual information. In other

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instances, activists have travelled overseas in their capacity as victims of state violence, placing them in direct contact with the exiled community, foreign governments and media outlets. For example, Zoya Phan, a Karen activist and daughter of the slain KNU leader Pado Mahn Sha, met Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister at the time, and was also asked to address the British Conservative Party Conference in 2006 and 2007. On both occasions she was able to convey her experiences of persecution and displacement and to highlight the plight of Karen people in Burma.¹ In September 2006 Hseng Noung, a Shan activist, was invited to talk at a special roundtable discussion convened to coincide with the opening of 61st General Assembly session of the UN.2 She spoke of the Burmese Army’s use of rape against women, particularly in Burma’s ethnic areas. It can be difficult to see the immediate benefits of engaging with the international community. It does not o en bring about swi change or relief, and the outcomes can be ambiguous and difficult to measure. As an example, one could argue for the integral role played by the international community in Burma’s 2010 general election and the Burmese military’s partial relinquishing of power to the NLD in the 2015 election, effectively ending over six decades of absolute military rule, though not its continuing power over the governing process. At the same time, this supposed transition to democracy has had li le effect on resolving Burma’s ethnic unrest; the ongoing persecution of the Karen, Rohingya and other ethnic groups is testament to this. One could argue that despite utilising these global platforms and despite the optimism a ached to the change of governance in Burma, the state of play remains largely the same. Ethnic minority groups continue to suffer at the hands of the Burmese military; the reporting on the plight of the Rohingya over the last five years shows the catastrophic consequences of the international community’s failure to act on this particular issue.³ However, there may be small victories, as in the case Saw Ba told me about. Every year at the end of the rainy season, the Burmese military start moving their provisions to the frontline in preparation for their dry season offensives. In the past they would force Karen villagers to carry their loads, up to 60 kg of ammunition and other supplies. But this forced labour began to be documented, influential people started to take notice, and the practice was mentioned on the floor of the UN and in multiple international reports. So the Burmese military adapted – they used prisoners as their porters instead, like those mentioned at the beginning of this book. But again the practice was noted and documented, and calls were made for it to cease. In 2005 the Burmese military again began their preparations for the dry season offensive, only this time they used trucks, cars and donkeys to transport their equipment. Could it be that a er years of

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documenting, agitating and condemning, the Burmese military had taken note? International pressure, underpinned by grassroots activism, had forced the Burmese military to cease an abusive practice. Well, that year and in that location, it did anyway. The evidence suggests that the practice continued elsewhere. Despite their limitations, I mention these examples to show the benefits of international engagement on a broader platform with a number of interconnected levels. It places the Karen conflict within a global framework where they can draw on the considerable resources of the international community. This in turn gives displaced Karen the opportunity to articulate their experiences in supported, politically recognised environments such as a forum like the UN. It also provides a platform from which displaced Karen can project a political narrative of persecution and political will. And finally it exposes displaced Karen to diverse interests and ideas, which in turn help to shape their understandings of their own conflict within the global context. There is another way in which this international engagement impacts the lives of displaced Karen. While instrumental in maintaining global interest in what is essentially a prolonged civil war, international engagement has also created a space of transversal trajectories that connects Karen political agency with ideas and resources. As a result, there are many more grassroots-driven activities that have come out of the borderlands over the last decade. One prominent example is the License to Rape report released by the Shan Women’s Action Network and the Shan Human Rights Foundation (SWAN and SHRF 2002). The release of this report prompted statements from the US Congress and US State Department, as well as a call by the UN General Assembly for the Government of Myanmar to cooperate with a UN investigation into charges of rape carried out by members of the armed forces.⁴ These responses were instrumental in forcing the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) to conduct an investigation into the report’s claims. Unsurprisingly, the SPDC investigation found that the report’s claims were false and fabricated and ‘groundless and malicious’.5 The License to Rape report instigated a number of other reports on the widespread use of rape by the Burmese Army, including Sha ering Silences (KWO 2004), which documented the rape of Karen women, and Catwalk to the Barracks (HRFM 2005), which documented instances of rape against Mon women. All these reports relied on information documented and collated by local researchers on the ground, and were strengthened by the ability of these researchers to speak to the report’s findings in international forums. These reports were further strengthened by their ability to present a picture of the widespread use of rape as a weapon of war against ethnic women and to link this to international forums already working

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on this issue. These and other similar instances highlight the increasing reach and capacity of the borderlands community to effectively utilise the resources of the international community. Engagement with the international community has meant many displaced Karen in the borderlands have acquired skills that will serve them in an increasingly globalised world, including the capacity to negotiate complex global structures and to communicate in both a cross-cultural and multilingual environment. Participation in formal structures as politically engaged members of the Karen community – for example, references to Karen reports documenting the displacement of Karen in Burma’s eastern states have consistently appeared in UN statements and recommendations since at least the mid-1990s – has also strengthened the legitimacy of Karen activists claims to present their own political agency. Engagement with international networks has provided the Karen with an outlet for their activism, increased global awareness of the Karen situation and developed the capacity of displaced Karen to present their own political voice. A considerable impact upon the effectiveness of global engagement is the many advances in communications technologies. These new media have not only strengthened Karen connections to the world away from the borderlands, but have also developed the capacity of grassroots Karen to define what these connections and messages should be.

New Media In addition to being a catalyst for greater and more effective interaction with the international networks mentioned in the previous section, new media have also developed the capacity of displaced Karen to produce their own messages and project them to broader audiences. New media, particularly in terms of developing networks of solidarity, have been most effective on two levels. First, new media such as social media, chat forums, blogs and websites, as well as online media consisting of traditional print, TV and radio, have been utilised by grassroots communities to increase global awareness of the Karen situation inside Burma and in the borderlands. They have also acted as a platform for the projection of a Karen political narrative of persecution. Second, new media have created opportunities for greater connections between Karen groups with shared interests and activities in the borderlands. It is important to note that I am not making a comment on the technology per se or on its impact on users, as this would require a very different methodological approach. Rather, my interest is in how Karen people use

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new media and for what purpose, and this necessitates a focus on content rather than a technical analysis of the technology. To date, what li le that has been wri en about the impact and use of new media in the Burmese and Karen communities has tended to focus on diasporic communities (Brooten 2015; Cho 2011; Gifford and Wilding 2013). However, this does not engage with the very particular circumstances of displaced Karen in the borderlands, particularly an ongoing close physical connection to the homeland and interconnectedness to Karen still inside Burma, which is evident, for example, in processes of cultural exchange and the collection of stories of human rights abuses. While the technology has and will continue to change, the larger arguments made here remain relevant – namely, that new media, whatever form they take, constitute a key platform from which a Karen political narrative of persecution is projected and that new media create opportunities for greater inward connection between the Karen in the borderlands as well as outward connection to a global audience. Through observations over a number of fieldwork stints between 2005 and 2011, it became apparent that new media were initially embraced by displaced Karen because they provided a readily accessible outlet for the documentation of Karen persecution and, as such, were an effective medium for their activism. The Karen I talked to recognised that these technologies could potentially capture larger audiences and garner more effective responses to the conflict inside Burma. The focus was on what the new media could convey, not necessarily its technical capabilities, although this obviously influenced its projection. It also gave many Karen who were concerned about the conflict inside Burma a purpose, some contribution they could make in support of a political resolution to the conflict. The line between the personal and professional use of new media is a blurry one in a messy political space like the Thailand–Burma borderlands, but my sense from the many interviews and observations I undertook at that time was that the use of new media served a political purpose – they were used to collate and disseminate information around ongoing claims of persecution, with the purpose of it reaching someone who could do something about it, or at least that was the intent. In this respect, new media were used in a number of ways. Social media, blogs, websites and chat forums have all taken a central role over the last decade in projecting alternative political, social and cultural messages from the borderlands. These o en function as information and exchange portals primarily aimed at the provision of political, cultural or social information about the Karen. This might serve a larger historical or preservation purpose, or it might have a resource provision aim, for example, as a complimentary service to an organisation’s core work on health or

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education. These platforms also o en provide important cultural and political information about being a refugee or displaced person in the borderlands, with both an inward focus on creating networks within the refugee and displaced communities and an outward focus on connecting these experiences with external audiences. Importantly, these platforms have also changed the form in which these connections can be made, notably providing a faster, more effective and accessible means of disseminating the information. In this sense, the purpose of activists in the borderlands remains the same. New media are simply an additional tool, albeit a significant one, through which their activism can be disseminated. There are at least two areas in which new media have had a profound effect: first, the way in which they have been used to develop solidarities between organisations in the borderlands; and, second, the way in which new media can give priority to personal narratives. In 2005 I conducted an interview with the Karen River Watch (KRW), a coalition of five Karen organisations, including the Karen Environment and Social Action Network (KESAN), the Karen Student Network Group (KSNG), the Karen Office of Relief and Development (KORD), the Karen Youth Organisation (KYO) and the Federation of Trade Unions – Kawthoolei (FTUK). I was interested in a campaign they began in 2003 against the decision of the Thai and Burmese governments to dam sections of the Salween River. The campaign was a good example of how new media helped develop solidarities between communities in the borderlands. By using various forms of technology, the coalition has been able to communicate, mobilise and advocate in more collaborative and efficient ways. The campaign worked at both a grassroots and a global level to raise awareness of the environmental impacts, as well as the associated political, social and economic impacts of such a large-scale development project. The campaign employed a number of new technologies to achieve its aims. The project produced a wri en report, a DVD, a music album and a website. It instigated an e-petition to the Prime Minister of Thailand and took part in a Global Day of Action in nineteen cities around the world. The production of the music album provides an interesting approach to cross-border sharing, which makes use of both new technology and international networks. A group from the KRW along with other associated individuals set up a temporary recording studio in an IDP area on the banks of the Salween River. They recorded six songs over five days. When villagers were not busy, they came down and watched. Many of the songs are based on Karen hta. So Pla, a member of the KRW who played a key role in developing the recordings, explained it like this:

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Originally we thought it would be too difficult to record this on the banks of the Salween. It is an IDP area and it is difficult to know when the Burmese military might appear … The use of poem, song and performance art is of real practical use to the villagers … music can make everything concise. They can keep the tape to remind them of the dam issue and it will remain in their memories.

Once the recording was finished, the group sent copies back to the village where they had recorded the music. It has also been distributed along the border and through international networks, including being able to be downloaded from the KRW website. By using the Web, video and music in the Karen and English languages, they have reached an audience, both locally and internationally, Karen and foreign, in ways that would never have been possible before the advent of new media. The connections and solidarity built around this one particular issue are indicative of the way in which new media can bring politically and socially engaged individuals together around shared values and interests, while at the same time restoring the value of the voices and the messages they provide. Projects such as these begin to show the inward projection of a Karen political narrative. In this instance, the KRW was able to construct a political message – first, regarding the viability of the dam and its impact upon local communities and, second, regarding a wider message of Karen persecution – that is specifically designed to reach and influence a Karen audience. The project brings an inward projection of solidarity that is characterised by its place as part of the larger act of persecution enacted upon the Karen by the Burmese military. In this sense, villagers affected by the dam are not alone in terms of the ongoing threats of displacement and violence enacted by the Burmese military. They are in fact part of a larger Karen community who have suffered similar experiences, making them part of a larger narrative that can articulate a collective response. New media enable greater access to a wider Karen audience (including the inward projection of a Karen political narrative) that facilitates the dissemination of a shared Karen narrative of displacement and persecution. However, it should be noted that these networks and connections largely function as external to those inside Burma. For while the experiences of Karen inside Burma may constitute the content of new media, they are not part of the community that forms through the consumption of new media, nor do they have input into the form and messaging new media takes. Writing back in 2003, Sandra Dudley stated that these platforms were ‘primarily a tool central to the work of NGOs, activists, academics, journalists and others’ (2003: 17). And by others we can add the larger Karen diaspora now rese led in third countries.

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The second way in which new media have had a profound effect is in their capacity to prioritise personal narratives, which in turn are used to establish a collective political narrative. This process provides legitimacy and power to Karen political voices by allowing the Karen to own their message as well as fulfilling a need in the outside community for greater ‘proof’ of atrocities they have only heard about second-hand. An early example of this is the blog KarenRefugee, which was started by a group of Karen students in 2007.⁶ It began by providing first-hand accounts of life in the camp as well as the aspirations of youth living as refugees. Due to the impact of the rese lement programme, the blog went on to include entries from Karen refugees rese led in Australia and others who are undertaking work in local Karen communities outside the camps. The blog had the potential to utilise both a diverse user base and a wide international audience, connecting those in the isolated confines of the camp with the greater online global community. The conversational nature of blogs allows Karen refugees to tell their stories, but also learn from communities they would not normally have access to. Of course, examples such as this are now prolific given the uptake in social media platforms – displaced Karen in the borderlands utilise Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger, among others, as a means to project their stories of displacement and persecution, and connect both inwardly to other Karen communities and outwardly to an international audience. The personal narrative is imperative to this type of technology. Loo Ne emphasised this point when talking about a song he wrote, ‘Story of an IDP’: ‘It’s like I’m reading my own biography since I was a child.’ For him, the song fulfils an intensely personal need to let other people know his feelings and experiences as an IDP. But this is not the only purpose of writing the song. A group of Karen activists created a video clip for the song and released it to a wider audience on YouTube.⁷ In this instance, technology and greater opportunities for dissemination allow this personal narrative to also become an advocacy tool. In our interview Loo Ne expanded upon this when he said: Writing this song was not really for myself because it is a story I already know. It’s like I’m using different tools to tell the story of the IDP, actually not only the IDP but people here [in Thailand] as well. It can cover all people, not only those from the civil war zone. Especially it can be useful for human rights activists who can do lobbying and campaigning with it.

What is also evident in the way Loo Ne speaks of his song is his belief that ‘Story of an IDP’ represents a larger collective of people with similar stories. This is not his story, but many people’s story. He tells it as a way of reflecting the experiences of other IDPs or other Karen in the conflict

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zones or displaced into Thailand. In ‘Story of an IDP’ we see a subjective experience of displacement turned into a collective identity with a political message projected through an activist framework. The song is a good example of moving beyond the realm of a personal narrative into a shared experience of displacement and, in turn, a potential point of mobilisation and identification for a collective community of Karen. In the early to mid-1990s the border area experienced an influx in trainings around video and its potential as an advocacy tool. Western organisations spent time training and funding local activists to take video cameras into the conflict zone and record first-hand experiences. It followed an international trend where the public wanted ‘to see for themselves’ what was happening in areas they had only previously read about. Loo Ne, who had been heavily involved in projects documenting these voices, stated that: I think, nowadays, there are changes in many places, including information and media. More and more people are aware of ge ing the real voice, the real story from those who suffer, not through NGOs or reports. They themselves want to see, want to hear. First of all they try and get these people to go somewhere and tell their story by their own. That’s what they try. From the point of view of the voice of the people, one thing is like the empowerment. They don’t feel that they are victims; they don’t feel that they are suffering alone. It will give them awareness to go out and learn they are not the only ones who are suffering. In other countries there are also people who are suffering like them. And also there are people who support them, a sort of movement. They are not standing alone, so it is very important to bring their voice to empower.

New media and access to broader networks have allowed the Karen to present their own voices to a global community, effectively moving the debate beyond the state narrative that has typically excluded them from having political voice. As pointed out by Loo Ne, this has produced a space that allows for personal narratives and at the same time reinforces a sense of empowerment for those whose voices have a history of being neglected. Psychologist Julian Rappaport, who has worked extensively in the fields of community psychology and social policy, calls neglected voices ‘an ignored or devalued resource’ and as a resource therefore subject to uneven distribution. Re-establishing the value of these stories therefore requires ‘people participate[ing] in the discovery, creation, and enhancement of their own community narratives and personal stories’ (Rappaport 1995: 52). This is an example of Geoff Wood’s claim to put the story back into the case (Wood 1985), but with an emphasis on the value of these stories that are too o en neglected. To some extent, what new media have done is address this imbalance, allowing long-neglected or devalued voices to de-

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velop a space in which their political voice is supported. A video, a social media page and a blog are all methods of information exchange that can function freely and largely outside of the formal political structures. As a result, it is a space where alternative political voices can be expressed and supported, and it is this capability that ensures new media are an integral factor in creating spaces of solidarity for displaced Karen, and in turn helps develop an alternative space where those political needs can be met. Advances in new media and the increased capacity of displaced Karen to utilise these technologies have significantly improved the reach of Karen political voices and have undoubtedly increased the reach of advocacy around Karen persecution and displacement. At the same time, these technologies enable greater connections between individuals and groups in the borderlands with shared interests and activities.

