IN this final chapter, I take a closer look at how Indigenous modes of ownership and sovereignty, and small-scale experiments with conservation and autonomy, were being rescaled into a sprawling (6,747 km²) protected area in the Mutraw highlands known as the Salween Peace Park. Through conversations with the activists behind it, all belonging to the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network, and by analyzing the documents they (co)produced, I explore how the idea of a peace park emerged and how it was enacted in the law and on the ground. In this exploration I show how these activists worked simultaneously bottom-up and top-down. They worked closely with both Indigenous people, rescaling their situated cosmologies and practices to a large-scale conservation zone, and with the Karen National Union, and occasionally Myanmar, state policy makers, lobbying to create a gap in the legal landscape for the Salween Peace Park to flourish. In the process, these activists were messing with the geographic and political scales of conservation and revolution and prefiguring alterative futures that unsettled and subverted established notions of what peace parks and self-determination should look like.

This large-scale experiment in conservation and autonomy worked in concert with the KNU, the Salween Peace Park dovetailing with and extending the KNU’s protracted struggle for self-determination. The people working on the Salween Peace Park, such as the activist quoted above, saw themselves as revolutionaries, carrying on the fight of their foremothers and fathers. As the white hot “heat” of armed conflict dissipated during Myanmar’s transitional decade, from 2011 to 2021, the struggle for greater self-determination was increasingly enacted by other means. To better capture the revolutionary zeal of the Salween Peace Park, I coin the term liberation conservation.

One knock-on effect of bundling conservation together with revolution was that the Salween Peace Park departed markedly from standard models of peace parks, and indeed of large-scale conservation projects in general. Peace parks can be found all across the globe and are generally understood as “transfrontier conservation areas” or “transborder protected areas.” Their guiding principle is to cultivate peace between different groups of (warring) people through encouraging them to cooperate in the conservation of an area that straddles a boundary they share (Ali 2007; Büscher 2013; Watson 2014). But the Salween Peace Park straddled no border, and the cooperation it promoted was largely limited to coordination between different departments and townships of the KNU. Rather than seeing this as a grave misunderstanding on the part of KESAN, I show how this mismatch aligned with their pragmatic politics, leveraging the different interpretations of a peace park to appeal to various groups at the same time—and unsettling what a peace park is and can be in the process. This all began when the activists were looking for a way to combine their different conservation and lobbying activities and, as they were fond of saying, started “thinking bigger.”

“THINKING BIGGER”

The KESAN office was ensconced in a residential area down a maze of small side streets on the outskirts of Chiang Mai. The first time I visited the office I managed to get hopelessly lost on the way. I arrived over an hour late, dripping in sweat, my brain pickled from cycling around in circles in the midday sun. After cooling off a little in their air-conditioned meeting room, and after the activists had finished cracking jokes about my sense of direction, or lack thereof, I attempted to pitch a research collaboration with them. I began by describing their work in the Mutraw hills as a type of “insurgent conservation.” Before I could finish my spiel, one of the leading activists, Ta Thoo, who sat behind a laptop adorned with stickers of KNU logos and Karen flags, interjected. He asserted that they are rather hostile to words such as insurgent and rebel due to the thorny connotations they have gathered over the decades of armed conflict in southeast Myanmar.¹

James, a North American who described himself as a consultant to KESAN, his hair pulled back into long black ponytail, added that “I want to make it clear that KESAN is not working in parallel to the KNU. We work very much with the KNU. This work should be seen as part of the revolution, part of the struggle.” He went on to elaborate how KESAN’s efforts to protect the biodiversity of the Mutraw District of the Karen State came from within KNU’s Karen Forestry Department KFD. Their conservation work in Mutraw sprang largely from the KFD’s definition of a “protected landscape” (that they, in turn, appear to have adopted from the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN).² Ta Thoo continued that, in working from within the Forestry Department, the vast majority of their activities consisted of lobbying the KNU on land rights issues and how best to govern forest lands. Indeed, as a Thai researcher, Eh, who had worked closely with KESAN for some years, put it succinctly, “KESAN is more of a technical body [of the KNU] that deals with conservation issues.” After putting this issue to bed, Ta Thoo went on to detail their current big conservation project in the Mutraw hills, the Salween Peace Park.

