No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Humanitarian mine action in Myanmar and the reterritorialization of risk
Abstract
This article examines current debates for and against Humanitarian Mine Action (HMA) in Myanmar. The analysis, based on interviews with key local, national, and international actors involved in HMA, reveals why so many of them regard the mapping and removal of “nuisance” landmines to pose a security threat to the peace process. (Landmines deny people access to territory; when conflict ends, these landmines no longer serve a strategic purpose and thus become a dangerous nuisance.) These same debates also shed light on the growing role risk management approaches now take in Myanmar as a response to decades of authoritarian misrule by a succession of military regimes. The landmines, although buried in the ground, actively unsettle such good governance initiatives and the neoliberal development projects to which they are often linked, most often by re-territorializing military, political, and economic authority in overlapping and conflicting ways at multiple scales. The findings reveal why HMA actors resist labeling the crisis landmine contamination poses to civilians as a “crisis” that requires immediate humanitarian action.
This chapter deals with a question foregrounded by historian Willem van Schendel in his seminal 2002 article “Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance”: how do arms and associated regulatory practices reshape the geometries of authority and power in borderlands? The rich literature on borderlands has deployed van Schendel’s insights to respatialise areas and states but has devoted scant attention to such questions. Drawing from “new materialist” scholarship in IR and the concept of scale in political geography, the chapter argues that fluid and fractionally coherent combinations of weapons as technical objects, rationalities, and techniques of arms control reproduce multiple scales of territorial authority and struggles over scaled modes of governing violence in borderlands. Such struggles constantly reconfigure the territorial arenas of authority on violence at the edge of the state. Delving into the processes and practices of “making” and controlling the “landmine”, different socio-political orders confront themselves through rationalities, techniques and practices of humanitarian arms control via which they navigate/jump across scales, forge new ones, or mobilise multi-scalar alliances. Different types of “dead” and “alive” landmines nonetheless defy these attempts at rescaling territorial authority over violence by acting in unforeseen manners at the scale of their own ecologies of violence.
This article deals with a question foregrounded by historian Willem van Schendel in his seminal 2002 article ‘Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance’: how do arms, arms flows, and associated regulatory practices reshape the geometries of authority and power in borderlands? The rich transdisciplinary literature on borderlands has fruitfully deployed van Schendel's insights to re-spatialise areas and states but has devoted scant attention to such question. Drawing from ‘new materialist’ scholarship in IR and the concept of scale in political geography, the paper argues that fluid and fractionally coherent combinations of weapons as technical objects that come from somewhere, rationalities, and techniques of arms control reproduce multiple scales of territorial authority and struggles over scaled modes of governing violence in borderlands. Such struggles of scales and about scale constantly reconfigure the territorial arenas of authority on violence at the edge of the state. Based on fieldwork in Ta'ang areas of northern Shan State, Myanmar, the article develops an empirical analysis of encounters between explosive devices/landmines and the subjects and spaces they target. Delving into the processes and practices of ‘making’ and controlling the ‘landmine’, I find that different socio-political orders confront themselves through rationalities, techniques, and practices of humanitarian arms control via which they navigate/jump across scales, forge new ones, or mobilise multi-scalar alliances. Different types of ‘dead’ and ‘alive’ landmines nonetheless defy these attempts at rescaling territorial authority over violence by acting in unforeseen manners at the scale of their own ecologies of violence.
The humanitarian impact of landmines was well publicised during the 1990s. The efforts by nongovernmental organisations during this decade led to an international treaty banning the production, stockpiling, and use of antipersonnel landmines. Since the late 1990s a series of important changes have occurred in the management and coordination of humanitarian demining, which are associated with the emergence of a new development discipline for those affected by landmines. I suggest that these changes have important implications for the exercise of power. I also argue, however, that this development discourse is being repoliticised through a process of 'cadastral politics'.
Myanmar world s third worst for landmineshttp www mmtimes com index php national news myanmar world s third worst for landmines html
- WaLone
Mine action in Myanmar
- Fasth
Mining Project http www dawpuwae com
- Brown
Myanmar Myanmar mine action standard Myanmar
- Center