Politically Conscious, Politically Reflective A state of political consciousness is in many respects an outcome of the first two practices already mentioned; it also represents the way in which the Karen typically utilise new forms of knowledge and skills to develop the capacity of their communities. While not explicitly stated, many Karen approach this as a way to expand the potential power and influence of Karen political agency. I contend that the Karen a empt to develop political consciousness in their communities in order to strengthen their ability to convey a strong political message around the ongoing persecution of Karen inside Burma. This fulfils a larger need to develop the skills and knowledge of local Karen communities both inside Burma and along the border. While I touch briefly on aspects of more formal technical skills transference such as practical trainings and education, this section focuses on the broader theme of political consciousness and reflection. There is an important reason for this. A key theme that emerged from many of the displaced Karen I interviewed was the twin desire to both share the knowledge and opportunities they themselves had gained, and to build a critically aware population capable of strengthening the Karen political movement and ultimately resolving the conflict inside Burma. This motivation has deep historical roots and is framed by a desire to present the Karen as an educated and civilised nation with its own history and literature, thus pu ing them on a culturally and politically equal footing to others and highlighting the unjust nature of their persecution (Cheesman 2002: 209–14). This position is encapsulated in the words of Po Lin Tay, an early Karen historian:

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If at some time our texts are lost, what will become of our race’s experiences in past generations? There would be nothing to serve as evidence of Karen history, whether records, newspapers or wri en news, so we would not be able to exactly re-identify our origins and would become a generation of people without a country. (Quoted in Cheesman 2002: 213)

It is a sentiment echoed by a U Kyi, who clearly saw the importance of learning and ‘knowing’ Karen history and culture: Personally, for me I think it is really, really important because without knowing your own history you cannot do anything for your people … You know that to organise people you have to know history and culture, this is what I believe. Because if you would like to give the young generation, let’s say this is not the right word but like ideology or nationalism then you need to base it on history. If you cannot give them firm information then they will not believe. That is why history is important.

U Kyi’s account indicates a perceived link between a critically aware population and the progress of the idea of a Karen nation. In other words, to work for the cause and to educate others is seen as the duty of all Karen in order to ensure the survival of the Karen people, their history, their culture and their land. This is certainly true of the displaced Karen I encountered who expressed a clear duty towards developing a politically conscious population as a way of protecting and developing Karen identity and culture. There are a number of key examples that best illustrate how this process of political consciousness helps to form networks of solidarity at the local level. Imparting learnt knowledge underlies most of these types of activities. One participant, Saw Ba, is a Karen artist-activist with a particular interest in drawing cartoons. He has natural creative ability, but has also benefited from informal training in community organisation and NGO-facilitated arts programmes in the borderlands. A number of his cartoons have been published in KweKaLu, a Karen-language newspaper distributed along the border and inside Burma. In our interview, Saw Ba said that the main purpose behind his cartoons is for them to be used as an educational tool, a means of imparting knowledge. He talked about a particular cartoon he drew where he contemplates a common refrain expressed by Karen in Burma’s more remote and illiterate conflict zones (see Figure 4.1). He believes that prolonged suffering and isolation has caused many displaced Karen to search for explanations in the metaphysical world. This will o en take the form of an ‘acceptance of fate’ or ‘God’s will’ and this then frames how Karen perceive the injustices enacted upon them and rationalise their current predicament.⁸ In the cartoon the mother accepts that the circumstances of her life are caused by fate. Saw Ba told me that the mother represents many displaced

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Figure 4.1. ‘Fate’. Illustration by Saw Ba.

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Karen who believe that life and its repercussions are beyond their control, demobilising any action that might serve to change these conditions and in effect entrenching their own immobility. In his work on cultural pedagogy, Paulo Freire has a empted to account for this cultural conditioning that allows people to inadvertently participate in their own subjugation. His term ‘culture of silence’ is a useful way of understanding the sometimes paralysing effect of living under sustained periods of oppression. Under the culture of silence, life is a space in which you live only, where blame and responsibility lay outside the realm of your reality, and where alienation from those in power has caused the masses to be complicit in their muteness (Freire 1972: 30). It is these kinds of belief that Saw Ba believes are damaging to Karen agency and that he is determined to address through his cartoons. He uses knowledge and skills enabled by his presence in the borderlands to create and then disseminate alternative messages like the one in his cartoon above. His knowledge and subsequently his message can be found in the comments of the villagers in the last panel when they state that the conditions suffered by the woman and her son are the creation of fellow human beings, not an ethereal ‘other’ from a different realm. By viewing this in the context of action-cause, displaced Karen can change the nature of those conditions rather than be complicit in their silence. Saw Ba has developed this knowledge or political awareness through a combination of self-analysis and exposure to other ideas. It is knowledge that he thinks is important to share and he achieves this through his art. Cartoons have been used in a similar way by the artist Pe Li in his ‘Hsaw Pa Kaw’ series. Published in KweKaLu since 1997, the cartoons o en convey educative messages around politics and being a refugee. In a particular cartoon published in October 2005, Pe Li addresses the concerns he has with the rese lement programme. At the end of 2005, concern within the refugee camps about rese lement to third countries was particularly heated and dominated by misinformation. Many thought they would be leaving to be rese led the next day, not understanding that the process might take months if not years. Pe Li’s cartoons at this time showed concern that li le was being done to address the cultural realities of rese lement – from simple things, such as differences in the styles of dressing, to more potentially debilitating differences, such as making a living and understanding what daily life would be like in countries such as Australia or America. As more and more people complained of the lack of information being handed out to those in the camps, Pe Li’s message through his ‘Hsaw Pa Kaw’ cartoon became increasingly important in reaching the people most affected by the resettlement process: those in the camps. It was a reminder to the people that

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Figure 4.2. ‘Hsaw Pa Kaw’. Illustration by Pe Li, KweKaLu, October 2005.9

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rese lement was not necessarily the golden land promised and that it was not without its own difficulties and struggles. For many, rese lement is a resolution to the appalling and protracted living arrangements of the refugee camps along the border. However, it can also be the beginning of a whole new set of challenges for displaced Karen to face, and it is this knowledge that is conveyed in Pe Li’s cartoons. The objective of both these cartoonists work is to convey knowledge and ideas. In their work they critically analyse the realities that impact the everyday lives of displaced Karen in the borderlands and inside Burma. As an easily accessible and understood medium, cartoons have the potential to reach a large and dispersed audience. In his ‘Fate’ cartoon, Saw Ba talks of this in terms of developing a culture of political reflection through art, and he believes that the medium of cartoons is currently underutilised in terms of its capacity to develop a forum for a Karen political culture. In our interview he expressed it like this: From my experience I don’t see the Karen draw so much compared to the Burmese and other cultures. I mean in terms of making a living from your art and having your work published. Karen people draw but they don’t pass on their work to others, it’s mostly just for themselves. I would like us to have our own drawing culture that is widespread, that shows our own ideas, opinions, culture and identity.

In a sense, Saw Ba is articulating the element of ‘silence’ currently pervading this artistic medium and its associated messages. The implication is that Karen people must be responsible for articulating their ideas, opinions, culture and identity if a political culture is to be sustained. To achieve this requires a critical consciousness of social, political and cultural realities. In Figure 4.1, the cartoon’s message is a call for this type of consciousness. It encourages an awareness of the political realities that cause suffering. It asks people to discard their beliefs in fate and God’s will, and embrace a deepening awareness of reality based on the actions of individuals, not on what Saw Ba depicts as a demobilising spiritual realm. A further example of this consciousness can be found in the way in which another participant Po Hsan articulates his motivation for teaching art to school students. Po Hsan is an artist who was living in Mae Sot at the time and had spent many years teaching art to migrant children. He expressed strong views about the role that art can play in education. Education is important. It’s not only about transferring technical skill but also sharing with them the many social and political issues they will confront. Children need to see strong positive ways forward and I believe art can provide this.

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Later on in our interview, Po Hsan expanded upon what he sees as the key aspects of educating through art: first, it provides skills for critical thinking; second, it builds a relationship between the artist and nature; and, third, it provides a means to articulate emotion. In this way, his art classes convey the technical skill needed to create art, while at the same time supporting the consciousness of critical young minds so that they can transform the political realities that oppress them. There are many other examples of projects that develop political consciousness in the borderlands, some of which provide more practical, immediate benefits through their use of international advocacy tools. For example, many displaced Karen in the borderlands use their newly acquired skills to educate and train those unable to access the same systems from which they benefited. In 2005 I interviewed members of the KSNG about their community theatre programme, ‘Theatre for the Oppressed’. This programme aims to educate refugee and IDP populations on political, cultural and social issues, and in a format that is accessible to both literate and illiterate audiences. One of their members told me that many of the communities they work with cannot read or write. If they have access to radios, it is rarely in their ethnic language. He believes that community theatre has a number of benefits: it is more accessible, more easily understood, delivered in the audience’s own language, and is made familiar and relevant to their everyday lives. Given that most of their audiences have had limited education opportunities and spend the majority of their adult life in demanding physical activity, he also says that it is very important to the group that they incorporate capacity building into their programmes. The KSNG also conducts community theatre in the refugee camps, transferring its knowledge about social issues such as domestic violence and alcohol and drug use, as well as educating the camp population on the rese lement programme and social, political and economic issues at both the local and the global levels. For example, in 2004 the KSNG took part in a joint project that aimed to educate villagers about the Salween Dam campaign. It conducted evening drama performances that drew up to a hundred villagers, five times the number that took part in the daily formal training activities. Later, it conducted this same performance in the refugee camps. Members of the KSNG explained the reasoning behind this: Many of the refugees in the camps did not know about this campaign or the threat to the Salween River until they had seen our performance. Drama is the facilitator between those inside and those outside. We were able to provide a link across the chasm that o en exists between those inside Burma and those living along the border … they told us they understood the issues

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about the dam a lot more and that they would undertake activities to support those who were objecting to the dam.

Imparting knowledge and skills in ways that develop and strengthen local capacities is integral to the work of displaced Karen in the borderlands. For many displaced Karen, education and skills are an important part of developing local communities – both in the borderlands and inside Burma – as well as improving the effectiveness of a political Karen voice. Whether it be educating for greater political consciousness or developing technical skill, displaced Karen in the borderlands become equipped with knowledge and skills they feel it is their duty to share. In doing so, they are helping to strengthen the ability of displaced Karen to convey a strong political message around the ongoing persecution of the Karen inside Burma, as well as more generally developing the capacity of local Karen communities. Together, these three practices – a new political capacity (developed through political consciousness) combined with a more effective vehicle (new media) and access to a broader audience (through international networks) – are evidence of the social relations that develop an interchange that occurs across the national border. This interchange is evident in shared projects with local-global reach such as the KRW dam campaign, Karen engagement with global human rights networks, partnerships that form around the production and consumption of music and art, and political messaging that challenges the state narrative, to name just a few of the examples that have been explored across this chapter so far. What this interchange does is establish a set of practices that, due to their sociality across the national border, sit in tension with the modern territorial domain. This tension is a characteristic of the borderlands space, but it also gives form to the social practices and identity constructs of displaced Karen as they relate to that space. In addition to these activities, networks of solidarity in the borderlands can also be seen at a more abstract level, in that they form around shared experiences of displacement and persecution, something that in many senses is less physical and tangible, but that sits at the core of all this activity. In some respects, this incorporates membership into a collective group that has experienced persecution due to the heavy militarisation occurring on the Burmese side of the Thailand–Burma border. Solidarity, in terms of talking about a community based on shared feelings and a corresponding set of interests and responsibilities, forms from this base point of shared persecution and develops through to a shared political narrative around which the community can mobilise. The next section looks at the form this political narrative takes and argues that new networks of solidarity are framed by a political narrative based on shared experiences of persecution and displacement.

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Activism: Projecting a Political Message Up until this point, I have focused on the ways in which international networking, new media and political consciousness all strengthen Karen capacities to form networks of solidarity from which they can advocate for political change in Burma. I now want to examine an element that sits at the core of these activities: that these networks of solidarity are framed by a political narrative based on shared experiences of displacement and persecution. This political narrative along with a narrative based on cultural recovery (discussed in the next chapter) are key components of Karen social practices, but, more than this, they ultimately form the basis of a projected Karen identity that emanates from the borderlands. Of particular interest are the political messages inherent in activism – particularly from the perspective of those who fall outside formal political organisations – and also how cultural expression is used as a method to convey these messages. My interest in cultural expression as a vehicle for advocacy comes from my experience of the borderlands during numerous research trips over the last decade. These experiences indicated a common use of cultural expression as an activist tool that could document experiences and make calls for action. For example, songs about displacement and the armed struggle are common, as are drawings of Karen culture and Burmese Army a acks on villages. In addition, the practice of these types of expression allows for a more nonformal involvement in the politics of the borderlands and, by extension, inside Burma. Some of the most interesting examples of advocacy framing the practice of cultural expression can be found in the way that inanimate forms of human rights documentation are increasingly being used in more dynamic forms of advocacy at the grassroots level, framed by artistic mediums and, in particular, new technologies. These artist-activists combine factual information with a more appealing dissemination format, suggesting a broadening awareness of their audience. A common technique was to infuse art with the voices or stories of displaced Karen. Artist U Kyi spoke about talking to Karen inside Burma and then using their words in his songs. In this way he says he is paying respect to the voices of those otherwise silenced, while at the same time exposing the human rights violations they suffer. An interesting element of this technique is U Kyi’s ability to move stories and voices across international boundaries in ways that physical movement cannot. For example, while the owner of a story of persecution can be physically confined to Burmese territory, the story is not; it transverses a global se ing, using communications technologies

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to connect with international networks and, with others who share similar stories, to form a larger collective narrative of persecution and displacement. As a result, a critical mass of solidarity develops around this collective narrative, forming an identity that is based on shared experiences of displacement and persecution. Many Karen artists in the borderlands draw strength from their ‘people’ inside Burma to direct this activism, o en returning to Karen State to document cultural practices. As U Kyi told me: ‘I love to go inside and see my people and my land. When I see them I gain strength from them and grow more commi ed to the struggle.’ However, such experiences can also create further trauma in the telling. Anthropologist Marita Eastmond, who collected the narratives of Chilean refugees in the late 1980s, found that for many of the refugees, ‘it was a struggle between the moral imperative not to forget and the extreme pain of remembering’ (2007: 259). It is a sentiment echoed by U Kyi, who told me: ‘It’s difficult to write songs because you have to remember your experience.’ This epic but nuanced struggle between ‘not forge ing and remembering’ is exactly what U Kyi did when he wrote his song ‘Do Not Forget’. He uses strong language to describe the experiences of many Karen inside Burma, producing a narrative that is both a documentation of human rights abuses and a denunciation of political violence: Old or young, they show them no respect, all are treated brutally They split our skin in torture and put salt in our wounds They disembowel us and hold it tauntingly in our faces They cut off our fingers and hang us feet up Our children are choked, pounded and whipped ’til necks hang loose Our virgin women have been raped to death and le to rot Creating our hatred Small children thrown to the skies and impaled upon enemy spears These are not tall tales but reality (‘Do Not Forget’, extract of song wri en and translated by U Kyi)

The lyrics of this particular song act as documentation of real-life events and atrocities, acting as an historical record of a particular period of time and place that might otherwise be lost. In describing the writing of ‘Do Not Forget’, U Kyi said that while he himself had never seen a child impaled upon enemy spears, he believed the events he described in this song were commensurate with events described in many human rights reports that document such atrocities. There is no need for him to construct ‘tall tales’ of abuse, he said, because these events were the reality experienced by many Karen living in conflict zones. These two stanzas of the song also project a collective experience of persecution – it is our children choked

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and pounded and our women beaten and raped – and this becomes a Karen narrative around which a displaced community can mobilise and identify. This need to document events is also found in the work of Nyi Nyi, who talked about living through a Burmese Army a ack on Huay Kaloke refugee camp in 1997 and how he dealt with this through his drawing: For me drawing can tell a story. Like when the camp burnt down I used my drawings to document the burning. It means I can keep it as a record. But also I drew this and [the] UNHCR took it and made an exhibition with it. So when the people saw the exhibition it reminded them that the camp had been burnt down … Even though we take refuge in Thailand our life is still not safe, we are still faced with burning and persecution.