Looking up from his computer screen again after furiously typing, Ta Thoo explained to me how the first seeds of the peace park were sown in 2015 when they “started establishing wildlife sanctuaries and began to think bigger.” They experimented with ways to combine all their smaller conservation and development projects in this area with their work protecting and promoting Indigenous kaw governance systems prevalent in southeast Myanmar in order to create a larger conservation zone. By working from within the KNU, they lobbied policymakers to compose and amend laws that would allow the Salween Peace Park to take root.

Ta Thoo went on to state that the Salween Peace Park was “one of the ways to work on the federal situation.” However, he quickly added that it was “just an idea. A local solution that could not be applied in all places.” He then concluded that the Salween Peace Park “is part of our movement to claim land and control this land as we are Karen.”

* * *

Ta Thoo’s talk of “thinking bigger” gestured toward the way KESAN was experimenting, stitching together its work lobbying the KNU and establishing smaller conservation zones in the Mutraw hills with the Indigenous kaw land possession practices (explored in chapters 2 and 3) in order to compose the Salween Peace Park. Glancing back at the map of this protected area presented in the introduction to this book, we see how these processes were taking shape. KESAN has spent decades laboring to create wildlife sanctuaries, to reaffirm (colonial-era) reserve forests, and to establish locally managed community forests. Through the Salween Peace Park, all these different patches of land were woven together with kaw or “customary territories” to create a peace park.

At its heart, the Salween Peace Park, much like each kaw, was itself a patchwork of different lands—that is it say, patches of heterogeneous yet related lands, bundled together to form a delineated space (see chapter 2; Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt 2019). “Thinking bigger” for these activists entailed drawing these heterogeneous types of land together to form a contiguous space that would act as an Indigenous-run protected area, 6,747 km2 across. For scale, this makes the Salween Peace Park a little larger than the Everglades National Park in the United States and little under half the size of the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. Akin to sister conservation projects in the south of the country (see chapter 4), this protected area in the Mutraw District of southeast Myanmar strived to push back against growing ceasefire territorialization.

By “thinking bigger” the activists behind the Salween Peace Park were also thinking across geographical and political scales. They were resisting threats of dispossession by “adapting”—that is to say, translating, mapping, and also rescaling—small-scale situated Indigenous practices, such as kaw lands, into a wider (trans)regional project. The peace park was weaving together conservation with a small c—which Terese Gagnon (2024; see also Nazarea 2005) describes as sensory and embodied practices of making good relations with landscapes—with Conservation with a capital C, of more formalized top-down efforts to create protected areas. In the process, the activists were building peace and autonomy by opening up a space for and prefiguring alternative modes of federalism that emerged from Indigenous land possession practices. The centrality of situated Indigenous land possession practices, and the way they were translated and rescaled into key aspects of the sprawling Salween Peace Park, becomes particularly salient in its official charter.

The introduction in the Salween Peace Park charter reads, “The Salween Peace Park is a grassroots people-centered alternative to the previous Myanmar government and foreign companies’ plans for ecologically destructive and socially inequitable development in the Salween River basin.” To this end, “the charter finds its inspiration in the core of the Indigenous Karen way of life, namely a worldview that sees land, forests, waters, and people, as inseparable.… The charter represents an adaption of the beliefs and values that the Indigenous Karen people have held for generations to a more structured system of governance and management” (Mutraw District et al. 2018, 4).

