IN November 2016, I caught up with a general from the hawkish wing of the Karen National Union in Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second city. During our conversation he put it to me that, “since the KNU signed the NCA [National Ceasefire Agreement] in 2015, our leaders are in the Burmese’s pocket.” This statement was very much of a piece with those made by other so-called hard-liners. Along the border and in the diaspora, the political elite I met regularly peppered their speeches with accusations of corruption leveled at the current KNU leadership and claims the ceasefire was exacerbating dispossession in southeast Myanmar.¹ Hard-liners like the general had long opposed any rapprochement with the Tatmadaw, speaking of ceasefire as tantamount to surrender. Beyond these jingoistic and saber-rattling discourses, however, I found that this skepticism toward the ceasefire echoed all the way up into the Mutraw hills, resonating in villages such as Ta K’Thwee Duh, among people far removed from these hard-liners. This became particularly evident when speaking to the headmaster in Ta K’Thwee Duh.

Possessed by a sense of great purpose, the headmaster of the local primary school came through the door to my little house, at the bottom of the village, as I sat catching up on gossip with Naw Paw, my field assistant, and Naw Lee Paw (Hpu Hkee’s oldest daughter). He sat silently on the floor beside us in his navy blue football jersey from the refugee camps. His usual knowing smile, stained almost jet black by his interminable chewing of betel nut and lime, and the familiar glint in his eye signaling he had a humorous story to share were replaced with grave seriousness. Upon noticing this change of countenance, our conversation quickly ground to a halt. We all turned to face him, waiting to hear what he had to say. After a short silence, he explained, speaking slowly in a voice muffled by the copious amount of betel nut he had stuffed in his mouth, that he had just returned from a meeting for all residents of the Pa Heh village tract, which encompassed Ta K’Thwee Duh. At this meeting, the local Karen National Liberation Army commanders had forbidden the villagers from taking me along to hpeh hku—the laborious clearing of trees in a pgha, or “mature/old,” fallow field with machetes—nor were they to take me anywhere with a steep incline. Apparently, these military leaders feared that I might get injured or even die should I take part in these activities and ominously warned the villagers of dire consequences should this happen.² Rather than spelling out what the consequences might be, the leaders quickly changed the topic to politics.

The headmaster continued that the local KNLA explained how, “although the ta du ta yah koh [literally, hot conflict] may be over, for the time being,” they now face a new and growing threat: the threat of ta du ta yah hku (cool/peaceful conflict), currently taking place under the guise of the ceasefire. They went on to detail how the Tatmadaw had continued its counterinsurgency against the villagers in these highlands, only now it was visited upon them by other means. The koh (hot) means of guns, mortars, and attack helicopters was slowly being replaced by hku (cool/er) means of temples and pagodas—that is to say, by way of propagating religion but also, as I shall illustrate, by building mines and hydroelectric dams. According to these KNLA commanders, this new “cooler” counterinsurgency unfolded in a series of steps: first they (it was unclear who “they” were here) assisted the local Buddhist population in constructing a local pagoda or temple; when it was completed, these Buddhist structures started drawing in Burman Buddhist monks and laypeople from far and wide to make pilgrimages and donations; with time, these areas slowly became inundated with non-Pwakanyaw people and capital, including, increasingly, Tatmadaw soldiers; and finally, the Tatmadaw swept in to secure these religious spots and the (Burman) people who had moved there, assuming control of the surrounding area and dispossessing the original (Pwakanyaw) inhabitants in the process.

When the headmaster finished this tale, I asked him whether he, and his fellow villagers, also considered such insidious new forms of warfare to be a serious concern, or whether this was their leaders overreacting—not unlike their excessive fears for my safety. Before answering, he took a long drag of one of the green Burmese cheroots I had placed between us, letting the silence swell around him. “These worries that the building of Buddhist structures may bring back the Myanmar Army,” he told me between puffs, “are something most people in this area share, despite us having many Buddhist neighbors and kin.”

In this chapter, I take a step back to trace continued patterns of militarization and dispossession during the ceasefire period (2012–21). I go on to explore burgeoning social movements that experimented with translating Indigenous modes of possession into their ongoing struggles to reterritorialize and repossess landscapes in southeast Myanmar, creating small interstitial spaces of autonomy. These highlands were pockmarked with Tatmadaw army bases and lacerated by military roads. Despite the faltering ceasefire agreements and attempts to build a lasting peace, the Mutraw hills (and indeed many other areas of the Karen State) remained deeply militarized. Bringing Indigenous analyses of cool/peaceful forms of counterinsurgency together with academic work on the ways states continue territorializing land during peacetime, I describe how processes and technologies of dispossession, including recent land laws, might be grasped more widely as a form of ceasefire territorialization. I then go on to shine a light on budding experiments by ensembles of Indigenous and ecological activists, students, and Indigenous peoples, who worked tirelessly to push back against this ceasefire territorialization. I show how these ensembles played with translating Indigenous land possession practices and cosmologies to turn state-making processes of mapping and legibility on their head: to reterritorialize and repossess landscapes, in budding countermovements.

THE “COOL” COUNTERINSURGENCY: PROSPECTING, PAGODAS, AND BULLDOZERS

The juxtaposition of hot and cold, drawn on when evoking the notion of a new ta du ta yah hku (cool/peaceful conflict), aligned with common practices found among Pwakanyaw communities across Myanmar and Thailand (Hayami 1993; Paul 2018, 69–70). In chapter 3, I demonstrate how people often opposed a sense of hku (coolness)—understood as intercommunal peace and harmony—to a sense of koh (hotness), of conflict and moral misconduct. Human moral misconduct and conflict often led the kaw k’sah, the owner of the kaw, to become vexed and to punish not only those responsible but also members of their household, their livestock, and/or their crops, by making them sick and feverish and thus “hot.” The earth itself became overheated and fever-like, and, if not cooled down again, death and/or crop failure could occur. To rectify this situation, the persons or parties responsible had to, as soon as possible, lu ta (feed/propitiate) the kaw k’sah in order to make amends and to cool down the situation again, usually with the blood of a chicken or a buffalo. Accordingly, the chicken or buffalo offered to the kaw k’sah was referred to as ta hku (literally, coolness/that which is cool). This bears out in the literal translation of the Pwakanyaw word for peace, ta mu ta hku, as “happiness and coolness” and trouble and strife as ta hkoh ta ghaw, or “hotness and redness” (see also Paul 2018, 69–70). These counterposed notions of hot vs. cold and of peace vs. conflict were thus deeply entangled with Indigenous practices and cosmologies of possessed landscapes and with the sovereignty of spectral owners in the Mutraw highlands.

Military leaders in this area were latching on to these practices/cosmologies to express a situation in which conflict and dispossession persisted in the absence of the usual koh (heat) of armed conflict and moral discord. The notion of ta du ta yah hku could be rendered, rather oxymoronically, as “cool/peaceful conflict.” To exemplify the coherence between what these KNLA commanders were saying and people’s local understandings and experiences, the headmaster told us a story (as was his penchant).