Nyi Nyi also talked of an outward projection of persecution. He needed to let other people know about the camp’s destruction and remind them of the atrocity that was commi ed by the DKBA and Burmese Army troops. Disseminating this message on a global scale was facilitated by an international organisation: the UNHCR. Nyi Nyi, like many others discussed in this chapter, conveys an outward projection of a Karen narrative characterised by shared experiences of displacement, violence and trauma. These experiences and their articulation build upon each other to produce a political narrative that helps define the identity of displaced Karen in the borderlands. A common theme throughout the many pieces of cultural expression I viewed is this idea of injustice. Shared experiences of persecution are a common thread framing the content and political messages of stories produced in the borderlands. It is also a significant factor in motivating activists in the borderlands to advocate on behalf of those exposed to the continuing realities of persecution. Po Hsan spoke of his art as having political purpose, but also his motivation to document lived experiences for the purpose of informing others. His comments suggest a preoccupation with recording actual events so that they are not lost, but also in presenting a political statement around the continued persecution: When I first saw the IDP children inside I felt so painful I wanted to draw their faces. I wanted people to know the realities of the Burmese military’s operations and I really feel that I have the opportunity to share this through my art.

Loo Ne shares a similar sentiment when he highlights the plight of IDPs in his song ‘Story of an IDP’: Security and shelter are vanishing Health, food and education I lack of I can’t think for tomorrow Because I don’t know how to survive today

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The military regime destroyed my lands and home I wonder who even knows our suffering I miss the place where I was born Where my mother rocked me in the cradle Peace, love and unity were there Natural resources abundant And a picture of ‘home’ was in my eyes Now the world’s greed destroyed this unity and peace Oh, I miss the place where I was born I long for the songs my mum sang to me And her love drags me to recall the place I once lived Wishing to be back there before the end of my days The children are naked The mothers are sobbing The fathers disheartened And all because of war And I want to go home when the light shows my way I can’t think of tomorrow Because I don’t know how to survive today My farm and home has been destroyed by the military regime I wonder who even knows our suffering Dark clouds are growing darker And the military troops approach our home We are moving from place to place and suffering daily Oh I want to be free Oh where has all the education gone I want to learn I want to rest like the birds at night But I have to worry for tomorrow And that worry brings screams while I sleep (‘Story of an IDP’, song wri en by Loo Ne, translated by So Pla)

‘Story of an IDP’ conveys Loo Ne’s personal story, but it also places his experience in a broader global context. He talks of our suffering and our home and the destruction caused by the world’s greed. When he speaks about his song, he sees it as his own story, but also as the story of a greater collective narrative. It is a lived and shared experience that gathers meaning and power in the telling. He explained: I just wrote this song because I want to show the life of the IDP through the song. It’s like I’m reading my own biography since I was a child but I also see other children who are still facing these same problems that I faced as a child. In my opinion to tell this type of story is the first step. It shows only

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the problem, trouble and worries of the IDP and all those who live in the civil war zone. My idea is to write another song a er this one, because this one only shows the oppression and the next one is about the power in you. Because this one tells the true story but in the eyes of the radio listener you are a victim under this oppression and people see you as powerless but in the reality people are doing many different things and they survive, they are still there, without having any weapons to protect themselves. No education, food scarcity, no healthcare, but they stay there. Their energy and their power is [sic] still going strong.

In both ‘Story of an IDP’ and ‘Do Not Forget’, the authors convey a message of solidarity around the shared experiences of displacement and persecution. While ‘Do Not Forget’ is biting with hatred and bi erness, ‘Story of an IDP’ conveys a deep sorrowful energy. It is a romanticised memory of ‘home’ and a previous way of life. Yet underlying both these songs is a focused a empt to use cultural expression to both educate and advocate, to bring people together around a shared purpose and to convey a shared political message. As Loo Ne explains in the interview above, the story is his story, but it is also the story of many children still experiencing persecution and displacement inside Burma. He suggests a collective exposure to atrocities, but also a collective response not to succumb to its disempowering qualities. These pieces of cultural expression (voices) from the borderlands tell many stories about the lives and political motivations of displaced Karen. They offer insights into individual and collective narratives with a recurring theme of shared experiences of persecution and displacement. The very presence of these voices also tells us something of the uniqueness of the borderlands. Where activism in relation to persecution has intersected with particular mechanisms of social power – international networking, new technologies and political consciousness – new networks of solidarity have been able to form that enable, broaden and strengthen the capacity of a Karen political voice that is specific to the borderlands space. These networks of solidarity also become an important conduit for the projection of a political narrative based on shared experiences of displacement and persecution, and a sense of belonging to a common community. The presence and importance of these practices over the last decade or so has changed the way in which a Karen political voice is projected outwards to an external audience, developing a form of activism that is more powerful, but also driven by a more informal political power. This informal political power develops because of a more fluid, heterogeneous and contested approach to the borderlands space that is characterised by practices of activism, networks of solidarity and processes cultural recovery. These form the dominant modes of social practice of displaced Karen in the bor-

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derlands, practices that sit in tension with the operations of the nation-state, which has tended to treat the borderlands space with a more homogeneous political authority that is framed by the narrative of a modern territorial domain. The nature of this tension is an integral characteristic of the space and, as such, critically informs many of the activities that occur there.

Notes  1. At the 2007 Conservative Party Conference, Zoya Phan pleaded for international action to help the people of Burma. She recounted the ongoing killing in Karen State as well as the use of violence against monks during the Saffron Revolution. Her speech can be viewed at: ‘Burma: Zoya Phan at the Conservative Party Conference 2007’, Burma Campaign UK, 12 October 2007, h p:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=WW4fd8pUblM (retrieved 29 November 2019).  2. For coverage of this UN General Assembly session, see a posting by Washington File United Nations Correspondent J Aita, ‘Laura Bush Highlights Burma Crisis in UN Roundtable Discussion’, US Department of State, 20 September 2006, https://reliefweb.int/report/myanmar/laura-bush-highlights-burmacrisis-un-roundtable-discussion (retrieved 20 January 2020).  3. The international community’s responses have been largely contained to strong statements. For example, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning the ‘ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya’ (see K. Gypson, ‘US House Passes Resolution “Condemning Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya”’, VOA, 6 December 2017, h ps://www.voanews.com/a/us-house-rohingyaresolution/4152898.html [retrieved 29 November 2019]) and Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, stated that Myanmar forces ‘may’ be guilty of genocide against the Rohingya (see S. Nebehay, ‘Myanmar Forces May Be Guilty of Genocide against Rhongya, UN Says’, Reuters, 5 December 2017, h ps://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-myanmarrohingya-un/myanmar-forces-may-be-guilty-of-genocide-against-rohingyau-n-says-idUKKBN1DZ152 [retrieved 29 November 2019]). At the time of writing, the persecution of the Rohingya is ongoing. Recent reports estimate over 670,000 Rohingya have fled Burma to Bangladesh since August 2017, bringing the total in the camps in Bangladesh to more than 900,000. They tell horrific accounts of rape, murder, looting and large-scale destruction of their villages and property. The UN has declared the Rohingya the ‘most persecuted people in the world’. (Further accounts of these atrocities can be found in reports put out by HRW, the UN and Amnesty International, among others.)  4. Expressions of concern regarding rape and other forms of sexual violence consistently appear in the Resolutions of the UN General Assembly. In 2003, following the release of the License to Rape report, the 58th session of the UN General Assembly specifically called on the Government of Myanmar: ‘To

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immediately facilitate and cooperate fully with the proposed investigation by the Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on the situation of human rights in Myanmar into charges of rape and other abuse of civilians carried out by members of the armed forces in Shan and other states, including unhindered access to the region, and to guarantee the safety of those cooperating with and covered by the investigation.’ The resolution can be accessed here: h ps://www.un.org/en/ga/58/ (retrieved 20 January 2020). For an example of the SPDC’s response to the License to Rape report, see ‘Briefing Paper on the Human Rights Situation in Burma Year 2003–2004’, presented to the 60th Session of the UN Human Rights Commission, h ps:// www.burmalibrary.org/docs/BriefingPaper-UNCHR2004.pdf (retrieved 19 January 2020). The KarenRefugee blog was at its most active in 2007 and 2008. It has remained largely static since 2009, most likely due to the impact of the rese lement programme. The blog can be viewed at: h p://karenrefugee.livejournal. com (retrieved 29 November 2019). The video clip can be viewed at ‘The Story of an IDP’, YouTube, 18 April 2007, h p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0a97qOnrRU (retrieved 29 November 2019). Comments on ‘fate’ and ‘God’s will’ are found in the interviews of many displaced people in the conflict zones. For examples, see the video footage produced by Burma Issues and the KHRG. All efforts to gain copyright permissions have been made; any inquiries should be directed to the publisher.

5  ‘Symbolic Anchors of Community’ Processes of Cultural Recovery I was born in a refugee camp in a foreign land I was told that a small bamboo house is my home A life confined by barbed wire is not my home A living fed by others is not my home A life without dignity is not my home Freedom and equality is what I want To uphold my beautiful home —Saw Ba, extract from ‘I Dream of Home’

Nyi Nyi and I sit in a room in Mae Sot, Thailand. We are four kilometres from the Thailand–Burma border. We watch a television screen, which is showing video footage of Karen villagers in Nyaunyglebin District of Karen State. Nyi Nyi watches as some of the men assemble a klo’, the traditional Karen drum. They bless it with rice whisky and call on the spirits to protect them. With a number of deep vibrations, they begin a traditional Karen hta. Nyi Nyi expresses surprise at seeing the klo’ played. He has heard about the klo’, he says, but he has never seen one or heard one played before. ‘I know the story of it from learning about it at school and from the old people but I’ve never seen it for myself’, he states. And then

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more quietly: ‘I feel proud to hear my people still playing this traditional instrument.’ Nyi Nyi arrived at the border when he was young – he is uncertain how old, but probably around five or six. He stayed in the Thai community for a few months and then moved to Huay Kaloke refugee camp. He said he was about nine or ten before he realised he was in a refugee camp. He played with his friends. They would fish with crude sticks and make animals from bamboo leaves. They would draw in the dirt, scratching chickens or men with guns. It seemed that he was doing normal kid things. It did not occur to him that he was in an entirely different country or that he was now a refugee. This was a slow awakening. The older he got, the more he started to listen to the stories being told around him, of killings, beatings, forced portering, rape and the destruction of whole villages – and then later still, the realisation that this was his story and these were his people. Nyi Nyi was too young to remember what it was like to live inside Burma; instead, these stories of suffering became his memories. Nyi Nyi is distanced from his homeland by both the fixed geographical certainty of the national border and the uncertainty created by his displacement to Thailand. An outcome of this displacement is that he is forced to develop new ways of connecting to and representing both his homeland and his cultural identity. The borderlands facilitates this process through the recovery of a Karen cultural identity, characterised by a selective recovery of cultural icons and origin myths that reinforce the idea of a Karen nation, and framed by the shared experiences of displacement and persecution. This cultural recovery most commonly occurs through three significant processes that are made possible by the nature of the borderlands space, and these form the framework of this chapter. The first process is the public projection of ‘remembered places’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 11) that act as a ‘symbolic anchor’ from which a homeland and collective cultural identity can be constructed and projected. Displaced Karen in the borderlands use this public projection of memory to provide a linear continuity to a Karen cultural identity that is currently under threat from destruction and upheaval. These ‘remembered places’ act as a beacon around which the Karen can mobilise and in turn strengthen and project a version of the identity under threat. The second process is where cultural practices are re-established on the Thai side of the border through a process of cultural reification. The nature of these cultural practices changes in line with experiences of forced displacement and exposure to elements of cultural exchange and adaptation conditioned by the borderlands. As a result, cultural practices are reified in a learnt environment rather than through the everyday (as would presumably be the case for those still inside Burma). In addition, a

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fear of loss of ethnic identity and the resulting need to preserve and protect the associated culture has seen selected cultural identifiers li ed out of the everyday and used to reinforce the notion of a Karen nation around which displaced Karen can mobilise. The third process is where displaced Karen pursue a form of cultural recovery by imagining a vision of the future. These imaginings prioritise a connection, both physically and metaphorically, to a Karen homeland. Due to the circumstances of displacement, this vision of the future occurs at a largely abstract level that gives credence to a shared Karen narrative and ultimately a Karen identity. This process of cultural recovery is specific to the borderlands space, namely because it is enabled by key features of the space: a population with shared experiences of persecution and displacement that have led to heightened a ention paid to cultural identifiers; access to resources that have helped shape and disseminate a cultural narrative that forms the basis of a Karen identity; a certain level of security that allows the practice and projection of ethnic culture to occur without fear of retribution; and a close geographical proximity that allows the flow of cultural activities across the Thailand–Burma border. For these reasons, the processes of cultural recovery that are occurring in the borderlands are distinct from a Karen cultural identity that could be found inside Burma or among the greater Karen diaspora, for example.

Memory: The Public Projection of ‘Remembered Places’ In refugee and diaspora literature, remembered places are o en constructed with the idea of what Gupta and Ferguson call ‘symbolic anchors of community for dispersed people’ (1992: 11).¹ In this sense, the constructions served by memory act as a beacon around which the chaos and destruction of displacement is replaced by familiar elements of cultural identity or community. Displaced Karen in the borderlands use a public projection of memory to provide a linear continuity to a Karen cultural identity that is currently under threat from disruption and upheaval. This requires an expanded vision of Gupta and Ferguson’s concept of ‘remembered places’, for it necessarily takes into account the range of elements that constitute that place – culture, ethnic symbolism, tradition, identity, myths and history, to name but a few. In this expanded vision, the process of ‘remembering place’ takes individual experiences and projects them as collective memories, which in turn act as a beacon around which the Karen can mobilise and then project a version of the identity under threat. During a trip to the borderlands in 2005, I had the opportunity to focus on the artwork produced by many of the displaced Karen I was inter-

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viewing. These mostly constituted subjective representations of Karen culture and identity. These artworks made an important contribution to my own observations and arguments on how a Karen cultural identity is constructed, practised and projected in the borderlands. One possible way of handling these artworks is to see them as important subjective constructs of a Karen cultural identity and ultimately a Karen nation. As such, they can be viewed, and subsequently analysed, as a powerful response to Burmese military persecution and the threat of cultural obsolescence. A common theme running through these pieces of art is the tendency to idealise the past by depicting the Karen homeland through a romanticised lens, a position that was in direct contrast to the current reality of conflict and militarisation in Karen State. An example of this can be found in the song ‘I Love You My Kawthoolei’,² wri en by U Kyi. The song comes from a trip he made to Karen State where he found himself on top of a mountain with a view of his Karen State (Kawthoolei), which, for a brief moment, seemed to defy all knowledge of the death and destruction that existed below the tree line: The green pastures The mountains, the rivers and the streams In the valleys the birds are singing And the flowers bloom in vibrant colours Beauty and wealth are in you And bring me perfect bliss When the sun sets And I look upon my Karen land There is only happiness I have to stay away from you While others take you over And your beauty becomes fields of death My blood and my sweat I sacrifice for you I give you my life And stay true to you my Kawthoolei I will fight for my return my Kawthoolei As many lives have been sacrificed for you We have exchanged our blood and sweat for your return There will come a day my Kawthoolei When we will meet again to enjoy our life The land of Taw Meh Pah We will not give to others We will struggle for the return Of our Kawthoolei (‘I Love You My Kawthoolei’, song wri en and translated by U Kyi)