CLEARING A LEGAL SPACE FOR THE PEACE PARK

At the crack of dawn on Christmas Eve 2016, I joined the lion’s share of the KESAN staff from their Chiang Mai office, along with several of their non-Karen consultants and interns, on the long car, boat, and tractor ride to Deh Bu Noh, the administrative capital of the KNU’s Mutraw District in the Northern Karen State, to attend a public consultation meeting for the Salween Peace Park. It was there that I first met the three men whom I would later accompany as they attempted to protect their forest from overexploitation. Following the official opening of the public consultation meeting, the draft charter of the Salween Peace Park was read aloud, in full, to the crowd assembled in the large meeting hall at the edge of town. It was read to participants who had traveled far and wide from nearly all areas that fall inside the park’s borders. This was so everyone in attendance, including those unable to read, could comment on and suggest amendments to the document before it was finalized. Following the consultation meeting, the charter was revised again (this was the second of three consultation meetings), and the final document was later presented at a series of smaller meetings followed by an election, held at the seat of each village tract within the Salween Peace Park area, throughout 2018. At each of these elections, representatives from each community that would become part of the peace park, 75.1 percent of the voting age population, voted in favor of endorsing the charter. On December 18 of the same year, the Salween Peace Park was officially established, becoming a legal entity in KNU law (albeit, this status was less clear in Myanmar state law; KESAN 2019). This landmark event was reached through a long, drawn-out process of clearing a space in the legal landscape where the Salween Peace Park could flourish.

KEY EVENTS RELATED TO THE SALWEEN PEACE PARK

Chartering a Course to Conservation

Reading aloud this over-forty-page document, with continual breaks for questions and comments, was a laborious and time-consuming process. As I stood just outside the grand meeting hall where it was being presented, I noticed how many of the participants’ patience quickly wore thin. People often slopped off to look for food, tobacco, betel, a place to snooze, or all of the above. But listening in, I heard how the charter opened with a bold “Preamble”:

We, the Indigenous Karen People of Mutraw,

Recognizing our roots that transcend national boundaries;

Respecting the natural world, which has sustained our people for generations;

Honoring the memory of those who have struggled against all forms of injustice against the people and the Earth;

In order to create and sustain a lasting peace in our lands, protect and maintain the environmental integrity of the Salween River basin, preserve our unique cultural heritage, and further the self-determination of our people;

Do enact and establish:

The Charter of the Salween Peace Park. (Mutraw District et al. 2018, 6)

Following the apparent nod to the preamble to the United States Constitution in evoking “we the people,” the charter goes on to explicitly lay out that the “legitimacy of governance shall be determined collectively by the people of the Salween Peace Park” and “not disproportionately influenced or unilaterally determined by the KNU Mutraw District government or the Salween Peace Park Governing Committee” (Mutraw District et al. 2018, 12). Moreover, as Indigenous people, the residents of the Salween Peace Park “have the right to manage and govern their own lands and the natural resources above and below the ground that are inalienably part of Indigenous territory,” since “customary rights to ancestral domain take precedence over governance systems that have excluded the voices and perspectives of Indigenous Karen people” (11). The general thrust of the charter was that the Salween Peace Park should “devolve management responsibilities to decentralized committees that will be responsible for the day-to-day management of the collective and public affairs of the Salween Peace Park at the village level” (19).

Continuing to listen carefully, in the final chapter on land and land ownership, it became clear that terms used throughout, such as decentralized committees, Indigenous territory, and ancestral domain, were differing ways of referring to the practices and cosmologies tied to kaw lands, which I examine in part 1 of this book. In Article 107 (Section 5.1), the charter elaborates that “the land in the Salween Peace Park that are organized under the Indigenous kaw system shall be considered as land owned by the villages or communities that forms the kaw” (Mutraw District et al. 2018, 36). Consequently, while not stated explicitly, it was evident here that kaw, and the particular modes of ephemeral and nesting ownership and spectral sovereignty implicated in them, were not only “an integral part of Indigenous Karen culture” (37) but also integral to the workings of the Salween Peace Park as a whole. The “kaw customary lands” served as the backbone of the Salween Peace Park, enshrined as pockets of local autonomy. In effect, much like similar movements, the charter translated Indigenous practices and cosmologies, such as those tied to kaw, to forms that were more legible to both states and international conservation groups.