During the period prior to the ceasefire, around 2006 to 2007, the headmaster began, there was a market-hamlet-cum-KNLA-base in the neighboring kaw called Thee Mu Hta that lay along the Salween. “The [predominantly] Buddhist residents of this hamlet,” he went on, “decided that, since there was no place nearby to worship, they should build their own small pagoda here.” They then sought out the help of a highly revered local Pwakanyaw monk from Myaing Gyi Ngu (in Burmese; Khaw Hta in Pwakanyaw). The monk willingly assisted, declaring that “he hoped the building of a pagoda here would help bring peace to warring factions of the KNU” that, as the headmaster reminded us, had split in 1994. The pagoda was quickly erected in Thee Mu Hta, to the great rejoicing of the villagers. This joy quickly turned to despair, however, as a steady influx of Burman visitors, including more and more soldiers, began to arrive on the pretext of visiting to pay respects at the pagoda then stayed on. “As the population of Burmans from Central Myanmar and Tatmadaw soldiers steadily grew,” the headmaster continued, “a conflict between the Tatmadaw and KNLA over control of this territory broke out, forcing many villagers to flee.” The KNLA were eventually defeated and the hamlet transformed into a white zone/peace area: a large Tatmadaw base in the area, located strategically along the Salween and a bustling market town, he concluded.

I heard numerous variations on this story, the narrators regularly evoking it and similar tales as a way to explain their unease toward plans, in both Ta K’Thwee Duh Kaw and in other villages along the Mutraw hills, to construct pagodas. The story was drawn on to emphasize that people’s trepidations were not rooted in their ideological opposition to Buddhism itself. Rather, they were simply worried that the raising of such Buddhist monuments might set off a similar chain of events to those in Thee Mu Hta, potentially leading to their dispossession and their homes transformed into a staging post for further Tatmadaw attacks and militarization. Significantly, the fate of this riverside hamlet rehearsed the events leading up to the bitter factional split between the KNU and the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA). In 1994, the very same monk, U Thuzana, built a “Peace Pagoda” beside the KNU stronghold Manerplaw, then called all Buddhist soldiers disaffected with the KNU to join him, forming the DKBA. Soon after, the DKBA joined forces with the Tatmadaw and overran Manerplaw, causing thousands of people to flee (South 2008, 57–60).

The story of Thee Mu Hta (and, by association, Manerplaw) acted as a kind of cautionary tale, warning people of the dangers of this new mode of counterinsurgency that was intensifying as the armed conflict slowly cooled. The hard-line KNLA general introduced at the start of this chapter described the situation quite aptly as one of a “peace trap.” During our meeting in one of the glistening shopping centers just outside Chiang Mai’s old city, he stated that the ceasefire had hamstrung the revolution since their “leaders have made many concessions and have got nothing back. They keep giving and waiting for a return. [Meanwhile], they [the Tatmadaw] have used the peace to gain ground and reinforce their outposts, and the ordinary people have not received any benefits.”

Such tales of this “peaceful” iteration of counterinsurgency usually began not with an armed provocation but an offer, a promise, of something that people genuinely desired—such as a place of worship or of “development.” These subtle kinds of overtures rarely evoked the villagers’ suspicions or the ire of the spectral owners. Both day-to-day decision-making and spectral sovereignty was bypassed. Yet, soon after accepting the offer, people realized that these seemingly earnest gestures, such as technical and physical assistance to build a pagoda, were in fact a kind of bait to lure them in. As soon as they took the bait, the trap was sprung, and before they knew it, the local inhabitants’ lands and livelihoods had been seized by the Tatmadaw. By this point it was too late for either humans or specters to intervene to rectify the situation.

These stories served as a warning of an insidious new iteration of the ongoing counterinsurgency. People’s growing fears of being dispossessed, however, went beyond fears that the expansion of Burman-dominated Buddhist spheres might perpetuate the intensification of Tatmadaw territorialization, as the KNLA leaders and villagers’ narratives might suggest. I often heard people airing their concerns pertaining to the expansion of not only state/military religious spheres but also economic ones—of both the KNU and Myanmar states.

The gravity of these fears of dispossession by economic encroachments became perhaps most apparent when the new vice-head of the village tract, Hpu Wah, paid a visit to Ta K’Thwee Duh. He arrived in the middle of the day, ostensibly with the remit to discuss issues of conscription with some of the villagers. But, as the day progressed, he appeared far more preoccupied with finding out which household provided the best alcohol than which household should next provide a son to serve in the army. He worked his way, house to house, from the top of the village and downward such that, by the time he got to my house at the bottom of the hill, he was rather inebriated. He came stumbling through my door a little after twilight. While sitting slumped against the wall, he promptly produced a crumpled-up letter out of his jacket pocket that he told me was one of the reasons for his visit. This was a letter from his office informing villagers in this area of the imminent arrival of Chinese prospectors, who planned to survey neighboring Yu Wah Duh Kaw. On account of me being a white outsider, he assumed that I must have something to do with these prospectors and wanted to assure me personally that they would make sure everything went smoothly and would assist “us” as much as they could. In the following days, as word spread of the content of this crumpled piece of paper, I heard my neighbors begin to fret about what would happen should these investors find “valuable things,”³ such as gold, in the ground and should they expand their survey to Ta K’Thwee Duh Kaw.

Much like the cautionary tale of the fall of Thee Mu Hta, the looming arrival of Chinese prospectors retraced the path of older histories of violent resource frontiers. As the ceasefire set in up in these highlands, the revenant of resource frontiers returned once more—where “entrepreneurs and armies” work in concord to “disengage nature from local ecologies and livelihoods, ‘freeing up’ natural resources” (Tsing 2005, 27–28) in the name of territorial gains and capital. These stories of “peaceful” conflict urge us to examine closer how, as threats of dispossession returned to these highlands, they did not always assume the same spectacular form.

Classically, processes of dispossession are portrayed in terms of primitive accumulation—where people are violently separated from their means of subsistence (their land) such that wealth and power is accumulated in the hands of a few landlords and capitalists—which Marx identifies as capitalism’s origin story. More recently, the term accumulation by dispossession has been used to underline how processes of dispossession are not primitive, part of dark and violent pasts, but rather an integral everyday aspect of capitalism and imperialism, where the state often plays a critical role (D. Harvey 2003, 2004). Both these terms, however, have become exceedingly “busy” and “elastic” in their definitions, their applications, and the claims they make (Bernstein 2014, 1036n6). To rein in such sprawling terms and grasp the specific insidious and often extra-economic manner in which people in the Mutraw hills were steadily being dispossessed under a ceasefire, I zero in on how the liberal peace propagated by the peace process was turning predatory.

NEGATIVE PEACE/PREDATORY PEACE

One way to begin tracing intensifying entanglements between the Mutraw hills, the Myanmar state military, and commercial ventures is to follow how transformations in national politics during various periods of liberalization played into highlands politics.