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In this song U Kyi invokes a romanticised depiction of the landscape. He freezes this depiction in a time where birds sing in the valley and flowers bloom in vibrant colours, and there is a sense of bliss that invades him as he looks over a place that is obviously dear to him. Yet he immediately juxtaposes this with imagery that acknowledges the destruction of this beauty: fields of death, and the blood and sweat sacrificed as others take it over. The loss associated with the romanticised beauty of the place is heightened by the brutality in which it is being destroyed. U Kyi acknowledges the immediacy of this moment – its temporal, aspirational nature – it is a time and an image that no longer exists outside of his song. But perhaps most interesting is the way in which he correlates this moment with the motivation for what he does and writes. The systematic destruction of his Karen homeland defines the struggle projected from the Thailand–Burma borderlands. The romanticised beauty of what is being destroyed only intensifies the urgency of that struggle. I interviewed a Karen woman, Naw Mu, who had recently arrived at the Thailand–Burma border and showed a similar tendency in her writing. She described her village by saying there is ‘no village like my village’ and that it always ‘comforts me and brings me pleasure [to think of it]’. Her experiences inside Karen State and her journey to the border compelled her to write a poem, her first ever, about her village back in Burma: My beautiful village that I love the most Is the village that I was born You look very lovely by the evergreen mountain The stream is flowing down Carrying with it a beautiful sound Beside my village there is a night flower It spreads a fragrant smell The village that I grew up in Is such a beautiful village Even though I am far away from you I remember you always Not only in my time But from my forefathers’ time With all my sincerity I hope you will always be permanent (‘My Beautiful Village’, poem wri en by Naw Mu, translated by Sala Kyi)

Naw Mu also uses idyllic and unique language to depict her homeland. She shows that the memory of her home stays with her and informs her current thinking. She mentions the presence of historical and cultural connections to her village, acknowledging that what she talks of in her poem is something bigger than just her: ‘Not only in my time / But from

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my forefathers’ time.’ She employs a particular use of time, linking her time and her ancestors’ time to arrive at an understanding of what constitutes home, in this instance her village. While not explicitly stated, the implication is that her village’s historical continuity is under threat. A poignant reminder of this is appears the last line of the poem: ‘I hope you will always be permanent.’ U Kyi also creates a temporal frame around his message in ‘I Love You My Kawthoolei’. He begins in the past, a land untarnished in its beauty, then moves to the present, where that same land is ravaged by conflict, and then back to the past as he invokes the historical myth of Taw Meh Pah and the Karen’s claim over the land. While the romanticised depiction of home is frozen in a time where things were seen to be peaceful and beautiful, the conceptual idea of home moves between times. In ‘I Love You My Kawthoolei’, home is something that transverses time and the song’s movement through time works to both solidify Karen claims over Kawthoolei and delegitimise the actions of those who only exist in the present, ‘those trying to take it over’. In both these pieces of art, home is a more abstract presence in a larger historical order, moving it beyond the idea of home as a material object alone. Such heightened levels of loss and chaos incur a yearning for things that are stable and familiar, an a empt to relink the historical continuity that has been ruptured in the displacement. When interviewed about the song ‘I Love You My Kawthoolei’, U Kyi said he remembers his home where he could play football, travel freely, and hunt and fish. He can no longer do these things, yet he yearns for the time when he could. In a subsequent interview he said: I compare the situation in the past and now. In the past our land is full of natural resources and animals. Traditionally Karen people go hunting, but now you cannot do this anymore because of landmines, fighting, soldiers, the situation of our country is poorer, poorer, poorer. So some day we wish to see our land as before.

U Kyi a empts to draw a line between his memory of home in the past, through its present destruction and to the day he can see his home as it was before. War and conflict have disrupted the continuity of this trajectory, destabilising his perception of the world he knows. Memory – and the utilisation of memory in general – is a way to dispel the sense of disruption caused by the displacement. Instead, he holds on to a picture of home that is familiar, that gives purpose and meaning to his memory, but that also a ributes responsibility for its current destruction. In this sense, the remembered place is a powerful tool for protecting and preserving what is under threat of being lost.

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While both the song and the poem offer individual interpretations of lived experience, they also present a number of commonalities that suggest the existence of a collective narrative that is characterised by a sense of violence, loss and displacement. Both artworks use the device of romanticised depiction, while at the same time juxtaposing it with the brutal realities of loss and displacement. Both are constructs of current realities intermingled with references to historical events and past suffering. Both employ time as a device to represent the meaning of home and the significance of its destruction. Both artworks address a greater external audience as well as providing a sense of collective identity as a nation. U Kyi does this by evoking the homeland of the Karen nationalist struggle, Kawthoolei – the spiritual home of all Karen people, while Naw Mu does this by drawing an historical line to the time of her forefathers, illustrating a sense of ownership and community a ached to the land she speaks of. Both artworks are also aimed at a more localised Karen audience that is familiar with their experiences. This is evident in the fact that both songs were originally wri en in S’gaw Karen. The content of the songs also suggests they were wri en for an audience with a particular empathy or understanding of its message. The loss of land and its association with home is a feeling familiar to many displaced Karen, and references to cultural myths and ancestral continuity suggest familiarity with a common historical narrative. By singling out these cultural symbolisms of land and myth, and consequently using them to represent a common Karen understanding of home, both these pieces of art reinforce the idea of a collective narrative of Karen displacement and ultimately a Karen nation and identity. Taken at a big-picture level, there is much that can be ascertained from this presentation of a collective experience and its articulation into a collective narrative. There is evidence to suggest that displaced Karen in the borderlands construct a Karen history through the selective recovery of historical cultural myths and traditions that emphasise a unique ethnic identity. Many Karen activists infuse their cultural expression with references to such myths, employing mythical figures and symbols supposedly unique to Karen culture and asserting these as key ethnic identifiers. These ethnic identifiers differentiate the Karen from the dominant culture, in this case the culture claimed by the Burmese military. These ethnic identifiers, woven into the telling of mythohistories, may include references to unique language, kinship and religious practices, elements that are o en used as indicators of a national ethnic culture, although they are certainly not the only ones (Eriksen 1993). Social anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen sees ethnic symbolisms as ‘crucial for the maintenance of ethnic identity through periods

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of change’ (Eriksen 1993: 68). Not only does it reassure the threatened culture of an ‘ethnic belongingness’, it also provides for a continuity and authenticity of history and culture that may have been undermined by the upheaval caused by their displacement (Eriksen 1993). The key to Eriksen’s observation is the assumption of a pre-existing ethnic homogeneity, something to revert back to. However, it would be too simple to suggest the Karen had or have a pre-existing ethnic homogeneity. Existing studies (Cheesman 2002; Rajah 2002; South 2007; Thawnghmung 2008) question the assumption of a pan-Karen identity based on a shared material culture, suggesting instead that assumptions of a nationalist identity are in defiance of the differences in cultural, religious and lingual identification. One way of working through this discrepancy is to look at how displaced Karen recover certain elements of ethnic symbolism to portray a national ethnic culture, moving the debate away from the authenticity of a preexisting homogeneity and towards the construction of cultural identity. This cultural recovery works to sustain a collective memory and contributes to the development or construction of the notion of a Karen nation. At the same time, that Karen nation is being used for political mobilisation. To mobilise requires shared interests and, for displaced Karen in the borderlands, these shared interests include cultural constructs around people, myths and places that are used to establish what I argue is perceived as a collective Karen identity. There are a number of examples in the cultural expression of displaced Karen in the borderlands that can support such a claim. In the song ‘I Love You My Kawthoolei’, U Kyi talks of Karen State as the land of Taw Meh Pah, o en considered one of the Karen’s greatest mythical heroes. Taw Meh Pah’s story can vary depending on who tells it, but essentially the myth’s power lies in the belief that Taw Meh Pah is the Karen’s ancestral father and the presumption that all Karen share this common descent.3 The o -repeated story sees Taw Meh Pah leading his people from the ‘River of Flowing Sand’ (generally believed to be the Gobi Desert) to Burma, where they se led. This myth provides the Karen with a story of origin and, at the same time, an ancestral line that connects the Karen today with the Karen of the past. Many Karen have used this myth to claim that this ancestry places them as the original inhabitants of Burma (Saw Aung Hla 2000 [1939]), although most historians a ribute this position to the Mon (Falla 1991: 13). However, the myth serves the purpose of distinguishing the Karen as a distinct race from the Burmans and provides what Mikael Gravers calls ‘the genealogical foundation of a common Karen national identity despite religious and cultural differences’ (1998: 253). For Karen leaders, and in particular the KNU nationalist movement, the myth also works as a form of validation of the KNU as the representative of the

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Karen, as the leader and protector of a collective Karen unity and community. Of course, mythohistories like Taw Meh Pah must be looked at as a cultural construct rather than a factual certainty. Much has been wri en that disputes the validity of the events and locations that make up the myth (Rajah 2002), suggesting that there is li le historical evidence to support it. However, mythohistories do serve an important purpose. In the face of what may seem like the debilitating reality of persecution, the recreation of mythohistories acts as an anchor for displaced communities as they reformulate their history and traditions, reinforcing a common ancestral rooting and cultural identity. It shows a consciousness of Karen heritage, history and ethnic identifiers being part of a larger historical order. In many respects, it can be seen as evidence of ‘being in the world’, an important concept for cultures who feel under threat. It also provides legitimisation and therefore significance in the practice of culture and identity. This continuity with a past, epitomised by the placement of ethnic identity as present in a vast historic order, provides a sense of stability and order to what is otherwise a time of great upheaval for a Karen cultural identity. The retelling of foundational myths is one way in which threatened cultures can retain this historical continuity. A myth that appears across the different Karen religions and ethnicities is that of the Golden Book, although each may tell a slightly different version. Interestingly, it has sustained cultural relevance over a substantial historical period.⁴ The version related here was told by a S’gaw Karen person and is based on a book by Thara Htoo Hla E. The simplest version of this story is that God (Y’wa) bestowed gi s upon three brothers, the Karen, the Burman and the White Brother. The Karen brother receives the Golden Book, the book of wisdom, but he leaves it in his field one day and the White Brother takes it. The White Brother uses the Golden Book to bring wisdom to the Western world and the Karen are le languishing as they await the return of their Golden Book.⁵ The Karen o en interpret this story in different ways. Some use it to explain why the Karen have suffered throughout history as a result of their failure to protect the Golden Book from the White Brother, and that they would continue to suffer until the White Brother returned with the book. In his article ‘Ariya and the Golden Book’, Theodore Stern talks about interpretations of the myth that view the return of the White Brother as the dawn of a new era of Karen nationhood, where centuries of subjugation to Burmese and Mon kings would be replaced by a Karen king and the elevation of the Karen race (Stern 1968: 304). In this sense, the myth contains beliefs that Karen suffering is part of a larger divine order that one day will be eradicated by the return of Y’wa and the Golden

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Book. It also evokes strong political aspirations for a Karen nation, where the downtrodden will rise up and rule their own land. This myth is then interpreted through a number of events across Karen history. When American Baptist missionaries entered Karen State in the 1800s, bringing with them their bibles, it seemed feasible that this could be the White Brother returning with the Golden Book. The inference is that the missionaries were successful in converting many of the Karen to Christianity because the Karen believed the Bible was their long-lost book of wisdom (Falla 1991; Gravers 2007; Hinton 1983). There are other more contemporary versions. One is that leaders of the Karen resistance evoke the myth to justify the moral obligation of the White Brother to provide weapons to their armed movement (Stern 1968: 313). Another interpretation of the story was told to me by Saw Ba and involves the refugee camps. In this depiction, Western NGOs (the White Brother) look a er the Karen in the refugee camps because they are indebted to the Karen for stealing their Golden Book in the first place. Rather than being viewed as victims, this version allows the Karen to see their current predicament as the repayment of a debt. Of course, these recountings of the myth are highly questionable, not least because the wri en documentation of these stories relies on the translations of the Baptist missionaries who were likely entrenching their own agendas in interpreting the stories (Falla 1991: 231). The origins of such myths are undoubtedly important, particularly if we are to understand the purpose behind their construction. But of most interest to me is the way in which these myths are interpreted and used in the context of a borderlands se ing, and what part this plays in the construction of a political Karen identity. By remodelling mythohistories to suit the contemporary se ing, the Karen are taking historical-mythical accounts and ensuring a continuity of culture and identity across considerable historical platforms, from the first arrival of the Karen in Burma to the contemporary se ing in the refugee camps on the Thailand–Burma border. In doing so, the Karen are a empting to establish the idea of a Karen nation around which they can form a common point of identification and that in turn is used as a point of mobilisation for the threatened Karen culture. Another common representation of a Karen ethnic culture can be found in the drawings of many displaced Karen in the borderlands. Here, ethnic identifiers such as dress, music, employment and religious practices are reinforced through their presentation in visual mediums. Nyi Nyi spoke of why he felt compelled to draw the Karen culture: I always draw pictures of our culture, like our traditional instruments. That way I can explain this is Karen, this is what our culture looks like. We are

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one of the big ethnic groups in Burma, we have a great culture and our culture can be recognised as a group of people.

Po Hsan, a Karen artist who had been working along the Thailand–Burma border for a number of years, expressed a similar sentiment: I would draw my culture; sometimes I would draw our New Year’s celebrations, sometimes our traditional dance, the dohne. I wanted to describe our ethnic culture, how we dance, what we wear, things like that. Culture is important for ethnic groups.

Both these artists speak of their ethnic Karen culture as something that needs to be preserved and recognised. Po Hsan commonly draws the hse (Karen dress) and the ta’na (Karen harp), elements of Karen culture that can identify a person’s Karen identity. Drawing them reminds people of who they are and what makes them distinct. For displaced Karen in the borderlands, it serves an additional purpose: projecting remembered objects and places to document what is under threat of being lost. What both artists are speaking of typically falls into Eriksen’s observation of ‘ethnic belongingness’ in periods of change, the need to show a continuity of ethnic distinction that can be traced throughout history. ‘Remembered places’ are of course created through retrospection, with a tendency towards selective, subjective recovery, and this can make their legitimacy questionable. These elements will always make what is told open to historical dispute (which is in itself a legitimate concern), but rather than debating the historical accuracy of these ‘remembered places’, this book is more concerned with how a remembered culture is articulated and used in the formation of a Karen identity in the borderlands. Under these circumstances, I argue that the public projection of a shared remembered culture develops a cultural narrative that sits at the core of a projected Karen identity in the borderlands. This process of projected memory in effect constitutes an imagined connection to a place that is no longer inhabited, including embodying the cultural identifiers a ached to that place. Because it is no longer inhabited, displaced Karen retain that connection through a pa ern of reification, where cultural practices are re-established in a learnt environment, in a space that is not considered ‘home’. In the following section I look at how this process of reification works.