The charter rescaled Indigenous practices from small-scale situated politics (conservation with a small c) into (trans)national-scale environmental governance policy (Conservation with a big C). One practical example of this process of translation and rescaling comes in the section addressing access and use of—that is to say, relationships with—forests. Here, the charter dictates that “the integrity of sacred forest sites is inviolable, and the people of Salween Peace Park, regardless of faith or ancestral background, shall respect existing customary rules and regulations against access and use” (Mutraw District et al. 2018, 29).

By declaring the inviolability of such “sacred forest sites,” the authors of the text intimated the patches of the landscape regularly referred to in the Mutraw hills as ta thoo ta pgho or simply hsoo, “potent” or “strong.” As discussed in previous chapters, potent places such as the loh (glossed in the charter as “spirit dwelling sites”; see Mutraw District et al. 2018, 36) and Hpu Noh Noh Deh, or “the path that drinks your blood,” were wedded to day-to-day practices of treating the landscape as possessed—both occupied and owned by a plethora of spectral presences. Consequently, people refrained from clearing patches of forest in, and sometimes even attempted to avoid walking through, such potent places out of fear they might vex its spectral owner/s. Knowledge of these places was passed on not only via oral histories and hta (dramatic poems) but also through a robust set of ta du ta htu, or orally transmitted taboos. The charter translated and rescaled ta du ta htu into “customary rules and regulations” that it demands all inhabitants of the Salween Peace Park “shall respect” and that local rules and regulations should be determined “with respect to Indigenous Karen customs and traditions” (36).

Indeed, as the charter explicitly states from the start, it “finds its inspiration in” and builds on “an adaption” of Indigenous practices and cosmologies, which it attempts to marshal into “a more structured system of governance and management” (Mutraw District et al. 2018, 4). That is to say, akin to the burgeoning movements in Tanintharyi explored in chapter 4, the Salween Peace Park translated Indigenous practices and created counter-maps to push back against ceasefire territorialization and to repossess the landscape. This process of translation was, as I have shown, a deeply pragmatic affair, focused on making Indigenous land possession practices legible to national and transnational actors by making them “more structured.” In doing so, these “adaptions” of Indigenous practices also rescaled them, from micro-level day-to-day politics to macro-level units of environmental governance, bolstering the legitimacy of the peace park.

KESAN was not simply scaling-up kaw to KNU state–level legal entities; it was constantly working multidirectionally and across scales. Delving deeper into the process of writing kaw into law, anthropologist Emily Hong (2017, 227) demonstrates how KESAN was upending common approaches that tend to oppose top-down legal wrangling to bottom-up resistance. In the 2015 update of KNU’s land laws (that I address in the next section), for instance, KESAN built on micro-level kaw politics and simultaneously made explicit citations to macro-level laws—such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fishers and Forests (from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations)—greatly strengthening the legal standing of kaw politics in the process (Hong 2017, 233).

The charter of the Salween Peace Park similarly relies heavily on multiscalar movements, making citations to other foundational documents. Along with the United States Constitution, intimated in the preamble, it constantly refers back to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples—especially to Article 3 on Indigenous peoples’ “right to self-determination” (UN 2007). As the introduction proclaims, “the Charter enshrines the right of the indigenous Karen people to self-determination” (Mutraw District et al. 2018, 4; my emphasis). Paying attention to the strategic ways scale was deployed sheds light on the procedural ways in which scales were constantly made and remade and the manner in which the global and local were “mutually reproduced” (Hong 2017, 229; Milne 2022, 20; West 2006).