As the Cold War drew to a close in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, like many formerly (nominally at least) socialist states, Myanmar began to pivot back toward Europe and America. In ever more desperate attempts to woo foreign investors and their capital, the increasingly cash-strapped ruling military junta, the State Law and Order Reconciliation Council (SLORC), began a wave of liberalization. Monique Skidmore (2004, 109–11) points to the spectacle, and spectacular failure, of the “Visit Myanmar Year” in 1996 as one example of SLORC’s attempts to attract foreign capital. Consequently, in November the following year, SLORC dropped their rather Orwellian-sounding name in favor of the far catchier State Peace and Development Council and employed a Washington-based PR firm to lobby on their behalf (Lintner 2015, 248).

These overtures to investors, along with gradual liberalizing processes such as large-scale de-nationalizing and the selling of vast swaths of land to multinational corporations, had sweeping effects across Central Myanmar (see especially Rhoads and Wittekind 2018). Chronic armed conflict, however, largely insulated highland areas such as those in Mutraw from many of these sweeping transformations. A similar state of affairs could be seen in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the two Koreas, where a vast military buildup militated against potentially destructive developments, protecting the vibrant biodiversity there (Kim 2022). These liberalizing processes had only begun encroaching into the highlands of southeast Myanmar, and having felt effects on day-to-day life, as the war waned.

Liberalization gradually gained ground as decades of revolution and counterinsurgency receded in the wake of the ceasefire and resulting peace process and as relations between powerful local actors such as the KNU and the Myanmar government/Tatmadaw were progressively normalized. It is important to note that the cooling of conflict did lead to many significant betterments in the lives and livelihoods of people residing in these former war zones, allowing them to return to the agricultural rhythms of their ancestral lands (South 2018, 57). Nevertheless, these improvements were often double-edged.

The de-escalation of armed conflict in Myanmar was not accompanied by a significant revaluation of underlying grievances. Sheila Htoo illustrates this vividly by pointing out that there were over sixty clashes between the KNU and the Tatmadaw in 2018 alone, and from 2017 to 2018 the community-based organization Karen Human Rights Group (KHRG) received ninety-one cases of land confiscation in southeast Myanmar (Htoo, n.d., 118–19). As a result, I found that the residents of the Mutraw hills continued to worry that the Tatmadaw could return at any moment (borne out only four years later, in the events following the 2021 coup).

In response to these continued fears, most of the people I met had a chest filled with their most valuable possessions ensconced somewhere in their homes. For my neighbor Hpu Gay, it was filled with all his finest factory-made clothes and his silk trousers sewn from British parachutes. Naw Lee Paw’s chest was filled with all the clothes she had diligently woven in preparation for the time that she would marry, even though she was yet to find a suitor. People kept these chests in their homes, ready to take them at a moment’s notice when, not if, they were forced to flee again. Moreover, as I learned from villagers who regularly migrated to other parts of Myanmar to work, both sides of the conflict continued to reinforce their military positions. Each time the path of these mostly young male migrants took them past a Tatmadaw camp, they took note of how it looked ever more permanent, new concrete reinforcement cropping up each time.

Following protests in May 2017 by internally displaced people (IDPs) demanding the closure of seventeen of the more controversial Tatmadaw bases in the Mutraw District, a young Karen Environmental and Social Action Network activist snapped a photo while passing one of these bases on the way to Ta K’Thwee Duh. As this photo attested, the soldiers had scrawled the words “we will fight to the death before this base falls” in Burmese on a sign facing the Salween for all passing on boats to read, sending a clear message that they had no intention of demobilizing any time soon.⁴

One consequence of chronic militarization along the Salween was that the situation came closer to that of a ceasefire in its most literal sense. While armed skirmishes between the two sides still occurred, the conflict had largely ceased for the time being, becoming temporarily crystallized into a stalemate: a freeze-frame picture of an ongoing war. Yet, as Andrew Ong shows was the case farther north in the Wa State of Myanmar, while politics during a stalemate appear stalled, they remain ridden by “a fitful process of maneuvers and counterpostures” (2023, xi). The 2012 bilateral ceasefire accords and their ratification into the National Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) in 2015 emerged neither out of hard-won political demands being granted nor by significant changes in the underlying causes of the conflict. Rather, the ceasefire came about more out of a sense of “war fatigue” and the “departure from violence” (Löfving 2007, 51–52; see also Borneman 2002). Since, as Henrik Vigh phrases it, “wars do not start with the first shot or end with the last” (2008, 5), peace must surely amount to something more than the mere absence of armed violence.

In her work on the (former) war zones of southeast Myanmar, Htoo describes the situation following the signing of the peace accords in 2012 as aligned with the “liberal notion of negative peace, intended for capital accumulation and [the] free market” (n.d., 107). While negative peace is simply the “absence of organized, collective violence,” Htoo follows Johan Galtung in opposing it to the concept of “positive peace” as “a synonym for all other good things in the world community, particularly cooperation and integration between human groups” (Galtung 1967, 12).

In the negative/liberal conception of peace, violence is posited to be the disorder ailing a society at war, rather than a symptom of deeper systemic issues. Accordingly, the cure for armed conflict, in all places and at all times, is the administering of intensive democratization and marketization processes (Paris 2004, 41). This conception of peace, embraced and aggressively championed by such global giants as the United Nations and the World Bank (Hetherington 2011; Mac Ginty 2008, 144; Richmond and Mac Ginty 2015, 178), places processes of political and economic liberalization at the very heart of all peacebuilding efforts. The rationale underlying this theory, in simplified terms, is that market (i.e., capitalist) democracies rarely go to war against one another; thus, more liberalization must lead directly to less war (Paris 2004, 42). In practice, however, as seen around the world, the push for economic liberalization and neoliberal reforms often lead the charge toward peace, especially for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (Hetherington 2011; Klein 2008; Springer 2013).

In this respect, the NCA that the KNU signed in 2015, and the subsequent sessions of the 21st Century Panglong peace conference (2016–20) that followed in its wake, closely shadowed a global blueprint that banks upon economic development as the primary engine of conflict resolution.⁵ Consequently, the deep-seated causes of armed conflict were left relatively unaddressed, and a more insidious form of violence, grasped locally as ta du ta yah hku (cool/peaceful conflict), continued unchecked. Moreover, as Eleana Kim notes, the intensification of investments and extractivist enterprises that the liberal peace doctrine demands regularly entail “sacrificing” precious ecosystems in the name of economic development (2022, 5).

One incident that laid bare the logic of the negative/liberal peace thesis was an event held at the beginning of 2019 in the still war-torn west of Myanmar, in the wake of the Rohingya crisis. This event ran with the tagline “Rakhine is open for business to the world,” and then–State Councillor Aung San Suu Kyi, who presided over the proceedings, stated, “we have to address economic issues in Rakhine, that we may achieve the progress and development needed to sustain stability and prosperity” (Lwin 2019). As this case illustrates, the liberal/negative peace thesis doggedly insists that the best way to settle armed conflict is by liberalizing the economy and encouraging foreign investors to pour capital into the (formerly) war-torn fringes of the Myanmar nation-state. This approach ignores the underlying causes of conflict and that such investments often serve to further inflame them. It was in this context that the freeze-frame picture of the ceasefire along the Salween River emerged.