Re-establishing Cultural Practices: Processes of Cultural Reification Re-establishing cultural practices in times of displacement and disruption is o en defined by complex, interlocked factors that reorientate conceptualisations of home. This occurs on the Thai side of the border through a

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process of cultural reification, and these cultural practices change in line with experiences of forced displacement and exposure to elements of cultural exchange and adaptation conditioned by the borderlands. This process of cultural reification illustrates a key component in the recovery of a Karen identity: a heightened preoccupation with cultural identifiers that are li ed out and learnt in terms of establishing a collective Karen identity. There are two key distinctions that frame the nature of this cultural reification in the borderlands. The first is that cultural practices in the borderlands are largely reified in a learnt environment rather than being seen as part of the everyday. This is further complicated as traditional roles of cultural practice, preservation and custodianship become ambiguous in the displacement. As I will show, this is evident in the perception of roles between those who remain inside Burma and those who reside on the Thai side of the border. The second distinction is that a fear of loss of ethnic identity, and the resulting need to preserve and protect that culture, has seen selective cultural identifiers li ed out of the everyday and used to reinforce the notion of a Karen nation around which displaced Karen can mobilise. Unpacking all these elements is necessary to understand what role cultural practices play in times of displacement and how they have helped to develop a collective Karen narrative. Many Karen in the borderlands have not seen their ‘home’ for up to twenty years. Many children under the age of fi een are likely to be born in Thailand or the refugee camps. Many of the older Karen I spoke with expressed their concern over the loss of culture and identity, especially regarding Karen youth. Their comments indicated a fear of losing important practices that identify or establish the uniqueness of the Karen as a distinct ethnic group. Such a concern can be seen in a story relayed to me by Zaw Kyi. He told me that he asked his six-year-old sister if she would one day like to help the Karen people. She had replied to him by saying: ‘Who are the Karen?’ He told me his sister was born and bought up in the refugee camp and had li le knowledge of the Karen struggle. It is possible that she was still too young to fully grasp the history and significance of being Karen, but for this Karen man, the story was used to express his concern about how the Karen culture was at risk of being lost. Long-term incarceration in the refugee camps, and therefore removal from typical community pa erns, has motivated Karen authorities in the borderlands to provide alternative opportunities for learning Karen culture. A typical example is that cultural practices are now studied in a learnt environment, most commonly the schools in the refugee camps. This creates a reification of cultural practice where the intention is to ensure that culture is preserved and the practice of it is not lost. This is evident in the way in which Karen history and language form part of the

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school curriculum in the refugee camps. Another example can be found in Mae La Refugee Camp, where in 2005 a group called Le Geh were teaching what is considered by some to be the traditional Karen script (Le Saw Wei). Le Geh also taught traditional animist religious practices and traditional Karen music, including learning the Karen harp (ta’na). Refugee camp commi ees have also facilitated the practice of traditional Karen dances and ceremonies such as the dohne (traditional Karen dance) and da thee bli (string dance). The greater Karen community in the borderlands also continue to practise Karen New Year’s and Karen Revolution Day celebrations. Other traditional ceremonies have also been adapted to the new context. Nyi Nyi told me that the traditional Karen wrist-tying ceremony, lakhao knaing dju, has now become an annual celebration in the camps. Traditionally the ceremony occurs in August each year, at the end of the rice-planting season when families would return home and celebrate being together again. In the absence of this traditional se ing, many Karen along the border have forged a new version of the ceremony. He told me that because most people cannot go back to Burma and be with their families, they join together with the camp family instead, facilitating a new sense of Karen community and family. A number of academics have talked of the Karen nationalist influence over this event, including the use of Karen cultural and ethnic identifiers in the ceremonies and Karen nationalist imagery such as the KNU flag and a unified Karen nation (Rajah 2002; Rangkla 2014). These types of events tend to emphasise Karen origin stories and unity, adapted and reified for the contemporary se ing. For those in the borderlands, seeing cultural practices in traditional settings becomes an anomaly, and this is where the Karen still living inside Burma play an important role in maintaining cultural practices. Nyi Nyi’s story at the beginning of this chapter is an example of where institutionalised learning of cultural practices occurs. Nyi Nyi has learnt about the klo’ (drum), but he has never seen it outside of a picture and he has never heard it played. In the video footage, Nyi Nyi not only sees the klo’ played, but also experiences the traditional ceremony required before such a revered instrument can be used. He is seeing it played in a traditional setting, but he is viewing it through a detached lens, or the schism of the border. He can see it, but he cannot participate in it. He can know it, but he cannot practise it. It may be that Nyi Nyi believes he is missing important cultural learning unless he can participate in these traditional practices. For many displaced Karen in the borderlands, Karen people who remain inside Burma o en take on the role of cultural custodians. There are interrelated complexities evident in this statement and these are addressed shortly; however, there is first some benefit in looking at where this role as custodian might occur. During my fieldwork, I was told of a group of

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Monypwa (an ethnic subgroup of the Karen) numbering about 3,000 who managed to continue to practise their traditional cultural ceremonies. This includes orcheeobwa, an annual animist food festival, and spirit ceremonies practised with traditional musical instruments such as the klo’, moe (gong) and paw ku (xylophone). I was told by Nyi Nyi that the Monypwa were extremely protective of their culture and practised it very strictly. This includes participating in spirit ceremonies for protection and prosperity, and excommunication if you marry outside the group. I watched video footage of an interview with the Monypwa elders. They were asked what they saw as the threats to their traditional practices. They replied that Burmese troops were a threat. When asked how they could resist the Burmese troops, they answered that they couldn’t; they could only flee and return once the troops had le . They told the interviewer they had already been relocated a number of times, but they always returned because they needed their chicken, pigs and land to fulfil their traditional practices.⁶ Despite Burmese military threats and great disruption in their lives, these Monypwa continued to return to their land to practise their cultural traditions, arguably a form of resistance in itself, even if the Monypwa do not articulate it as such. When the Karen interviewer pointed out that the villagers’ return to their homes and their continued practice of cultural traditions is a form of resistance against the Burmese military, one of the old villagers repeated that they were unable to do anything against the Burmese military. While the Karen interviewer saw this as an act of resistance, it was not necessarily seen or articulated as such by those involved in the act. However, this incident does reinforce a point made by James C Sco : [T]he ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so forth. These Brechtian forms of class struggle have certain features in common. They require li le or no coordination or planning; they o en represent a form of individual self-help; and they typically avoid any direct symbolic confrontation with authority or with elite norms. To understand these commonplace forms of resistance is to understand what much of the peasantry does ‘between revolts’ to defend its interests as best it can. (1985: 29)

My argument that Monypwa actions be seen as a form of resistance confers with Sco ’s sense of false compliance: the Monypwa appear to relocate to Burmese military bases, only to return time and time again in defiance of these orders. Karen I spoke with in the borderlands viewed the Monypwa as custodians of Karen cultural practices, in ways they themselves were unable to fill because of their displacement to the borderlands. But the Monypwa face significant threats to their continued

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role as cultural custodians and this implies a more complicated reality to the roles of those inside and outside Karen State. One such perceived threat is the increased penetration of Western culture into traditional Karen communities. One Karen person I interviewed said that trading, even in the more remote areas, has meant that many Karen villagers have been exposed to Western clothing, food, so drink and even pornography CDs. For many villagers, this is their first significant contact with a world outside their village. Even the Monypwa community mentioned above has had its numbers reduced by conversions to Christianity and relocations to Burmese Army bases that disrupt traditional practices. The Burmese Army’s policy of ethnic unification also means that many points of ethnic distinction are assimilated or eradicated – for example, important ethnic distinguishers like language and history cannot be taught in Burma’s government-run schools. What these examples show is that in the case of Burma, being in an environment of perceived traditional cultural practice is not always conducive to their continued practice or retention. And herein lies the somewhat paradoxical dichotomy of Karen cultural practice and custodianship. For while Karen people inside Burma may be perceived as the keepers of cultural practices, it is the Karen in the borderlands who have largely taken responsibility for documenting and preserving these cultural practices. This illustrates an important division embodied by the border. Inside Burma, cultural practices are conducted in traditional se ings, but at great personal cost to those participating in them, to the point where security o en overshadows the importance of what they are achieving. In contrast, in the borderlands culture is reconstructed and practised in a new se ing, a se ing the Karen mostly tolerate but do not necessarily embrace and that is deemed a temporary substitute for how life should be lived and culture practised. But interestingly, it is also a se ing where greater personal security means that traditional cultural practices can be learnt and practised in relative safety, and where education opportunities have taught many Karen of the importance of preservation to threatened cultures and the skills needed to achieve that preservation. Po Khai, a Karen man I interviewed and who possesses an angelic singing voice, writes music with this idea of preservation in mind: I try to use the Karen words. I want to remember. Because some of our Karen friends, like me, when we speak we copy some Burmese words and some English words. When I visited my nephew I saw some children and other groups of people who grew up in the SPDC area. They don’t know about the suffering from the past. I would like to ask this of the next generation to come. Do we forget our suffering that we suffered in the past and the fact that our enemy is trying to lose our culture in the world.

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A common story I have heard from different Karen people in the borderlands is how the Burmese military a empts to destroy their culture. In our interview, Po Khai said that the SPDC claim that: ‘In the future if you want to see Karen culture you will have to go to the museum.’ For Po Khai and many other Karen artists in the borderlands, this concern feeds its way into their art. They are practising and preserving what they know and what they have experienced for future generations. Aspects of the borderlands enable this preservation to take place. Access to technology means that websites now document Karen dress, music, dance, literature and storytelling. Musicians and artists incorporate Karen language and Karen stories into their artwork. Education curriculums in the camps teach Karen history and culture. Not only has education and technology provided a means of preserving Karen culture, it has done so for contemporary times, turning it into transferable and easily digestible formats – for example, over the internet or in an album of music. At the core of these activities are a empts to ensure the Karen ethnicity is a living culture, not something that can only be found in a museum, and that Karen culture is something to be preserved, not lost. The borderlands space brings a further complexity to this dynamic of cultural reification. While the borderlands space in many ways facilitates cultural preservation and reification, it also provides opportunities for cultural change and adaptation that pose a challenge to Karen a empts to preserve and practise their culture. While adaptation and change are accepted norms of cultural identification and practice (Appadurai 2005; Geertz 1976), this does not discount the fear and resistance that o en comes with that change. An example of this can be found in the rese lement programme that began in earnest in the borderlands in 2004. It has arguably created the largest upheaval in the practice of a Karen cultural identity since the initial large-scale refugee exoduses of the early 1980s. The rese lement programme was a point of great discussion among people I interviewed in the mid-2000s. At that time, the programme was still in its infancy and a lot of uncertainty surrounded its implementation, let alone the possible impact upon a Karen cultural identity. Many Karen interviewed at the time expressed concerns around the negative impact of rese lement on the Karen culture. Comments ranged from concerns about cross-cultural marriages in third countries to fears the Karen culture would be lost through domination by a much more powerful Western culture. The theme emanating from most people’s comments was that the rese lement programme had a feeling of permanency, of immediate and unavoidable change with long-term ramifications. Many expressed the belief that by staying in the borderlands, they had the best possible chance

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of lessening the disruption and of retaining their Karen identity and connection to their homeland. But concerns about a disappearing culture, particularly in the face of Western assimilation, have been evident in the borderlands for some time. Many Karen I interviewed expressed concerns over interracial marriages, which are discouraged despite their increasing visibility. Others spoke of social problems such as domestic violence and drug and alcohol use, which they associated with Western influences. These concerns underlay their resistance to the rese lement programme and are also present as social commentary in some of the cultural expression I witnessed in the borderlands. This social commentary can be seen in the ‘Hsaw Pa Kaw’ cartoon where Hsaw Pa Kaw comments to his friend who is about to leave for rese lement: ‘You look like them, I worry you will forget us’ (see Figure 4.2 in Chapter 4). By embracing Western dress and moving far from her cultural origins, Hsaw Pa Kaw is implying that his friend will forget her people, her culture and her identity, to be replaced instead by a myriad of Western influences. These intersecting relationships around cultural preservation and cultural change bring heightened a ention to the necessity to define what Karen is and means. This has resulted in a layering of cultural practice in the borderlands, where culture continues to be ‘lived’, but in a form that tends towards a nationalist construct. This is the result of a significant shi in the way in which culture is learnt and ultimately practised. Rather than being seen as part of the everyday (as it would for those inside Burma), cultural symbols are li ed out of the everyday and given defining categorisations around national identity. This can be seen in the way in which the traditional woven hse (two narrow strips of woven cloth sewn together to form a loose-fi ing garment) is considered Karen national dress. The klo’ and kweh (a horn usually made from an elephant’s tusk or a buffalo’s horn) are sacred instruments associated with intense patriotism and romanticisation; an affirmation of their revered status is that they are symbols on the Karen national flag. A Karen history of martyrs and revolutionary heroes, including the leadership and ultimate ambush of the KNU’s founder Saw Ba U Kyi, is taught in the schools in the refugee camps. A portrait of Saw Ba U Kyi, and other leaders such as Aung San Suu Kyi and Bo Mya, will o en line the walls of Karen houses in the borderlands. These national symbols are reified through the formal learnt environment and are a ributed meaning and purpose in ways that li cultural practice in the borderlands out of the realm of the everyday and into a constructed nationalist paradigm. While this process remains a largely subjective construct of a Karen nation, it does hold real ramifications for

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displaced Karen, who not only believe that a Karen nation exists, but that it is also something worth struggling for.

Deterritorialised? Cosmopolitan or Global Karen Identity At this point it is worth examining an associated process of cultural reification that is occurring in the growing Karen diaspora. In particular, I am thinking about the larger Karen community/communities rese led in third countries who bring new knowledge to these debates around cultural identity and practice. As more Karen, particularly from the refugee camps, are rese led to third countries such as the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe, Karen identity, and in particular its practice, increasingly takes on more mobile and diverse characteristics. Mikael Gravers has referred to this growing diaspora as constituting a ‘pan-Karen global and cosmopolitan identity’ (2007: 250). There are some particularities to a cosmopolitan identity that both resonate with and defy the practices of those in the borderlands. A cosmopolitan identity promises an opportunity to address generational, diversity and global context gaps in the current ethnonationalist identity that tends to the dominate the borderlands. It is able to accommodate transnational connections that have the potential to both strengthen Karen nationalism and diversify the movement beyond a purely ethnonationalist form. It is at the crux of these tensions that cultural identity becomes both adaptable and reified. A cosmopolitan identity also presents a growing body of peoples who have no shared territory and a decreasing interest in a claim to territory. The growing Karen diaspora, global in outlook and dispersion, is less inclined to see Karen identity as irrevocably linked to a Karen homeland. However, to be clear, this cosmopolitan Karen identity constitutes only a small proportion of Karen people and experiences. The majority of displaced Karen retain an outlook framed by the refugee camps and the experience of persecution and displacement. This is certainly the case for those residing in the borderlands. Yet what is evident here is that nonterritorial movements are beginning to emerge as territory-based movements are weakening (Lee 2012). In other words, as the territory-based ethnonationalist movement of the KNU loses power, other more globally focused forms of Karen community and identity are forming, particularly around reconciliation, peace, opportunity and civic engagement. Traditional concepts of communities based on individuals in close proximity who share religious, cultural and social values are replaced by transnational communities whose membership can be as geographically broad as it is narrowed by advances in

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global communications and connections. This phenomenon as it relates to Karen identity in the borderlands is worthy of examination. While the territorial boundary is o en present in the practices of the Karen diaspora, it is not integral to the actual formation of a Karen cosmopolitan identity. Governments-in-exile are a striking example of assumed political authority with no territorial sovereignty. Such an environment allows for the construction of new homes and homelands that do not necessarily have a territorial base. A sovereign territory of their own may be an aim, particularly for exiled or diaspora communities, but a homeland and a national identity can be formed and practised without it. This absence of home can motivate the mobile to invent a home ‘through memories of, and claims on, places that they can or will no longer corporeally inhabit’ (Malkki 1992: 24). Here, Lisa Malkki is suggesting that the construction of home manifests itself in some sort of genealogical or metaphysical sense rather than the physicalness of a discontinuous line. Benedict Anderson argues a similar sentiment by suggesting that through global processes, a type of community can form with no shared territorial or physical presence needed at all (1991: 188). Malkki in particular argues that you can identify with people and practices in which you currently share no common territorial boundary; that you can maintain allegiances and identify with a homeland, while at the same residing in, but not necessarily assimilating into, a new country (Malkki 1992). Essentially, you can share in a community that has no great expectation of ever meeting face to face, yet that shares a common identity, culture and national narrative. In contrast to the early migration pa erns of the nineteenth century, migrants and refugees in the contemporary era are increasingly able to maintain the cultural ties they identify with, despite entering new cultural zones (Malkki 1992; Rosaldo 1993). This is evident in the practices of cultural reification located in the borderlands, but also in the way in which cultural activities such as the wrist-tying ceremony are increasingly utilised in Karen diaspora communities (MacLachlan 2012; Rangkla 2014). The challenge for these diaspora communities is to not replicate the divisions that have dogged Karen identity for decades; this includes religious divides between Buddhist and Christian Karen but can also include gender and age inequalities and fears over cultural ownership. There is concern that these divisions continue in transnational se ings (Gravers 2007: 250; MacLachlan 2012: 466), suggesting that power norms are difficult to shi . For displaced Karen, we begin to see a familiar but slightly contradictory pa ern emerging. Despite displacement, the Karen maintain strong cultural ties to their Karen identity and in many instances even a heightened connection to it; an internalisation of identity if you like. At the same

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time, this identity is undergoing transformations related to outwardlooking or external forces, partly because of the exposure to ideas and influences associated with access to global networks and partly because of the shared experience of persecution and displacement that has framed the experiences of displaced Karen. Identity is therefore embedded in the idea of home (which is no longer physically inhabited, but certainly part of a political imagining) as well as transformations occurring in the context of the borderlands and the larger global context. While these two things seem to sit in tension with each other, for displaced Karen they are in fact coexistent. They represent the nature of Karen identity that forms in the borderlands as well as other transnational spaces, where synergies in terms of flows of information and resources, as well as maintaining connections to culture, identity and family, are emergent. Lisa Malkki conceptualises this phenomenon in terms of border crossing. She suggests that border crossers are active agents in transforming the political and cultural systems they inhabit. Rather than the loss of identity and agency o en associated with displacement, she suggests that territorial displacement effects a transformation in culture and identity consciousness (Malkki 1995: 208). This is a view also adopted by Donnan and Wilson: Culture and identity, like class-consciousness and class relations, do not appear among the people who make the crossing. They simply change: they change within their home communities because of the loss entailed in their going as well as within the new political and economic context in which they find themselves, and they change in the communities who are now host to the border crossers. (1999: 114)

The importance of Donnan and Wilson’s position is that by arguing for a process of change or transformation, they acknowledge the interaction between the practices of the ‘old’ country with the influences of the ‘new’ community. This is evident in the fact that refugees in camps along the Thailand–Burma border maintain a close geographical proximity to ‘home’, but are also subjected to legal and political regulations that determine their assimilation into Thailand, if this were to be considered. I asked Loo Ne if it was easier to maintain his Karen identity by staying in the borderlands. He responded: Yes. It’s closer to your original community even though you are living in the border. At least in Thailand you also have Karen community with the same background, history and culture that you can learn. In the camp, when you live together you have the opportunity to organise and maintain your culture, more than if you are living separately in different countries. I think it’s really hard.

