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ID:
189372
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| Summary/Abstract |
Predominant approaches in the rebel governance literature have looked at control over the means of violence as a prerogative of rebel-rulers, or armed/non-armed actors, somehow deterministically linked to territory. Here weapons have been understood as either autonomous technical-factors or as analytically invisible objects instrumental to human agencies and interactions aiming to territorial control. This paper challenges understandings of control over the means of violence as a central property radiating outwardly through hierarchically and geographically ordered spatial containers. It argues that the means of violence are relational networks among heterogeneous human-non-human entities – e.g. weapons, stockpiles, militarised architectures, forms, armed individuals/groups – that generate territory. These networks are controlled and stabilised via diffused techniques and rationalities of control. Drawing on the study of Ta’ang areas of Northern Shan State – among the few in Myanmar where well-established rebel movements have experienced official disarmament and later undertook a full-fledged re-armament – I find that controlling the means of violence occurs via turbulent combinations of technical objects, techniques and rationalities that relate to four main domains: narcotics eradication; institutionalisation; ethnonationality; and humanitarian security. Processes and practices through which attempts to control the means of violence are made entail alternative strategies to re-generate spatial organisational control and shape multiple shifting territories. Empirically exploring a highly under-researched case, the paper provides a view of the diffused character of controlling the means of violence and its mutually constitutive relations with territory, while illuminating also the role of weapons, other technical objects, and techniques.
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| 2 |
ID:
189351
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article analyzes the ways in which processes of weapons acquisition and armed collectives formation contribute to shape rebel polities – with their populations and attendant political geographies – in frontier spaces. It argues that the acquisition of weapons and the formation of an armed ensemble are shaped by political rationalities and techniques of governing the entanglements between humans and weapons that are diffused throughout society as a whole. Drawing on biopolitical governmentality, I also show that by governing weapons acquisition and the formation of an armed force rebel movements shape the rebel polity’s collective identity and political geographies of ‘vital’ space in frontiers. Harnessing fieldwork-based research to study Ta’ang rebel movements in Myanmar, I find that weapons acquisition and the formation of an armed ensembles have been inflected by govern-mentalities of narcotics eradication and ethnonationality. The article concludes that some forms of rebel rule at the edge of the state in Myanmar can be qualified as ‘blunt’ following work by anthropologist Elliott Prasse-Freeman. That is to say, rebel rule lacking the governmental apparatuses to intensively know and promote life at aggregate scales still operates massifications and divisions of biological populations and political space via the formation and governing of armed ensembles.
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