Notions of a new “cool/peaceful” phase of counterinsurgency, as well as similar formulations from other “post-conflict” societies around the world (Büscher 2013; Löfving 2007; Lund 2018; Vigh 2006), suggest that the liberal peace thesis fails to accurately capture lived realities on the ground. In southeast Myanmar local military leaders and subsistence-farming villagers alike talked incessantly about the ceasefire as, in many respects, a continuation of the state-sponsored counterinsurgency of the “four cuts” (Smith 1999, 258–59). As the koh (heat) of armed struggle dissipated, the counterinsurgency had congealed into a new and more insidious form. Following the signing of the bilateral ceasefire in 2012, people were decreasingly dispossessed by force of arms. They now feared that the land they lived on and lived off would be expropriated by far more subtle means, through the creeping expansion of state-dominated religious and economic spheres—through “peace traps,” preceded by promises of places of worship and of prosperity.

The building of pagodas and large investment projects, such as plans for the construction of the Hatgyi hydroelectric dam farther downstream, testified to these new creeping forms of counterinsurgency—and the price environments were expected to pay in order to achieve peace. The Hatgyi hydropower project, funded by Sinohydro (China) and EGATi (Thailand), proposed to build a 1,200-megawatt plant with a 33-meter-high dam (Bright 2019, 79; C. Middleton et al. 2019, 33). Located just downstream of the Salween Peace Park, it threatened to inundate vast swaths of land. What is more, while it promised local “development,” the dam offered no discernible benefits for the people living in the area around it, as the overwhelming majority of the electricity produced would be transferred directly to Thailand and China (C. Middleton et al. 2019, 36). A memorandum of understanding to begin work was signed between the Thai and Myanmar governments in 1996, but progress was continually stymied by armed clashes in the immediate vicinity of the dam (Bright 2019, 79). Shortly after the ceasefire, as armed hostilities tapered off, the Myanmar government continually attempted to move this project forward, leading to renewed rounds of armed skirmishes in 2016 (Bright 2019, 79–80; Karen Rivers Watch 2016).

I find the notion of “predatory peace,” coined by political ecologist Christian Lund (2018), instructive in understanding these new insidious forms of dispossession in (post)conflict settings. Taking his point of departure in Aceh in Indonesia, Lund shows how the end of armed conflict in Aceh was experienced as a rupture that created “an open moment where both opportunity and risks multiply” (2018, 434). However, this rupture also ushered in a new frontier, leading state actors to give concessions to contractors for huge swaths of land, while smallholders’ rights were undermined and silenced as they were slowly dispossessed. This was an extreme case of how “old stories” continued on into the present, where new patterns of dispossession rehearsed those from colonial times, peace slowly becoming predatory.

However, whereas smallholders in Aceh were initially more sanguine about the possibilities opened to them following the peace process—that they may finally be able to assert their customary rights over the land—people along the Salween, after so many years of chronic conflict, were considerably more pragmatic, if not out-and-out pessimistic. While they were able to move around more freely, their hopes that the ceasefire might finally allow them to stabilize their livelihoods and maybe even improve on them were constantly tempered by anxieties that the ceasefire would compound the risks of dispossession they already faced. They feared that the ceasefire could at any moment turn out to be a trap, ready to spring.

While tales of Thee Mu Hta were often evoked in the Mutraw hills to explain trepidations about the ceasefire, for the KNLA commanders at least, stories from other parts of Myanmar helped further undergird their pessimism. For both local KNLA officers and many activists, the hard-won lessons of their former allies the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), based on the Chinese borderlands in northern Myanmar, were not easily forgotten. In 2011, the KNU together with KIA founded the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC). For a time, the UNFC was the most powerful alliance of non-state armed organizations in Myanmar, formed as a platform to collectively bargain with the Tatmadaw. This alliance was founded largely in response to the KIA’s faltering attempts to strike out alone and sign a separate bilateral ceasefire with Tatmadaw. The fragile peace this ceasefire engendered steadily became more predatory over the years.

As the ink was still drying on the ceasefire accords the KIA signed in 1994, the Tatmadaw quickly began allocating land concessions to local elites and Chinese and international conglomerates and redirecting timber trade in these former war zones. This served to both weaken the KIA’s sovereignty and create legible, militarized, state territory (Woods 2011, 747; issues of legibility are discussed in the next section). Rather than threatening state sovereignty, granting land concessions to non-state actors actually augmented Myanmar military state-building efforts. Capturing and controlling flows of capital into these resource frontiers had the effect of generating effective Myanmar state authority, sovereignty, and territory in practice (Woods 2011, 749) and, simultaneously, weakening both KIA and smallholders’ customary claims to these lands (754). As Thomas Sikor and Christian Lund (2010, 1–3) demonstrate, processes of recognizing claims as property, in a rather circular manner, also work to imbue institutions and states with the recognition of their authority to do so—thereby bolstering state building.

To describe these processes, Kevin Woods (2011) coined the term ceasefire capitalism. Through ceasefire capitalism the Tatmadaw were able to achieve what had eluded them throughout the decades of armed counterinsurgency: taking effective control of this contested territory. Woods proceeds to name the actual workings of this collaboration between the Tatmadaw and investors to seize control of contested land “military territorialization” (748–49), which, he persuasively argues, ushered in a new phase of state-sponsored counterinsurgency. Taken together, Indigenous analyses and academic treatments of the ceasefire predicament illuminate the new face of the ongoing state counterinsurgency in Myanmar and beyond and the resulting territorialization and dispossession it dragged in its wake. These new forms and threats of dispossession were, in turn, deeply entangled with the current global rush for viable land, increasingly conducted via legal technologies such as Myanmar state-level land laws.

LAND RUSHES, LAND LAWS, AND CEASEFIRE TERRITORIALIZATION

Stories of creeping dispossession by alliances of state and private actors offer a window on wider political processes. Upland swidden cultivators’ livelihood struggles and their current precarious predicaments are deeply entangled with the global food crisis, driven by increased demands for staples, the reorientation of consumption patterns, and the exploding energy demands of more affluent nations. All these factors have led to the interminable hunt for new zones of valorization in ever-evolving land frontiers, enacting colossal processes of enclosures and land grabs, collectively known as the global land rush (Makki 2014, 79–80; see also Hong 2017; Li 2014b; Springer 2013).