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Both the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ play an important role in the transformation of the refugee experience and the projection of a Karen identity from the borderlands space. While empowering, this tension between ‘old’ and ‘new’ is also unse ling for many Karen. This transformation of identity is a response to changing circumstances, displacement but also emplacement to new contexts. New contexts bring new influences, and this can be seen as a threat to the survival of a Karen cultural identity. A number of Karen in the borderlands framed their reluctance to pursue rese lement around these concerns. Saw Ba stated: When I see it at the moment, many Karen le to the third country and they stay in the Karen communities and they celebrate Karen New Year’s and Karen traditional wrist-tying, so I think they maintain their identity. In Australia they open the Karen school, they learn their own language. But like some people say, this generation is fine, but maybe in the future, future, future. I don’t know, if we are strong, if we have people to organise us, but I don’t know. Because you stay in the capitalism country. It’s difficult right. You have to care about work and money. But here you don’t care about money so much, you care about your community. But when you stay there it is difficult to care about your community, you forget about your family, you have to go and look for a job. It’s different, there’s something changing, just in one generation.

Saw Ba identifies a key concern particular to the cosmopolitan identity: the influence of external factors, such as those derived from capitalism, that threaten some of the core values of Karen identity – an emphasis on the individual rather than the community, a preoccupation with upward economic and social mobility at the expense of seeking justice. As Saw Ba himself concludes, ‘culture is always changing but the real thing is how to maintain your spirituality, what’s inside, to respect your culture and your parents’. For many Karen, finding that balance is not always evident. Retaining a static cultural identity, which is meant to strengthen and unify the Karen, becomes a safer option. Change, external influences, can become something to be feared. This fear can just as likely lie in the capitalist influences of Western countries as in the homogenising forces of the Burmese military. The continued practice of a cultural identity is a key concern for displaced Karen. Many saw their identity and culture under threat from the militarisation that led to their displacement, as well as cultural domination from external factors such as Western influences in the borderlands. The initial displacement o en disrupts familiar cultural pa erns, but even when cultural practices are re-established, the nature of displacement forces these practices into new, more complex forms. This occurs in instances of cultural exchange and adaptation as well as in the changing

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relationship between Karen inside Burma and Karen in the borderlands. Traditional cultural roles change, as does the cultural content, which in the Thailand–Burma borderlands shows evidence of becoming more political in intent. This is both a response to the threat of political domination by the Burmans and to reinforce political messages particular to the circumstances of displaced Karen in the borderlands.

Imagining ‘Home’ In addition to the public projection of memory and a process of cultural reification, displaced Karen also pursue a form of cultural recovery by imagining a vision of the future that prioritises a connection, both physically and metaphorically, to a Karen homeland. This process uses the memory of place and culture to construct a vision of the future. Due to the circumstances of displacement, this vision of the future also occurs at a largely abstract level that gives credence to a shared Karen narrative and ultimately a Karen identity. These imaginings are crucial because they embody the process of ‘making’ place and culture through the recovery of a Karen cultural identity, as well as acting as a conduit for the projection of that identity. Displaced Karen approach this imagining through a framework of retrospection of the past as well as critical awareness of the current realities they face. This duality frames what I believe is a search for meaning; the Karen are looking to understand their own experiences by placing these in a broader social and political context. From this perspective, the way in which displaced Karen imagine their future is contingent upon their experiences in the past. For example, these imaginings o en project a world free from the constraints of suffering and persecution, while at the same time are a construct based on displaced Karen experiences of the loss associated with that persecution. Anthropologist James Clifford calls this the living of ‘loss and hope as a defining tension’ (1994: 312). In other words, the nature of displacement forces many Karen in the borderlands into a daily confrontation with loss, while at the same time hope – of return or a resolution to their predicament – o en defines the constructs evident in their imagined vision of the future. For Karen in the borderlands, the process of imagining incorporates the presentation of possibility and a vision of the future, but also an awareness of the subjugation and persecution that has led to their current circumstances. Displaced Karen build upon these past experiences in an a empt to create an alternate vision for the future.

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Moo, a Karen woman from Tham Hin refugee camp narrated her story using imagery that illustrates a powerful vision of her future that fuses the past with the present: Looking back I would say my life is like this. I would go and stand in the shade of a tree near my home that I le in Burma. This tree, the insects had eaten the inside of it out and worms gorged themselves on the leaves. If I stay under this tree then the shit of the worms would drop on me and eventually the branches will fall off and hit me. So I have to leave the shade of this tree. If I go back I want to stand in the shade of a tree that provides coolness and it should be a tree that we plant ourselves.

The metaphors she uses here help us understand the threads of her life that motivate these imaginings. Central to the picture Moo paints is the vulnerability of what is typically portrayed as a sign of strength and growth, the tree, rooted in the ground from which its life source comes. She highlights its susceptibility to rot when infested with parasites, the insects being representative of the Burmese military’s slow destruction of the Burmese land and its people. Her use of the word ‘gorge’ to describe the parasites’ feeding frenzy suggests that the extravagant ‘fa ening’ of the military is at the expense of its people and natural resources, while her use of the words ‘shade’ and ‘coolness’ to describe her imagined future sit in stark contrast to more heated metaphors that could be used to describe the death and destruction that has shaped her experiences inside Burma. In this metaphor, where heat burns, shade soothes. The narrative has a visually powerful retrospection of the past; Moo’s life has been the slow ro ing and final destruction of her home. She realises this is not a condition in which she can remain and survive. This retrospection allows her to construct a vision of the future; in that vision, her home is strong, protective and cool, and it is a home that she makes herself. The memory of her past experience is significant in the construction of her future vision, and this is a fairly typical theme running through much of the cultural expression witnessed during my time in the borderlands. Even when research participants called for a focus on the future rather than the past, their imaginings were rarely free of the remembered past. Another participant, Naw Kyi Mu, spoke about a song she had wri en: There was this world conflict and the conflict in Burma and I wanted to think about how we could live together peacefully. I don’t want our young people to just have hatred and revenge. You know if someone kills my parents and then I kill theirs, the hatred will never end. I don’t mean we should forget about our history but that we should find a positive way forward.

The song was wri en in response to a time of great upheaval. The September 11 a acks in the US were fresh in her mind and Burma had reached

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its tenth year since the results of the democratic election had been denied. The song was wri en as a response to Burma’s internal conflict, but also to greater global upheaval – it is very much a product of past events. But for this Karen woman, there is also concern regarding the disempowering aspects of hatred and revenge associated with past injustices. As a result, her final comment is one of peace and pursuing a way forward, a mixture of practical action and imagined possibilities. A common theme running through the imaginings of displaced Karen in the borderlands is the idea of returning to their home. It can be found in the comments of Nyi Nyi, who told me that the Karen hope to live one day in their own land, but it also o en permeates to a much deeper level in the songs and poems of displaced Karen. Saw Ba later sent me a poem he had wri en about his life. He called it ‘I Dream of Home’. The poem begins with a dream of what his home should be. He then juxtaposes this with three segments that represent different periods in his life: internally displaced person; refugee; and migrant worker. He finishes with a plea for them all to be treated as human beings and finally he repeats his dream of home, only now he talks of our home: I Dream of Home I Dream of Home I want to go Home I have dreamed of it for so long Home will be filled with love freedom and equality Home will provide me with protection, security and love At my home I won’t worry about hunger and my crying and suffering will fade away I will see the smile of the bright sun and the sun’s rays will bring me peace Everybody will be happy At my home We will celebrate Peace with true justice Internally Displaced Person I was born in the jungle People say that I am homeless But I have hope to have a home Where I won’t flee like wild animals My meal is not Klee Ti When the killings, rape and destruction of my paddy field I couldn’t see with my eyes When apprehension and tragedy Fear and tears were gone This is my home

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Refugee I was born in refugee camp – a foreign land I was told that a small bamboo house is my home A life confined by barbed wire is not my home A living fed by others is not my home A life without dignity is not my home Freedom and equality is what I want To uphold my beautiful home Migrant Worker I wasn’t born in my parents’ homeland I am told that my home is everywhere But I am not recognized as a legal person with a legal document Always afraid of Thai police and moving my cloth-tent I want to return to my native land My home is not here where exploitation and corruption occur Not where deception and human trafficking happen There is neither slave nor master at my home, but everything is equal We are a human being We are the three people from different places, but have one dream We are the three people with different lives, but have one suffering We, the three people who don’t want Hate, oppression, domination, discrimination, segregation Envy, corruption, killing, war, rape and torture We need a HOME Our home will be filled with love freedom and equality Our home will provide us with protection, security and love We will see the smile of the bright sun and the sun’s rays will bring me peace Everybody will be happy At our home We will celebrate Peace with true justice We want to go home … We want to go home … We want to go home … (‘I Dream of Home’, poem wri en and translated by Saw Ba)

This poem has multiple layers to it, many of which have already been discussed in this book. It paints a romanticised picture of home – a place of bright sun, celebration and love. It juxtaposes the brutality of the past with hope for the future – suffering, killing and hunger replaced by happiness, peace and justice. In another sense it is a call to action – to work to bring equality, peace and justice back to a land that has been denied these things for so long. It places the situation of the Karen into a global context – the

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internally displaced person, the refugee and the migrant worker are all human beings and part of a larger global community. And finally it is a plea to return, to be rid of the hate, oppression, war and torture, and to be back in the place that is Saw Ba’s home. But one of the most interesting techniques used in this poem can be found in the three segments that represent stages in Saw Ba’s life. In these stanzas he makes a very strong statement about what ‘home’ means. As an IDP, he is told he is ‘homeless’, as a refugee that his home is a ‘bamboo house’, and as a migrant worker that his home is ‘everywhere’, but not in his homeland. Yet he lists all the reasons why these are not his home and rejects their claims upon him. Instead, he offers his own vision of home, one that is full of love, has freedom and equality, and where people are protected and secure. Rather than accept the interpretations of home imposed on him by others, he imagines his own home and it is a mixture of what he remembers it to be (free from hunger and suffering), what he has learnt from his time in the borderlands (that it should incorporate peace and justice) and ultimately what he imagines it will be (a place of freedom and equality). This kind of imagining connects Saw Ba to his home; it also allows him to articulate his own vision of home rather than someone else’s. He is retrospective of past events, he finds meaning in them to be er articulate his current circumstances, but he also uses that critical understanding to construct his vision of home in the future. Used in this way, the imaginings of displaced Karen in the borderlands can find the positive ways forward that Naw Kyi Mu talked about in her earlier comments. While I have argued that the imaginings of many displaced Karen in the borderlands are linked to past events, there are instances where imaginings reconstruct an imagined return that is not based on past memories. Naw Kyi Mu spoke of this when describing her songwriting: Writing as a person who had lived most of their life along the border my songs are o en about returning to my homeland. Not about going back to what we had, because many of us don’t remember Burma anymore or were born in the refugee camps, but imagining what we will return to in the future.

For many Karen wanting to return home, the image is one of an imagined future, not necessarily what they remember their home to be like in the past. The reality for many Karen in the borderlands is that home is a distant memory at best, but more likely a learnt one. What therefore awaits a population whose claim to the land is one riddled with uncertainty? U Kyi has also given considerable thought to this concern: Actually I talk with many families from the camp and they want to go back to their home. But as for their children they want to go back but they don’t

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know exactly where their land is. Maybe they will learn about their land from the school, but it is difficult. So now they face the problem where when they came here they were only one person, they married and had children and now there are many more people. It is difficult for them to compare to before and what they will go back to. I think this is also one of the problems. But I think that if we have peace in our land, maybe, no not maybe, I think we have many, many spare places for our people.

U Kyi’s last comment highlights a serious concern for any vision of the future. Underlying the desire to return is a need to establish how this might occur and what it might result in. There are many factors that might hinder this process and, again, a predominant consideration in U Kyi’s comment is time. The longer Karen stay in the borderlands, the more difficult it is to remember, or imagine, what their home might be, and the more complicated the social unit becomes as more and more people become integral to the process of what that imagined return might be. In this instance, time is problematic; its ramifications are felt in current realities and in turn can tarnish future action. While not reading too much into U Kyi’s hesitation over the word ‘maybe’, it is indicative of the uncertainty that characterises life in the borderlands. It is an uncertainty steeped in the unknown future, the illegal status most Karen obtain in the borderlands and the unsustainable existence of being a refugee, IDP or illegal migrant. This uncertainty o en finds its way into the cultural expression of those involved in this study and is an important indication of the complexities involved in any imagining of the future. The word ‘maybe’ also implies an understanding of the tensions that can occur when places imagined at a distance must become lived spaces (Gupta and Ferguson 1992). While imagining that occurs at a distance provides useful insights into theoretical considerations of imagined communities (used to mean something broader than Benedict Anderson’s (1991) interpretation) and spatial understandings, it does add a level of complexity to any practical implementation of that vision. At a distance, many of the pieces of cultural expression discussed in this thesis imagine a Karen homeland of beauty and wealth. But any future return will need to account for, among other things, the loss of land to the military or subsequent inhabitants, as well as the effects of militarisation such as landmines, agrarian deterioration and the destruction of natural resources. These are complex practical concerns not o en dealt with in the imagining. These references to land are one of the most common themes found in Karen imaginings of the future and indicate the importance of land in Karen conceptualisations of cultural identity. The importance of land lies in its spiritual role – it is at the centre of many traditional cultural ceremonies, as well as its agrarian role, and it provides essential food and em-

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ployment for many communities and individuals. But land is also central to the struggle for nationhood. It represents both a physical location that is being fought over and an ideological conceptualisation of Karen culture and identity. This means that land is talked about in terms that frame a key subsidiary argument of this book; it is both a fixed geographical place (territory) and a space that is a ributed cultural meaning and identity. Some of those I interviewed talked about a specific piece of land to which they would return or of the effects of militarisation and the struggle to control pieces of land. The notion of land in these instances falls into typical state understandings of ownership and control over territory. For others, land was home, and represented the peace and justice they were fighting for. In these instances, land conceptualises meaning and identification; it epitomises the struggle and represents the end goal. In a way, these imaginings are a conversation with the past and the future that happens to take place in the present. The examples used above show that for displaced Karen in the borderlands, retrospective views of the past form a vision for their future. Michael Fischer calls this the modern version of the Pythagorean arts of memory: ‘retrospection to gain a vision for the future’ (1986: 198). This retrospection is a search for meaning, to understand the totality of experiences in the broader social and political context. Its vision for the future is in turn both a critique of domination and a celebration of possibility, and it is here that Karen imaginings of the future can provide powerful antidotes to the despair and destruction o en inherent in current realities. As displaced Karen in the borderlands negotiate the difficult terms dictated by their displacement and consequent emplacement in the borderlands, a itudes to home and cultural identity change. This chapter has argued that the nature of the borderlands facilitates the recovery of a Karen cultural identity, largely conducted through the processes of remembering place, cultural reification and imagining a future ‘home’. In turn, this cultural recovery develops a Karen cultural narrative, made up of reclaimed cultural icons and origin myths that reinforce the idea of a Karen nation, and that are framed by the experience of persecution and displacement. This cultural narrative becomes a significant part of a Karen identity that is projected from the borderlands space, in that it provides a sense of a cultural heritage around which displaced Karen can identify and mobilise. What is increasingly apparent is that this Karen identity projected from the borderlands is a complex construct mapped across the social practices of displaced Karen and tied to a performative dimension of Karen identity. Notably, this has included the notion that the borderlands space gives rise to key modes of social practice that can account for the activities of

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displaced Karen as they negotiate their experience of displacement and persecution. These social practices include a process of cultural recovery that reinforce a shared Karen cultural narrative based on the notion of a Karen nation and a pan-Karen identity, and a political identity framed by a shared narrative of displacement and persecution. In addition, a close geographical proximity and connection to a Karen ‘homeland’, and political agency, developed in response to the institutionalised status accorded to displaced Karen in the borderlands, highlight the range of social, political and cultural factors that impact the construction and projection of a Karen identity in the borderlands.