In the context of this book, I refer to this process of continual negotiation, of making and unmaking scales, as “messing with scale.” In this framing I highlight the highly pragmatic and playful ways in which the activists deployed scale to suit the situation at hand, in a manner that tended to unsettle and subvert them. Through messing with scales, kaw were not simply scaled-up into legible, largely unchangeable, and scalable units of governance that could be rolled out in other areas of southeast Myanmar, as is often the case in big Conservation projects (Milne 2022, 14–15; Tsing 2012). A far more complex and messier picture was emerging. As Ta Thoo reminded me, the Salween Peace Park was “just an idea. A local solution that could not be applied in all places.”

In accordance with the charter, much of the land that fell within the Salween Peace Park was grasped as owned and controlled first and foremost by the people of the given kaw. It was they who determined local rules and regulations of land tenure and use. By implication, Indigenous modes of ownership and sovereignty—ultimately resting in the hands of the k’sah and the other spectral presences discussed in part 1 of this book—were elicited. Thus, local rules and regulations, or ta du ta htu, were always “determined” by humans in relation to the appetites and gripes of their spectral sovereigns.³ This militated against any notion of transforming kaw into scalable units of environmental governance that could be “rolled out” across southeast Myanmar.

The translation and rescaling of kaw carried out throughout the charter followed the activists’ pragmatic politics: as a practical way to simultaneously bolster legitimacy through appealing to different scales while also unsettling and subverting these scales in the process. The activists were oriented not only toward countering the Myanmar state and affiliated investors but also to prefiguring new scales and new modes of politics that embodied a form of self-determination.

As many of the KESAN activists continued to stress to me, however, the charter and the Salween Peace Park itself did not materialize out of thin air. Both this legal document and the Indigenous-run protected area more generally cannot and should not be considered separately from the several decades of activism KESAN has put into supporting Pwakanyaw communities in both sustaining themselves and protecting their environments and in their continued advocacy for these communities, lobbying the KNU to build “good governance.” The Salween Peace Park project emerged out of and was built upon a great deal of work in the background by KESAN activists clearing a space within the KNU legal landscape where this large-scale conservation project could take root. This legal gap was opened through lobbying the KNU aggressively both to shape land laws and to begin awarding collective land titles to kaw lands. Only then could the Salween Peace Park eventually blossom.

Lobbying, Land Laws, and Collective Tenure Titles

Spending time with these Chiang Mai–based activists, I learned that many of their efforts were invested in lobbying the KFD. Predominantly, this lobbying was conducted through the KNU’s Central Land Committee, where several KESAN staff members had significant influence, and was foundational for the establishing of the Salween Peace Park. One of the first fruits of these combined labors came in the current land policy, officially approved by the KNU’s highest legal body, the Executive Committee, in December 2015.

The current KNU land policy came about through many years of hard graft, petitioning local government members and working closely with external (transnational) activists and academics. One tangible outcome of this work was that KESAN staff were largely fluent not only in technical terminology but also academic terminology and current debates. Consequently, they were able to bring their combined engagement with other activists, academics, and non-government organizations such as the Transnational Institute to bear on the reworking of the land policy. This sustained contact left a deep impression on the final document. Traces of the activists’ engagements with the wider world could be discerned in the ways ownership was dealt with explicitly in the newest iteration of the land policy, whereas previous versions skirted around the subject.

Take the first land policy from 1974. Here the KNU decreed, “the land must be in our hands.” The 2005 update, however, proclaimed, “land to the native people.” In the 1974 version, it was unclear who the possessive determiner “our” referred to: the policy’s authors (i.e., KNU leaders) or the Indigenous people themselves? In the 2005 update, it remained opaque as to what specific rights were implied in stating that the land was “to” the Indigenous people: to use, to borrow, to buy? It was therefore striking that the newest iteration from 2015, a document strongly shaped by the influence of KESAN and its external activist-academic interlocutors, placed ownership firmly at the center.