In Ta K’Thwee Duh and the surrounding area, soldiers and farmers alike were acutely aware that, as the heat of armed conflict slowly dissipated, a growing form of ceasefire capitalism akin to what happened in the Myanmar-Chinese borderlands threatened to ratchet open these highlands to global capital, generating new (violent) frontiers and echoing dark histories of (colonial) extraction. Local people’s apprehensions toward the current political situation could perhaps be best summed up by the slogan of the Tarkapaw Youth Group (2015), in response to the building of the Ban Chaung coal mine farther south in the Tanintharyi Region: “We used to fear bullets, now we fear bulldozers.”⁶

One way in which the global land rush portended seismic effects on these highlands was through the enacting of the Vacant, Fallow and Virgin Land Management Law, often shortened to VFV Law, first drafted in 2012 (perhaps not coincidentally, the same year the initial bilateral ceasefires were signed). In a report released on March 12, 2019, the day after the slightly amended law came into full force, the KHRG (2019) christened this moment “Day One.” The instant the VFV Law entered the legal fold, becoming part of Myanmar state policy, all land unregistered in state ledgers, estimated to be between 45 and 50 million acres, became “vacant, fallow, or virgin.” The lion’s share, 82 percent, of this unregistered land resided in “ethnic areas” (i.e., areas under the sway of so-called non-state armed groups such as the KNU and KIA), large swaths of which were held in “customary tenure” in Myanmar’s highland areas, such as the patchworks of kaw lands in the Mutraw hills. Overnight, these vast expanses of land were reclassified as vacant, fallow (i.e., underutilized, see below), or virgin and thus ripe for government reallocation to more “productive” uses such as monocultures for the mass production of food, mineral extraction, and hydroelectric dams for the production of commodities and energy in faraway places.

Laws such as the VFV Law were a continuation of a long history of targeting patches of land involved in swidden cultivation (Ferguson, “Scramble,” 2014; Forsyth and Walker 2008; Springate-Baginski 2018). This form of agriculture/agroforestry is regularly cast as inefficient, due to the long fallowing periods it allows for the soil to regenerate. In the eyes of the state, upland swidden cultivation leaves a great deal of potential agricultural land underutilized. Somewhat paradoxically, swidden cultivation is simultaneously seen as degrading the environment and a major cause of deforestation, due to the periodic clearing and burning of small patches of secondary forest it involves (Forsyth and Walker 2008; Springate-Baginski 2018).

The VFV Law and associated laws such as the Farmland Law (also passed to coincide with the ceasefire in 2012) illustrated one particular modality of ceasefire capitalism. Through these laws, Myanmar state/military counterinsurgency was increasingly wedded to the current global hunt for new zones of valorization in ever-new land frontiers. The military and private sector were joining hands to “secure” and territorialize contested lands through legislative technologies such as land laws (Ferguson, “Scramble,” 2014). In concert with mapping (discussed in more detail below), land laws are part of states’ wider attempts to bring “unorganized” territory—that is to say, land beyond the horizon of their sovereignty—into the legal/legislative fold by making it, as James C. Scott (1998) so productively puts it, “legible.”

As legal technologies, the VFV Law and associated land laws simplified and translated intricate, indeterminate, and playful Indigenous modes of possessing the landscapes, tied to swidden cultivation, turning them into a uniform/standardized form of landholding that was legible—that is, into land that could be registered in Myanmar state ledgers (Scott 1998, 2). Once land was made legible, it could be distributed or sold to state and private actors for investment and development. The case in northern Myanmar—where the state generated de facto authority, sovereignty, and territoriality by ceding land to private actors and erasing local claims (Woods 2011, 749; see also Sikor and Lund 2010, 1–3)—illustrated these processes in practice. Land laws attempted to achieve this same goal by similarly flattening or reifying Indigenous modes of ownership, such as the ephemeral and nesting modes of ownership I discuss in chapter 2, where the ownership of parcels of land constantly cycled between human and spectral hands. These legal technologies rendered landscapes legible by drawing on a property regime where each patch of land became a discrete and uniform unit “owned by a legal individual who possesses wide powers of use, inheritance, or sale and whose ownership is represented by uniform deed of title enforced through the judiciary and police institutions of the state” (Scott 1998, 36).⁷

Through land laws, possessed landscapes were simplified and transformed into a uniform grid of landholdings that could be readily represented on cadastral maps, rendering them “readable” and “assessable” by both the Myanmar state and commercial actors. Yet, as I demonstrate in chapter 2, only a tiny fraction of villagers in the Mutraw hills held land title deeds. What is more, the few paddy field land titles that people did hold were awarded by the KNU and thus unlikely to be recognized by the Myanmar state. Alongside legal technologies, then, maps are a “technology of territoriality,” as Thongchai Winichakul so powerfully argues (1994, 16). Following the colonization of Southeast Asia, overlapping “galactic polities” (Tambiah 1976) were gradually displaced by modern Westphalian notions of bounded nation-states, each with its own delineated “geo-body” (Winichakul 1994). Maps became the prime technology to “affect, influence or control people, phenomena, and relationships by delimiting and asserting control over geographical area” (16). As such, mapping has long been wedded to military force.

The application of the VFV Law on the ground in the Mutraw hills would have essentially led most, if not all, the land there to be classified as vacant, fallow, or virgin, ripe for redistribution and investment. Moreover, the gridding and mapping implied in the VFV Law threatened to greatly exacerbate the commodification of land, both by state/private actors and “from below” by the villagers themselves (cf. Li 2014a), which we saw stirrings of in the growing trend toward wet rice cultivation. Thus, these land laws and efforts to map the Mutraw hills foreshadowed catastrophic effects for the subsistence farmers residing there, and indeed all across Myanmar, of mass displacements and political/economical upheavals in the near future.

People’s continued fears of dispossession were not, however, isolated to their trepidation about new land laws and other forms of intensified state/private partnerships in the shape of ceasefire capitalism. The fall of the riverside hamlet of Thee Mu Hta took the form not of predatory business ventures but of religious encroachments initially welcomed by the inhabitants. For many of the people residing in the adjacent areas, these events exemplified a growing new phase of counterinsurgency and dispossession. And yet these events came before and appeared to presage the coming new threats inherent in ceasefire times.

Ceasefire Territorialization

After the Tatmadaw wrested control of Thee Mu Hta from the KNU, the surrounding area was rescheduled as a so-called peace area. Shortly thereafter, it became a bustling economic hub for cross-border trade, attracting people from all across Myanmar and Thailand—that is, until the KNU surrounded it with landmines and forbade villagers from visiting. While we cannot rule out that the Tatmadaw planned to later grant land concessions in and around this riverside hamlet to external investors to bolster and extend their territorial control, as was the case in Kachin State, it is clear that ceasefire capitalism was but one part of the story. Predatory business ventures partnering with Myanmar state/military actors followed, and depended upon, prior religious and military encroachments. To grasp the wider story of the ongoing counterinsurgency, I delved into older attempts by the Myanmar state at gridding and mapping these highlands to make them legible.

As I touch on in the introduction, long before land laws such as the VFV Law were conceived, one of the Tatmadaw’s first attempts at making these highlands legible was through the “four cuts” counterinsurgency program. In this program, landscapes along the lower Salween were mapped, chessboard-like, into three zones: black zones, obscured from the Myanmar state by being fully under the sway of armed “insurgent” groups such as the KNU; brown zones, where territorial control was still disputed; and white zones, which were classified as “free” or “peaceful” on account of being fully under the control of, and transparent to, the Tatmadaw (Smith 1999, 259). This map was then imposed onto the landscape itself. Areas controlled by revolutionary groups were cordoned off into a grid of black zones, each typically 40–50 square miles across; as Winichakul reminds us, “making wars means making maps” (1994, 14). With these areas mapped and gridded, the “four cuts” strategy aimed to turn all zones designated black into white ones. This was achieved by displacing and resettling the rural population residing in black zones into byu hla jaywa, or “strategic hamlets” that were under Tatmadaw control, thereby cutting them off from armed revolutionary groups.