Notes  1. The phrase ‘symbolic anchors of community’ comes from Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson’s article ‘Beyond “Culture”’, where they state that: ‘remembered places have o en served as symbolic anchors of community for dispersed people’ (1992: 11). I use this phrase throughout the chapter and in the chapter title, as a way of understanding the role of memory in the narratives of displaced Karen, but also more broadly as a metaphor for any imaginative reconstruction that leads to collective representations.  2. Kawthoolei is used here to reference Karen State.  3. Other Karenic ethnicities such as the Pwo and Karenni, as well as animist sects such as the Leke and Telakhon, have their own slightly different versions. The following is a shortened version of the myth taken from a S’gaw Karen account. Due to an expanding family, or in some versions persecution, Taw Meh Pah led his family away from their home in Mongolia in search of richer lands. Upon reaching Karen State, he left his family and went on ahead to find the path. His track was obscured and the Karen remained in the area waiting for his return. For further versions of the Taw Meh Pah myth, see Falla (1991); Gravers (1998); and Rajah (2002).  4. Stern (1968) provides a pivotal account of the different interpretations that constitute the history to this myth.  5. This particular version comes from The Golden Book by Thara Htoo Hla E, published by the Karen Baptist Convention in 1955. Other versions range from a dog stealing the book to the book being burnt in the paddy fields. However, the outcome is generally the same: the Karen lose their wisdom through their own foolishness. Other versions and interpretations of the Golden Book story and the conversions of the Baptist missionaries can be found in Falla (1991).  6. Video footage courtesy of Burma Issues, translated by Nyi Nyi, Mae Sot, 15 October 2005.

 Conclusion The Space Between In 2005 I went to visit friends near Kanchanaburi. It was a fairly nondescript concrete house down a quiet street – it was of course meant to be like that. In a corner of the front room was an old chair and an old table. Pa’doh was almost always at this table, rifling through loose papers. Some were old and worn, their edges burnt a light brown and curled towards the reader, fingerprints smudged into the greasy lines of the paper. A pair of glasses would hug his nose, the surfaces smudged with finger imprints. They would slip south in the heat or would be flung carelessly across the beloved papers. Pa’doh pored over these papers with devotion, a dedication to the details. He shaped the words in the confines of his mouth, installing them in a part of his brain where they would be tended, nourished. When he spoke, it was to recount a story; there was always some story waiting to be told. When he wrote, it was with a scratching rhythm as the pencil made its way across the paper. His words became sentences, which became stories, which became life. Words were a lifeline for Pa’doh, a reason; they made sense in a landscape where sense was o en hard to find. He would at times study the Karen characters of stories for his newspaper, interceptions from military radios, instructions from KNU ba alions and interviews with those who had been displaced by the conflict. At times he would study the English characters of papers to get the information he needed, or dictionaries and encyclopaedias, which were o en the source of the general knowledge he was legendary for. But when I visited in 2005, the space was empty. The words seemed to hover forlornly above the now desolate desk. The papers were gone, the voice silent. Or so it seemed. For a long time I felt that Pa’doh’s being gone was a loss, a gaping hole in the work that still needed to be done in the

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borderlands. I was told vague, contradictory stories about where he was: he was in a village on the border, or back inside Burma, he might be back next week. He had spent his life fighting for his people, for their freedom. He was tired, he needed a break. This seemed the least likely explanation, but who was I to judge? I wondered if this was the fate of activism in borderlands spaces. As socially constructed and constantly evolving, it harboured transitory populations. But in a conflict as long as that in Burma, even those who stayed for the long haul must eventually have an end. These borderlands actors made great impacts, but it also felt that in their absence, they le gaping holes. In my first naive musings on this phenomenon, I determined that these actors o en took their knowledge and skills with them; those le behind would need to start from the beginning, or at least from a muchreduced starting position. I do not want to minimise this impact – it is very real – but this position tends to privilege the individual rather than the collective. Pa’doh le behind an important legacy. There was the practical legacy, like his contributions to journalism and documenting the atrocities occurring to his people. There was also a mentoring one, a young group of Karen journalists who continue his work on new media platforms that Pa’doh would not have conceived of ten years ago. But there was also something a li le more abstract – the small part Pa’doh played in the historical trajectory of Karen activism against their persecution. Pa’doh’s story, and his contribution, is one of many that constitute the social practices and relations that form the fabric of the borderlands and that give the space its meaning. In their collective form, they build the story of the borderlands, but not a traditional narrative with a defined ending. The story of the borderlands is a living one. Pa’doh made his contribution, as do the many others who appear in this book and as will others who journey through the borderlands in the future. This living cosmos is, in part, the uniqueness of the borderlands space, and what this book ultimately argues for. The Thailand–Burma borderlands has changed significantly since I first began working there. For many years, change was largely determined by the ebbs and flows of Burmese military operations that displaced the Karen, both internally and across the border into Thailand. And while these factors still remain, there are new external forces also at play, global processes over which the Karen have li le control, despite being their intended beneficiary. The first is the growing emphasis on resolving the refugee problem through rese lement and repatriation programmes, the impacts of which are yet to be fully realised. Doubtless they will be significant. Since it began in 2004, the rese lement programme has placed around 100,000 refugees in third countries. As of 2020, almost 100,000

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remain in the refugee camps. Numbers have certainly dwindled, but they are also replenished by the ongoing conflict inside Burma and births in the camps. The rese lement programme has decimated the camp populations, not so much in terms of numbers, but in terms of the skills it has removed. Rese lement countries have strict criteria, and they target the young and educated. Like Pa’doh, the loss is felt keenly; skills need to be regenerated. In the meantime, refugees become ever more dependent on outside forces to fill the gaps. Many of the Karen interviewed in this book have benefited from the rese lement programme, establishing new lives in the United States, Australia, Norway and the United Kingdom. Others, like Saw Ba and U Kyi, have chosen to stay in the borderlands. Neither option is the preferred one. So far there have been a handful of repatriations of refugee populations back to Burma, totalling fewer than 300 people. Progress is slow and the uptake minimal. There are obvious reasons for this. Considerable concerns remain about this programme, particularly from the refugees themselves. Many I spoke with said they would return only if their safety was guaranteed, and this seems unlikely given the current situation of ongoing conflict in some areas and the high risk of resumption of fighting in other areas. There are also concerns about returning to land that has been heavily militarised, through undetonated landmines and other weaponry. There is as yet no comprehensive removal programme, leaving large tracts of Karen State as high risk for human habitation. Other refugees expressed concerns about land and property rights. What would the refugees be returning to, given the large-scale destruction of land and property, lack of identification papers that could prove property ownership and lack of compensation procedures? One could also question the Burmese government’s capacity to provide the necessary infrastructure for the return of such a large number of refugees – health and education services, housing, and employment and livelihood prospects are lacking generally, let alone for a large, vulnerable returning population. Another largely unexplored area of concern is the pervasive distrust refugees have of the Burmese government. Any form of voluntary return will need to deal with this thorny issue. Refugees have refused to participate in the official repatriation programme because they do not want to be identifiable to the Burmese government. They remember a long history of being targeted because of their ethnicity and they worry that their status as a refugee in Thailand might make them a target for abuse by the Burmese government. They have spent their lives evading the Burmese military, disappearing into the jungle like ephemeral ghosts; why would they now draw a ention to themselves?

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Discussions with Karen along the border in 2018 also suggest concerns about the Burmese Army outposts that have been established close to Karen villages. Villagers are concerned about their safety and their ability to access their farmlands. Many suggested they did not trust this highly visible, threatening presence. A report by the Karen Human Rights Group in 2016 described Karen women’s concerns with the proximity of armed soldiers in areas of Karen State, and in particular their fears about the increased risk of gender-based violence.¹ Understandably, there is ongoing distrust of the very institution that is seen as the perpetrator of their persecution. It is not an easy task to heal these wounds or bridge these divides. This situation is unlikely to change without targeted interventions that can address this issue of distrust. A further impact is the increasing withdrawal of international NGOs in the borderlands towards working inside Burma. The impact of this change of focus is already being felt in the borderlands. Many NGOs have expressed concerns about securing ongoing funding, while others have clearly stated that the funds have already stopped or will stop completely. Others have followed the funding inside and have re-established their work there. Where sanctions and international political pressure had previously constrained many NGOs from working inside Burma, Burma’s tentative political reforms are now seen as a reason to support work inside. The removal of funds from the border area will certainly have a significant impact. Key refugee and displaced persons support services have already been withdrawn, but with the diminishing presence of the humanitarian aid apparatus, we are also likely to see a significant reformulation of the borderlands space, perhaps one that will see it return to a more grassroots-driven directive. In addition to these programmes, a larger global process affecting the borderlands is Burma’s transition to democracy. The 2010 general election promised renewal; freedom from decades of military rule in Burma and a transition to democratic governance. The 2015 general election seemed to solidify this promise, bringing Aung San Suu Kyi into a key leadership role as State Counsellor of Myanmar (Aung San Suu Kyi and her party the NLD had boyco ed the 2010 election). Many have treated these events warily and rightly so, for Burma has a long and painful history not only of not fulfilling its obligations when it comes to its own citizens, but also in terms of meeting the demands of an international community eager for reform. Many of the initial concessions were relatively pain-free for the new government. The longer-term picture is a more disheartening one. The Burmese government is complicit in the large-scale killings of the Rohingya and the destruction of Rohingya villages. Since 2017, there are estimates of nearly 700,000 Rohingya displaced to Bangladesh, more than

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10,000 killed and over 280 Rohingya villages burnt or destroyed. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has declared that these acts ‘may’ constitute acts of genocide.² There have been a number of high-profile international responses to these claims. In November 2019 the International Criminal Court (ICC) authorised an investigation into alleged crimes against the Rohingya, and in December 2019 Aung San Suu Kyi testified before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), where Burma is facing charges of genocide commi ed against the Rohingya. There are also reports of ongoing Burmese military a acks in parts of Karen State,³ as well as the targeting of activists such as the killing of high-profile Karen environmental activist Saw O Moo, reportedly linked to his activism on the Hat Gyi hydroelectric dam project on the Salween River in Karen State.4 Saw O Moo’s death highlights some of the problematic outcomes for international investment in development projects. Projects like the Hat Gyi dam, which is funded by the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand, expose a number of human rights concerns. Construction of the dam has seen the forced displacement of Karen communities, many of whom have ended up in the refugee camps in Thailand. The increased military presence in the area in order to secure the site has led to claims of human rights violations against local communities, including forced portering and killings. There are also concerns over the environmental impact on this ecologically sensitive area, impacts that are likely to have catastrophic consequences for endangered species and the livelihoods of local communities. These acts and many others highlight the ongoing persecution that the Karen and other ethnic groups in Burma face. While such activities continue, it is likely that refugee flows into neighbouring countries will remain to some degree an impediment to Burma’s political reforms process, as well as to the long-term integration of its ethnic populations. These are just some of the more immediate global processes impacting the borderlands space. There are others too of course, like how Burma will manage an open economic market and increased international investment in its border areas, how it will develop critical infrastructure like roads, transport, health and education, and how it will approach ongoing political reform, particularly when it comes to democratic institutions, ethnic unrest and ethnic representation in governance structures. As these issues unfold, and in many ways with a focus that is state-centric, the modes of social practice occurring in the borderlands should be seen as an important contribution to political belonging, agitating as they do for be er recognition of the needs of those the state has both physically and metaphorically pushed to the margins.

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It almost seems redundant to state that the borderlands will continue to change, but then that is exactly the argument that this book makes. Borderlands, made up of intersecting social relations, by their very nature changeable, contestable and fluid, are always in a state of perpetual construction. Even the notion of a hardened homogeneous territorial domain is subject to the variable decisions and operations of the nation-state and other border agents. These changes may occur depending on political will, diplomatic relations, global processes and practicalities, among other things. This book provides a snapshot of the Thailand–Burma borderlands, a moment in time, but also from a particular political and social perspective. It shows how the confluence of a range of factors (political, social, cultural and historical) have created a distinct space in which displaced Karen can contest the structures of governance, articulate their political self, and construct an identity based on a narrative of persecution and displacement. In this sense, the borderlands is a spatial entity that will always make and be made by the agents and relationships that constitute the space. The dynamic of the social practices and relationships discussed in this book will likely continue, though their form may change. Displaced Karen and other border agents will continue to contest the state structures and institutional governance a ached to the national border, particularly as it continues to suppress their agency and isolate them from those same state structures. As I have argued throughout this book, these conflicting uses of the space both sit in tension and intensify each other, a situation that reflects the fact that neither agent (the nation-state or the displaced Karen) has absolute control over the space and that both are a empting to articulate their own narrative of the space. In this sense, the Karen will continue to engage in social practices and relationships that give meaning and a practical ethos to the space. These social practices are evidence of a set of social relations that can be mapped across the borderlands domain. At times they interact with other processes such as the operations of the nation-state, political agency, global processes and political contestation. These interactions and connections provide definition and substance to the ever-evolving borderlands space. The content of these social practices is likely to alter as new priorities and realities emerge. The form of identity I discuss in this book is susceptible to further adaptations, particularly as diaspora and hybrid identities gain more traction as a result of rese lement and migration. The nature of the repatriation programme is also likely to impact the kind of Karen identity and activism that is projected from the borderlands space, particularly in terms of the development of pathways to back inside Burma. New technologies continue to develop and change the way in which displaced

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Karen engage with global audiences and their own identity and narrative. The uptake in social media platforms, both at an individual level and an organisational level, ensures that Karen voices can produce their own messages and project them both to a large international audience and inward to a localised Karen audience. This is an important example of networks of solidarity being formed where activist practises intersect with forms of social power. The conflict and persecution that have caused many Karen to flee to the Thailand–Burma borderlands remain. Were it to ease or even eventually cease, other causes of mobility are likely to replace it, such as economic migration and displacement due to large-scale development projects like the Hat Gyi hydroelectric dam mentioned earlier. Despite these changes – in fact, because of it – the study of the borderlands space will remain relevant in the future. My emphasis in this book has been on the agency of displaced Karen as they engage with their persecution and displacement and their forced emplacement in a borderlands space. It is an intended position, one that treats refugees and displaced persons as dynamic actors rather than passive victims. Too o en when we talk of refugees and displaced persons, we use inactive terms – we emphasise their despair, their victimisation and their dependency on external support. But the interviews and stories recited throughout this book prove the opposite. The Karen have suffered persecution and displacement over many decades. Rather than being seen as purely victims of these sets of circumstance, displaced Karen have utilised the mechanisms of the borderlands space to engage with their marginalisation, contesting and reconstructing the existing socio-political structures to ensure a more adequate representation and response to their political needs. Displaced Karen do this by actively engaging with their persecution – naming it, articulating it in their own words and documenting it in order to raise awareness. They actively pursue resolutions to the conflict, holding the perpetrators to account and demanding genuine and proportionate responses. They challenge the limitations placed upon them, refusing to accept their confinement in refugee camps, or the label of ‘refugee’, seeing these as obstacles to their eventual return to Burma (something many of those in the borderlands express a wish for) and as unrepresentative of their active struggle to address their persecution and displacement. They push back against these structures of oppression, intended or otherwise, and in doing so they engage with both the empowering and limiting aspects of the space. The result is that displaced Karen are active participants in their own political narrative of both marginalisation and agency, and the borderlands space has both enabled and enriched the strength and reach of that narrative. This is clearly an important dynamic that links

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the social practices of displaced Karen to the borderlands space in which they operate, and the Karen political self to a process of interchange that occurs across the nation-state border. The space in which this operates is important and distinct. Like most socio-political spaces, it is also complex. The Thailand–Burma border represents the mechanisms of the state – it is a manifestation of state sovereignty, a visible representation of the operations that contain, control and define membership of the state, intensifying the border as a form of political authority. The border binds the homogenised narrative of the state. Yet while the nation-state may a empt to enforce this concept of the modern territorial domain, I would suggest that the operations of the nation-state are unable to achieve this with any form of totality. In fact, conversely, I have shown the o en complex and contentious practices that a hardened, homogenised approach to the border must necessarily and eventually accommodate. At some point, the operations of the nation-state must accept that the modern territorial domain also exhibits fluidity that is needed in order to accommodate what might be seen as aberrations to this a empt to contain and control – for example, activities encompassing illegal trade and informal population movement across the national border, as well as policies that cater to noncitizens such as refugees, international students and spousal visas. In both a conceptual and a pragmatic sense, the Thailand–Burma border therefore lends itself to the notion of borderlands, a space that transgresses the national border; a space that is formed by a set of social relations defined by an interchange that occurs across the national border. The actions of displaced Karen show the regular and evolving nature of these transgressions, from connections made through cultural exchange, to the use of new media to connect and engage with a range of political agents globally, to irregular pa erns of population movement across the border, to name but a few examples covered in this book. Rather than being constrained by the homogeneous operations of the modern territorial domain, displaced Karen apply qualities that are relational, fluid and dynamic to the space. Through these practices, they convey a lived understanding of the borderlands that sits in tension with the modern territorial domain. As we continue to engage with the idea of spatial constructs and the social relations that give them their meaning, it seems pertinent to maintain the study of borderlands spaces as central to these debates. Rather than looking at borderlands from the point of marginality, or as sites of border policing of nation-states, or as a fixed line delineating the homogeneous nation-state, this book has proposed that we look at it as a site of discursive construction, housing practices that highlight how relations reach

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out across the space – intersecting, connecting and multiplying in their articulation of an alternative political belonging. The book’s contribution therefore lies in developing our understanding of borderlands spaces, how displaced Karen live in the space and how they engage with the state structures that a empt to govern the space. Displaced Karen are already living this space as a construct that is far beyond the current political imagination of the state and, in doing so, they are drawing us to think in a different way about the connections between sociality, spatiality and identity.