As one popular Burmese proverb puts it, the Tatmadaw was trying “to drain the sea, in order to kill the fish” (South and Katsabanis 2007, 57). By severing the links between armed revolutionary groups and their civilian base, the counterinsurgency aimed to stem the flow of food, funds, intelligence, and recruits from the rural population to these uprisings, effectively slowly starving them into submission. With the insurgencies effectively neutralized, the Tatmadaw could then gradually expand its territorial control over the entire map. All pockets of revolution, such as the highlands along the Salween, were slowly turned into white zones/peace areas that were transparent—that is to say, readable and assessable—to the Myanmar state.

Although in practice this counterinsurgency program was almost exclusively carried out through military might—by the violent displacement of civilians, extensive use of landmines, forced labor, and scorched earth tactics (Ferguson, “Scramble,” 2014; KHRG 2000; Smith 1999; South and Katsabanis 2007)—its scope far exceeded this. As Martin Smith notes in passing, the “four cuts” strategy was, in theory, the Tatmadaw’s own version of a people’s war, their attempt to win the war through the hearts and minds of rural villagers (1999, 259, 495n38). In this light, the tale of Thee Mu Hta offers a glimpse of how, long before the ceasefires, so-called hot and cool measures regularly went hand in hand. What is more, the Tatmadaw’s war to win rural villagers’ hearts and minds was waged with promises both of economic/capitalist development and of building religious structures. These efforts often preceded and laid the groundwork for later armed military incursions aimed toward territorializing black zones and making them legible. Threats of a looming “cool” conflict in the Mutraw hills following the ceasefires were, in fact, a continuation of the long counterinsurgency. As armed conflict abated, this form of “people’s war” was in ascendance. The introduction of new land laws the same year as the ceasefire, and the ensuing intensification of commercial/capitalist and religious-led forms of state territorialization, built on and greatly extended this “cool” shadow side of the ongoing counterinsurgency, which long preceded the ceasefires.

To grasp the wider connotations of local articulations of this new phase of counterinsurgency, I amalgamate Woods’s (2011) terms ceasefire capitalism and military territorialization to describe the situation in these highlands, more broadly, as one of ceasefire territorialization. In much of Myanmar, but specifically in the Mutraw hills, under the guise of the ceasefires, battles continued to be waged, land territorialized, and people dispossessed. Military might was increasingly wedded and subordinated to economic and religious expansions/ventures, which were less spectacular and harder to confront directly. This new modality of the counterinsurgency, of ceasefire territorialization waged against the civilian population with economic and religious means, was not, however, met with resignation and acquiescence by all. In several pockets across southeast Myanmar, growing ensembles of local communities, ecological activists, and in some cases armed groups began to face down, push back, and attempt to reterritorialize and repossess their landscapes. This pushback was akin to Karl Polanyi’s ([1944] 2001) notion of multiclass protective “countermovements” that arise to resist the disembodying of the economy and the commodification of land.

To shine a light on these burgeoning countermovements, I begin by taking a short excursion to an organic farming foundation just north of Bangkok to meet an ensemble of farmers, students, and ecological activists from the Tanintharyi Region in southern Myanmar who had begun organizing themselves. Here in southern Myanmar, following a massive intensification of counterinsurgency activities from 1997 to the early 2000s, the KNU was significantly weakened and pushed into a thin sliver of land along the Thai border, paving the way for a dramatic influx of international investments. As one Chiang Mai–based researcher put it, “Tanintharyi district, in many ways, has become the Wild West of Myanmar,” through the (re)opening of a frontier.

KNU ACTIVITY, ECONOMIC ACTIVITY, AND GREEN TERRITORIALITY IN TANINTHARYI

The first time I met Saw Jonny was in yet another of Chiang Mai’s glittering shopping centers. I found him on the top floor at a small coffee stand, younger and lither than I had expected, smiling broadly as I introduced myself. Saw Jonny was a leading activist in a mushrooming group of community-based environmental and youth activist movements in the Tanintharyi Region of southern Myanmar. Collectively, these community-based groups called themselves the Tenasserim River and Indigenous Peoples’ Network, or TRIP NET for short. While Saw Jonny was a professional activist, with many years of working for various organizations under his belt, the vast majority of his fellow activists had day jobs as farmers and students. Accordingly, as I stress throughout this book, the line between activist and farmer/villager was not always clear-cut. Despite his affable disposition, Saw Jonny was quick to point out when I had misunderstood something and gently put me back on track.

When I tried to pitch a collaborative research project comparing the situation in the Mutraw hills to that in the Tanintharyi Region, he initially agreed that this was an important angle but stressed they were two very different contexts. While most of the Mutraw hills were (nominally at least) under KNU jurisdiction, in the south people lived under “dual administrations.” The majority of those residing in the Tanintharyi Region paid taxes to and were governed by both the Myanmar and KNU states. What is more, it was only “half true” to say that some areas were under KNU control. He took umbrage at the word control since the KNU’s sovereignty there was relatively weak. As he put it, it would be more correct to assert that certain areas had a greater or lesser degree of “KNU activity.” Moreover, KNU and Myanmar state/military activity was shadowed by a great deal of economic activity by a growing number of national and transnational investors.

A week later, I joined Saw Jonny for one of his “exposure trips” for farmers and youth from Tanintharyi. This trip took them to the Khao Kwan (Thai, meaning “the goddess of rice”) Foundation training center for organic farming in Suphanburi, a few hours’ drive northwest of Bangkok. At this center, the instructors encouraged the farmers to “not rely only on the market.” The organic agricultural practices they taught there aimed to “liberate farmers and not just to make money” by “increas[ing] happiness not richness and improv[ing] the quality of the air and the water.” It was a “question of survivability,” the Thai founder of this foundation told these youth and farmers through a translator on the first day. (I return to this theme of liberation in response to dispossession in chapter 6.) When, on the second day, I got talking to the farmers and students from Tanintharyi who had gathered here, they described the ways their rights were gradually being chipped away as armed conflict abated. They explained how, following the ceasefire, they were facing threats of dispossession by sprawling palm oil plantations and alluvial gold mining activities (as documented in Woods 2019). As Saw Jonny later explained, the context of hybrid, or what he called “dual administrations,” had exacerbated processes of creeping dispossession in the Tanintharyi Region.

For example, a few years ago Saw Jonny was approached by a senior figure in the KNU asking for his help to deal with one particular alluvial gold mining project. This elected official told him that the mine “received approval from neither the Myanmar government nor us [the KNU’s highest political body, the Executive Committee]. It is like how food sometimes falls through the gaps between the [flattened bamboo] floorboards of a house.” The Chinese conglomerate that set up this gold mine found a “gap” somewhere, most likely with local-level KNLA commanders, allowing them to set up shop in the area. The KNU official admitted that it was technically within his power to stop it but intimated that due to the delicate nature of this slip, involving high-ranking KNLA officers, his hands were effectively tied. Following this unofficial request, Saw Jonny helped those affected by the gold mine as they began organizing and protesting this development over the coming weeks and months. Eventually, their joint efforts paid off and the alluvial gold mining facility was forced to close, with little explicit help from the KNU government.

In these combined efforts, by villagers-cum-activists, to force the gold mining operation to close, we see glimmers of how countermovements were beginning to gather strength and effectively face down new forms of extractivism and ceasefire territorialization. For Karl Polanyi, throughout history there has been a continual “double movement,” where unchecked market expansion is met by a protective countermovement, which was “a reaction against a dislocation which attacked the fabric of society” ([1944] 2001, 136). He goes on to argue that such movements are often “spontaneous, undirected by opinion, and actuated by a purely pragmatic spirit” (147).

Countermovements in Tanintharyi were gaining steam, pushing back against dispossession not only by economic enclosures but also by conservation enclosures. Increasingly, the Tatmadaw and the Myanmar government were attempting to territorialize the ground beneath Indigenous peoples’ feet through (seemingly) earnest ecological conservation initiatives, in concordance with global environmental organizations (and indeed, in accordance with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals). This phenomenon is commonly spoken of as “fortress conservation” (Brockington 2002) and “green grabbing” (Fairhead et al. 2012).

In Kamoethway, where the vast majority of the participants who attended this “exposure trip” hailed from, a 420,000-acre (1,700 km²) protected area, the Tanintharyi Nature Reserve Project (TNRP), was slowly being established (RKIPN 2016; Woods 2019, 226). As Saw Jonny pointed out, this nature reserve was first conceived in 1996, through a collaboration between, on the one side, French and Malaysian oil and gas companies Total and PETRONAS and, on the other, the Ministry of Environmental Conservation and Forestry of the Myanmar government. This project was part of the oil companies’ corporate responsibility, to offset the damages caused by the Yadana pipeline that runs from off-shore rigs in the Andaman Sea through the width of the Tanintharyi Region and into Thailand (Barbesgaard 2019, 189). The coexistence and complicity between highly destructive extractive industries and this protected area in southeast Myanmar was not, however, a result of a historical quirk or happenstance, but rather archetypical of so-called mainstream/neoliberal conservation practices (Büscher and Fletcher 2020; Milne 2022; West 2006). Big conservation NGOs are, as Sarah Milne (2022) demonstrates in her “insider’s ethnography,” themselves corporate in nature, with similar business models and requirements to make the field legible (see also West 2006).

However, the Myanmar government were only able to enforce the TNRP as the political terrain began to become more settled, following the bilateral ceasefire between the KNU and the Tatmadaw in 2012, when people and goods began flowing more freely. Up until this point, the TNRP was simply a “paper park” (Woods 2019, 226), a park in name only. Following the ceasefire, state officials began informing residents that the northern section of their customary lands, which few if any of the villagers held Myanmar state-recognized land titles to, were in fact encroaching on the buffer zone of a nature reserve. Overnight, the rice fields and vast swaths of areca/betel nut plantations people had cultivated for generations became illegal occupations on government land. In response, Saw Jonny added, “the community elders tried to talk to these officials, but they have nothing on paper,” no land titles to back up their claims to ownership and access. In one fell swoop, great numbers of subsistence farmers were effectively dispossessed of their lands and livelihoods.

Conservation projects thus bear a striking similarity to the previously discussed land laws. In both cases, in situ land possession practices are effectively ignored and effaced. To capture the wider implications of these processes, I follow Woods in arguing that many (seemingly) earnest ecological conservation initiatives in Tanintharyi were one particular manifestation of continuing ceasefire territorialization, which he describes as “green territoriality” (2019, 219). Green territoriality, as Woods so succinctly puts it, acts as a form of “soft counterinsurgency” (220). Conservation in southeast Myanmar, at times, became a kind of counterinsurgency lite.

This soft counterinsurgency, however, was not going unchallenged. As one younger Karen man I met in Khao Kwan accentuated, the Indigenous people of this area were far from sitting idly, waiting for their lands to be expropriated. In his words, “the situation favors the rich man, because he has money and he is close to those who have more power in the government.… This is the reason why we people need to get together in order to deal with those who have money and power and those with the authority.” Accordingly, they began experimenting their own conservation project, conducting their own mapping, and creating a small pocket of Indigenous autonomy.

COUNTER-MAPPING AND TRANSLATION

Following the arrival of representatives of the Myanmar Forest Department, the villagers in Kamoethway gathered and began playing with Indigenous modes of conservation that turned processes of mapping and dispossession on their head. One wizened elder wearing a light blue T-shirt emblazoned with the logo representing his community in Kamoethway explained how, when their customary lands were designated as illegal occupations on the buffer zone of a nature reserve, they looked to local practices of protecting the environment:

The way we manage the forest depends on the landscape and the resources that we each have, so we can [for instance] divide it into wildlife sanctuaries, watershed forests and [zones] utilized for farming. We do this to protect the landscape and the different characteristics of the area. In Karen traditions there is a lot about conserving forests and animals. This is according to our ancestors’ knowledge. But we have also found evidence. We can prove that our efforts are effective. For example, we have started to teach fish conservation, and we have seen that in one or two years the fish population is increasing. So, we have evidence so people can see the results of our activities.

Saw Jonny then elaborated on this, elucidating how they went about zoning their lands (see RKIPN 2016). The community went on to discuss how to formulate local regulations on the watershed forest. First, they “discussed what was the purpose of the watershed forest, why did they need it and how should they regulate it.” Saw Johnny then asked them, “Ok, so can we cut down trees?” After a little back and forth, one person said, “Well, for charcoal we would have to fell some trees,” then another chimed in, “Oh, but we can also just take the old, dead, and dying wood and use them, for making charcoal and building shelters.” Then another villager interjected, “But if we remove too much of this deadwood on the forest floor it could destroy the habitat of certain frogs, fish, and other animals.” Through such protracted discussion, experimenting with different approaches, they eventually formulated their own rules and regulations for these areas. These areas were then transposed onto a map and the rules written down for each area.

The community went on to collectively define and map nine categories of forest with rules and regulations tied to each, agreed upon by all members of the community and detailed in a report cowritten by them (RKIPN 2016). Saw Jonny expounded gleefully that, when they presented this plan to the Myanmar Forest Department, “They were just silent.… Then eventually, the first thing [the Forest Department] said was, ‘who funded this?’” To this, one of the quick-witted villagers interjected, “We started this all by ourselves, and now the donors are starting to come to us.” A Forest Department official then asked, “How can this be? Before the people would never agree and abide by the rules we set out for the forest, why is it that you follow these rules?” Another villager chimed in: “Now the rules are written by the people, so it is easy for us to follow them.”