Notes 1. KHRG (2016). 2. See ‘UN: Myanmar May Be Guilty of Genocide against Rohingya’, Al Jazeera, 6 December 2017, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/12/myanmarguilty-genocide-rohingya-171205101012505.html (retrieved 29 November 2019). 3. There was a Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement between the Burmese government and the KNU in 2015 (as well as other ethnic armed groups). However, fighting continues to occur in parts of Karen State. See, for example, ‘Thousands of People Have Been “Displaced by Fighting” in Eastern Burma’, TIME, 13 October 2016, http://time.com/4529150/burma-fighting-hat-gyi-damkaren-kayin-myanmar (retrieved 29 November 2019). 4. Saw O Moo was a community leader who was heavily involved in the preservation of Karen culture, land and wildlife. His work also included supporting displaced Karen communities. He was involved in the development of the Salween Peace Park, which was established to protect land as well as endangered species such as the Asiatic black bear and the Sunda pangolin. The park took in areas that were under threat from Burmese government development projects such as the Hat Gyi hydroelectric dam. For more on his death, see J. Watts, ‘Indigenous Environmental Campaigner Killed by Myanmar Government’, The Guardian, 14 April 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018 /apr/13/indigenous-environmental-campaigner-saw-o-moo-killed-by-myan mar-government-karen-state (retrieved 20 January 2020); and ‘Burma Army Kills Karen Aid Worker’, Karen News, 10 April 2018, http://karennews .org/2018/04/burma-army-kills-karen-aid-worker (retrieved 29 November 2019).

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 Index Note: Page numbers in italics refer to maps and figures. ABSDF (All Burma Students’ Democratic Front), 52 aims of book, 10–13 All Burma Students’ Democratic Front. See ABSDF Anderson, Benedict, 133 Aung San Suu Kyi, 49, 147, 148 Aung Thein, Colonel, 55 BBC (Burmese Border Consortium), 45, 46, 59 border crossings, 25–26. See also Thailand–Burma border borderlands, 5–6, 27–31. See also Thailand–Burma borderlands borders, 27–29, 36–37 BSPP (Burma Socialist Programme Party), 48 Burma ’88 Uprising, 49, 52, 77 a acks on Rohingya, 147–48 borders, 37 census information from, 7–8 definition, x elections, 49 ethnic minority groups in, 9, 47–48, 147–48 internal conflict in, 26, 43–45, 47, 50, 51, 56, 58, 92, 146–48, 150

international investment in, 49–51, 57 international pressure on, 93 isolation of, 2, 48, 49 maps, xv, xvi military regime, 9, 47, 48, 50 ‘open door’ economic policy, 49–50 re-emergence of Burmese state, 43–44, 48–51 relationship with Thailand, 44, 48, 51–55, 59 ‘Saffron Revolution’, 77 transition to democracy, 147 Burma Issues, ix Burmans, x, 122 Burma Socialist Programme Party. See BSPP Burma–Thailand border. See Thailand– Burma border ‘Burmese’, definition, x Burmese Army. See Burmese military; Tatmadaw Burmese Border Consortium. See BBC Burmese Embassy, Bangkok, storming of, 58 Burmese military, 9 1983–84 dry season offensives, 26, 43–45, 47 and a acks on Karen in Burma, 43–45, 47, 50, 51, 56, 59–60, 148 and a acks on Karen in Thailand, 56–58, 110

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in border region, 55–56 Karen forced to porter for, 1–2, 9, 57, 92–93 opposition and resistance to, 48, 77–78, 128–29 and rape, 9, 57, 70, 82, 93–94 See also Tatmadaw Catholic Office for Emergency Relief and Refugees. See COERR CCSDPT (Commi ee for Coordination of Services to Displaced Persons in Thailand), 45, 60, 61 Chatichai Choonhaven, 50 Chavalit, General, 49, 50 Clifford, James, 136 COERR (Catholic Office for Emergency Relief and Refugees), 59 Commi ee for Coordination of Services to Displaced Persons in Thailand. See CCSDPT cross-border exchange, 27–29, 31 Democratic Karen Buddhist Army. See DKBA detention, 73–75 DKBA (Democratic Karen Buddhist Army), 56 Donnan, H., and Wilson, T.M., 134 Don Pa Kiang refugee camp, 56 Dudley, Sandra, 97 Dunford, Jack, 46 Eastmond, Marita, 109 Eh De Li, 1 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, 121–22, 125 Fassin, Didier, 69, 70 Fischer, Michael, 142 ‘Four Cuts’ campaign, 9 Freire, Paulo, 103 Friendship Bridge, 26, 32, 34, 42–43, 50 Gen Boonsak Kamheangridirong, 56 God’s Army, 58 Golden Book, 123–24

Gravers, Mikael, 122, 132 Gupta, A., and Ferguson, J., 117 Huay Kaloke refugee camp, 45–46, 56, 110, 116 human rights documentation, 91–92 Hseng Noung, 92 hta (oral storytelling), 35, 89, 96–97, 115–16 IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons), 10, 57, 98–99, 110–12, 140, 141. See also Karen people: displacement and persecution of; Karen refugees; refugees interviews, 14 and ‘othering’, 17 semi-structured, 16–18 and translation, 16–17 Karen Human Rights Group. See KHRG Karen Peace Council. See KPC Karen people, 7–8 and black-market trade, 54 in Burma, 7, 89 communication style of, 15–16 displacement and persecution of, 9–10, 12, 14, 67, 74, 85, 89, 91, 103, 108–12, 128–30, 148 ethnographic studies of, 13 and forced portering for Burmese military, 1–2, 9, 57, 92–93 history and literature of, 100–01, 123–25, 126, 131 and hta (oral storytelling), 35, 89, 96–97, 115–16 identity of, 12, 122–25, 133–34 importance of land for, 141–42 influence of Western culture on, 129 of Irrawaddy Delta, 7 Karen homeland, 38, 117–19, 132, 136–43 Karen language, x, 126–27, 144 Karen State, 7, 146–47

Index •

lowland and highland, 8, 10 military a acks on in Burma, 43–45, 47, 50, 51, 56, 59–60, 148 mythohistory of, 122–25 national dress of, 131 oral storytelling of, 88–89 origins of, 6–7, 127 political and personal narratives of, 95–98, 100–07, 108, 124 Pwo Karen, 4, 8, 10 resistance of, 76–78, 81–84, 128 Sgaw Karen, 4, 8, 10 suffering of, 1, 9–10, 57–59, 109–10, 112, 136–40 ta oos, 76–77 in Thailand, 7 See also Karen refugees KarenRefugee blog, 98 Karen refugee camps, viii–ix, 3–4, 14, 75 Karen Refugee Commi ee, 46 Karen refugees and artistic expression, 18, 21, 105–07, 108–10, 117–18, 125, 130 and cartoons, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 131 children, 116 and connections to homeland, 38, 95, 108–09, 127, 129, 130–31, 133, 140 and continuation or re-establishment of cultural practices, 38, 46, 116–17, 125–35, 149 and cosmopolitan Karen identity, 132–36 and cultural change, 130–31, 135 deportation of, 75 and distrust of Burmese government, 146 and education, 107, 130 and humanitarian aid, 44, 46–47, 59–62 and humour, 82–84 identification cards for, 73–74 and illegality of residence in Thailand, 15, 59, 74–75, 86, 141

163

and imagined future, 136–37, 139–40, 142 and imagining home, 136–43 and international networks, 90–94, 96, 99, 106, 107 and memories of place, 112, 116, 117–25, 136–43 and music, 96–97, 107, 115–16, 127, 129, 130 and narrative of persecution, 85, 90, 93–95, 109, 149 and networks of solidarity, 107–09, 112 as passive recipients of humanitarian assistance, 62, 70, 76, 80, 82 and remembered places, 112, 116, 117–25, 136–43 repatriation of, 146, 149 rese lement of, 44, 61–62, 66, 72–73, 86, 103, 104, 105–06, 130, 132–36, 145 resistance and activism of, ix, 10, 11, 12, 38, 52, 69, 70–73, 76–77, 79–86, 90, 95, 108–13, 128, 130, 150–52 and romanticised vision of home, 118–21, 136–41 safety of in Thailand, 55–59, 61, 110 self-reliance of, 46, 47 social problems among, 80–81, 106, 131 in Thailand–Burma borderlands, 30 and theatre, 106 treatment of in Thailand, 53, 59–62, 73–79 and use of new media, 90, 94–100, 130, 133, 149–51 as victims, 70–73, 76 and videos, 99 and wish to return to Burma, 36, 44, 138–41 See also Karen people; Thailand– Burma borderlands Karen River Watch. See KRW

164

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Index

Karen State, 7, 146–47 Karen National Liberation Army. See KNLA Karen National Union. See KNU Karen Student Network Group. See KSNG Karenni refugees, 28, 37, 47, 59 Kaw Kwe, 25–26, 34, 75, 88 Kaw Meh, 76–77 Kawmoorah, 57 Kawthoolei, 120, 121, 122 KHRG (Karen Human Rights Group), 78, 147 KNLA (Karen National Liberation Army), 9, 15, 52 KNU (Karen National Union), 9, 10, 12, 15, 45, 47, 48, 50, 53, 56–58, 122, 131, 132 KPC (Karen Peace Council), 58 KRW (Karen River Watch), 96–97 KSNG (Karen Student Network Group), 80–81, 96, 106

Mon people, 122 refugees, 47, 59 Monypwa people, 128 Moo, 67, 80, 137 MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières), 59 ‘Myanmar’, x. See also Burma National League for Democracy. See NLD Naw Kyi Mu, 137–38, 140 Naw Mu, 119, 121 Ne Win, General, 9, 48, 49 and ‘Burmese Way to Socialism’, 49 opposition to, 47–48 NLD (National League for Democracy), 49, 147 no-man’s land, 33, 34, 42–43 Nyi Nyi, 35, 56–57, 110, 115–16, 124–25, 127, 128, 138

Ler Per Her refugee camp, 57 Lintner, Bertil, 54 logging, 49–50 Loo Ne, 35, 67–72, 79, 82–83, 86, 98–99, 110–12, 134

Pa’an District, Burma, 45 Pa’doh, 144–45 Pado Mahn Shah, General, 58 Pe Li, 103, 104, 105, 131 Po Hsan, 105–06, 110, 125 Po Khai, 36, 75, 129–30 pseudonyms, use of in book, x

Mae La Oon refugee camp, 57 Mae La refugee camp, 15, 127 Mae Ra Ma Luang refugee camp, 57 Mae Sot character of town, viii, 38 as centre of Karen resistance movement, 39 market at, 40 Malkki, Lisa, 71, 133, 134 Manerplaw, 56, 57 Médecins Sans Frontières. See MSF memory and remembered places, 112, 116, 117–25, 136–43 Ministry of Interior (Thailand). See MOI Moei River, 32, 33, 34, 42 MOI (Ministry of Interior [Thailand]), 45, 59, 60

rape, 58, 82, 92, 93–94, 147 Rappaport, Julian, 99 refugees humanitarian discourse about, 69, 82 refugee exchange and agency, 28 rights of, 79–80 stereotyping of, 71–72, 79 terminology, 68, 71 See also Karen refugees research methods, 14–19 rese lement of refugees, 44, 72–73, 103, 104, 105–06, 130, 132–36, 145 UNHCR rese lement programme, 61–62, 66, 86 resistance, ix, 10, 11, 12, 38, 52, 69, 70–73, 76–77, 79–86, 90, 95, 108–13, 128, 130, 150–52

Index •

Rohingya people, 37, 92, 147–48 Salween River and Dam, 35, 96–97, 106, 107, 148 Sathirathai, Surakiart, 56 Saw Ba, 45, 60, 72, 75, 80, 86, 88, 92, 101, 102, 103, 105, 115, 124, 135, 138–40, 146 Saw Ba U Kyi, 131 Saw Ler Mu, 58 Saw O Moo, 148 Sco , James C., 77–78, 128 Shan Human Rights Foundation, 93 Shan refugees, 37 Shan State Army, 56 Shan Women’s Action Network, 93 Shinawatra, Thaksin, 54 Slim, H., and Thompson, P., 83 Stern, Theodore, 123 structure of book, 19–22 Tatmadaw, 9, 23, 48. See also Burmese military Taw Meh Pah, 122 Thailand Map, xvi refugee policy of, 44–48, 53 relationship with Burma, 44, 48, 51–55, 59 Thailand–Burma border, 6, 25, 26, 28–32, 34, 151 and borderlands, 39–40 Burmese militarisation of, 33, 37–38, 43, 45, 48, 55, 58, 69–70 and circular migration, 32–33 closure of, 55–56 illegal movement across, 32, 33 and Karen refugees, 43, 44, 47 maps, xv, xvi, 31, 43, 48 and Thai buffer zone policy, 53–54 Thai regulation of, 38, 43, 47, 48, 55, 59, 69, 73 Thailand–Burma borderlands activism in, 145 and alternative narratives, 31 and border, 39–40

165

changes in, 145, 149 characteristics of, 30–41 fluidity of, 32 humanitarian aid in, 44, 46–47, 59–62 and maintenance of Karen identity, 134–35, 140–41 maps, xvi, 30 and no-man’s land, 33, 34, 42–43 as place of Karen activism, 11, 39–41 as place of political struggle, 49–49, 52–53 as place of refuge, 3, 36, 44, 47, 56–57 security in, 55–59 as site of empowerment, 37 social constructionist view of, 29 withdrawal of NGOs in, 147 See also Karen refugees Tham Hin refugee camp, 57 Thara Htoo Hla E., 123 Thongchai Winichakul, 37 ‘truth’, 17 Tsing, Anna, 17, 18 U Kyi, 33, 78, 101, 108–09, 118–22, 140–41, 146 U Thuzana, 56 UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), 45, 61, 79 UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund), 81 United Nations Children’s Fund. See UNICEF United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. See UNHCR weaving, 15–16 at Mae La refugee camp, 15 Wijeyewardene, Gehan, 52 Yadana gas pipeline, 57 Zaw Kyi, 126 Zoya Phan, 92