Fascinatingly, this ensemble of activists, farmers, and students in Tanintharyi faced down the Myanmar state’s continued attempts at ceasefire territorialization by playing with the very same mapping and zoning practices that threatened to dispossess them. In effect, they turned state-like attempts to make these lands legible on their head, as a way to counter encroachments on their lands. By (re)mapping their lands, they were attempting to repossess them. Through these conversations with the participants and with Saw Jonny, I learned that, in a parallel fashion to the Myanmar state, the villagers and activists were experimenting with translating jostling Indigenous modes of possessing the earth into a uniform/standardized grid of different categories of land, to make them legible to the Myanmar state, plotted onto a map and creating their own “geo-body” (Winichakul 1994). Mapping is, after all, “an intrinsically political act” (Peluso 1995, 383). The activists-cum-farmers had effectively created their own conservation zone and with it a small patch of autonomous terrain.

These efforts resemble what Nancy Peluso (1995) calls counter-mapping. By appropriating state technologies of territoriality, they hoped to bolster the legitimacy of “customary” claims, in the process redefining and reinventing them (Peluso 1995, 384, 400; see also Chao 2022, 51–73). In this manner, Indigenous maps and practices were translated into legible and legalizing counter-maps to establish property rights that were readable and assessable to the Myanmar state, to be used in negotiations. As the wizened elder put it, in these activities “we have evidence so people can see the results of our activities.”

These activities were beginning to bear fruit. Myanmar forestry personnel were left speechless when first presented with this map, finally exclaiming, “How can this be?” This counter-mapping marked a startling turn in the protracted armed conflict in southeast Myanmar. In the face of creeping ceasefire territorialization and threats of dispossession, these countermovements worked to repossess the landscape. Such radical experiments to (re)zone and (re)map forests to make Indigenous land possession practices legible were ongoing, even as war returned to Myanmar following the 2021 coup.

The last time I met Saw Jonny was at the KESAN office in Chiang Mai where he came for a flying visit, with a large rolled-up sheet of paper tucked under his arm. When some of the activists and I asked what he was carrying, Saw Jonny excitedly unrolled it onto the table in front of us to reveal a rough map of Kamoethway valley, crisscrossed with lines to create different areas, each filled in with bright splashes of color. He was there to get help from resident cartography wizard Saw Hpweh to turn this sketch into a fully scaled and digitalized map. They planned to draw on this map when arguing their case to the relevant authorities in the pushback against the Tanintharyi Nature Reserve Project. He explained how, following the discussion to decide how to divide up the landscape into discrete zones, described above, and having agreed upon the rules and regulations for each of these zones, they marked them onto a map in different colors.

After he showed us these different zones, Doh K’Oh, the overworked KESAN activist mentioned in the introduction, leaned in and asked what all the red patches were. “Aha!” exclaimed Saw Jonny, “they are the ‘cultural forest’ areas.” As he turned to us and immediately caught the puzzlement upon our faces, he added, “These are the areas where people practice hku or shifting cultivation.” Swidden farming, or taungya in Burmese, was, as Saw Jonny put it mildly, “not very popular with the Myanmar government,” so instead “we call them cultural forests.”⁸

In a community report from Kamoethway (RKIPN 2016) published the year prior to this conversation, “cultural forests” was one of several different categories of forestland that the community demarcated to “preserve” and “revive” disappearing Indigenous practices. Other areas marked on the map that Saw Jonny showed us, and described in the community report, included a forest reserved for growing medicinal herbs and an “Umbilical Cord Forest.” The latter was rooted in long-lapsed Thoo Hkoh/Moh La Pa Lah (animist/ancestral) practices in this area in which people once hung or buried the umbilical cords of newborns in or under a particular (usually especially vibrant) tree. As I learned from a Pwakanyaw elder from the Thai side of the border, where this practice was still widespread, this tree kept the child’s spirits (k’la) safe from being “eaten/attacked” (aw loh) by spectral presences.⁹ These areas were thus deeply entangled with practices of possessed landscapes, where, as I argue in part 1 of this book, landscapes were treated as already owned, and its uses had to constantly be negotiated with its spectral owners. Yet, as he had told me earlier, Saw Jonny was unsure whether any practicing Thoo Hkoh/Moh La Pa Lah were left in the Tanintharyi Region. This last point illustrates the persistent issues such countermovements run against in the process of translation.

Returning to Peluso’s notion of counter-maps, it becomes clear that these technologies often “redefine and reinvent” customary claims as new “traditions” in the process (Peluso 1995, 384). Moreover, counter-mapping runs the risk of “fixing” or “freezing” Indigenous practices, robbing them of their flexibility and indeterminacy (Peluso 1995, 400; see also Li 2010). Paige West has long warned that translations, as deeply political acts, can lead to the “generification of culture” whereby “on-the-ground knowledge and practice begins to look like the outside renderings of them” (2005, 633). As the Italian adage goes, “to translate is to betray,” to redefine and reinvent.

Following Walter Benjamin, however, the betrayal inherent in translation is often not to the source language but to the destination language (2004, 253–69; see also Hage 2015, 65). Accordingly, by translating Indigenous notions into forms legible to the Myanmar state, these countermovements in southeast Myanmar aimed to deform and subvert state forms. Rather than continuing here by wading into the broad and vexed debate on the practices and politics of translation in anthropology, I want to foreground the pragmatism of these farmers-cum-activists’ relations to translation.¹⁰ In many ways the translation process was grasped as a practical way to bolster the legitimacy of their efforts while also deforming and subverting the Myanmar state’s attempts to dispossess them. These inventive experiments in translating Indigenous practices and counter-mapping in Tanintharyi were similar to the situation farther north in the Mutraw hills but differed in several important ways.

In contrast to the Mutraw hills, Myanmar’s deep south was a highly hybrid and plural context. The ensemble of activists, farmers, and students (these roles often becoming jumbled) in the Tanintharyi Region constantly countered and pushed back on ceasefire territorialization, not only from the Myanmar government and the Tatmadaw but, in part, also from the KNU itself. This was especially the case with the gold mining project, where this ensemble often had to face down “development” projects that had the approval not of the Tatmadaw, but of the KNU government (at the district level at least). In Saw Jonny’s telling of this story, when this ensemble of farmers, students, and activists began to organize and protest against the gold mine, and as it became increasingly difficult for the mine to continue business as usual, some KNLA commanders from this area began calling this same KNU government official. They requested he order Saw Jonny and this motley band of activists/farmers to cease and desist immediately.

The KNLA commanders called these actions “civil disorder,” claiming that Saw Jonny was training villagers to rebel against the KNU. The senior official did indeed contact Saw Jonny again, but instead of chastising him, told him that he must continue working and urged him to keep up the pressure. This politician then exclaimed that these activist/farmers were “like the mushroom that grows on a termite mound. You know termite mounds, right? They are very hard but somehow the mushroom still manages to grow.” Saw Jonny began giggling as he reached this final detail.

In the next chapter, I turn my attention to the area around Ta K’Thwee Duh in the Mutraw hills to explore similar experiments with conservation. Here, where Thoo Hkoh cosmologies and practices were still commonplace, I found that people were not so much reviving or reinventing but repurposing actually existing Indigenous conservation practices. In doing so, they were drawing on alternative modes of sovereignty and politics that were intermittently becoming aligned with KNU’s long struggle for greater autonomy: generating a novel kind of alter-politics.