The current land policy opens by proclaiming “people are owner [sic] of the land” (KNU 2015, 2). Delving deeper into this document, we find that its engagement with issues of ownership goes far beyond simple window dressing. In the following lines, this policy document states that since “land policies are never neutral” and as such “necessarily transform the status quo,” it was essential to take a point of departure in “socially-legitimate customary occupation and use rights” (2). This point is repeated and reinforced throughout. The 2015 land policy then represents one of the first concerted efforts to translate and rescale on-the-ground land possession practices—that is to say, kaw politics and spectral sovereignty—into official KNU policy and law. In the current land policy, KESAN’s twin priorities of environmental conservation and the protection of customary rights and practices are explicitly entwined for the first time. These labors to “think bigger” were finally bearing fruit. The deep imprint of KESAN’s advocacy becomes clearer upon reading the KNU land policy document from 2015.

In Article 3.6 on “KNU Authorities-Managed Public Purpose Land,” for example, there is a specific article on “Reserve Land” (Article 3.6.2) that effectively enshrines “Wildlife Protected Areas,” “Reserved Forest,” and “National Park Areas” into KNU law (KNU 2015, 34). This article dictates that these categories of land can only be established by free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) together with the “customary authorities.” Speaking with KESAN staff, they explained that the wording of this paragraph helped convince the KNU Executive Committee to accept the Salween Peace Park as official KNU policy in 2017. The peace park in effect fell into the category of “National Park,” established through an explicit process of FPIC, together with the “customary authorities.” Simultaneously, Article 3.3 refers directly to “‘Kaw’ Lands,” effectively bringing Indigenous land possession practices into the KNU legal fold:

Land, forests, fisheries, water and other related natural resources have social, cultural, spiritual, economic, environmental and political value to indigenous peoples and other communities with Kaw (customary tenure) systems. KNU Authorities must recognize, respect and always take into account these non-monetized values for peoples and village communities with Kaw tenure systems. (KNU 2015, 28)

Through the specific wording of this article, the KNU became legally obligated not only to recognize kaw land possession practices in the Mutraw hills but, in certain situations, to treat them as “socially-legitimate” modes of ownership and governance. The wording of the Salween Peace Park charter was therefore largely a restatement of existing KNU policy. What I find particularly compelling about this article on the KNU’s land policy is that kaw, as they are conceived here—as modes of land possession and as political systems—were little known, let alone a part of day-to-day practices, beyond the Mutraw hills.⁴ This fact suggests that this section of the land policy was penned with this particular stretch along the lower Salween River, or perhaps even the Salween Peace Park itself, in mind. Whether this was happenstance or the result of careful planning by KESAN is, perhaps, of lesser importance than the effect the new land policy had. This new legal framework helped pave the way for the Salween Peace Park, as a “National Park” composed of kaw that were treated as “socially-legitimate” modes of ownership and governance, to become KNU national policy.

While the 2015 land policy may have been one of the first of KESAN’s attempts to “think bigger” to yield results, it was far from the last. Rather than resting on their laurels, these activists wasted no time in using the new land policy as a wedge, to slowly open up a gap in KNU policy and law for the Salween Peace Park to take root. The next step in thinking bigger came two years later in 2017.

The KNU’s official website proclaims that their policy “is National Democracy. It fully recognises and encourages private ownership.”⁵ Accordingly, the KNU has long issued land titles to individual household plots and paddy fields, facilitating the transfer and, indeed, sale of land. In chapter 2, I illustrate one downstream implication of this policy where, as people in the Mutraw hills began establishing their own paddy fields and applying for titles to them, local land possession practices were slowly being stretched to the breaking point. In response to these transformations, together with other activists, KESAN worked behind the scenes to induce the KFD to issue collective land titles, in the form of community forest land titles. Community forest land titles recognize the collective tenure of a local community to a demarcated forested area. Community forests entail that the communities themselves are given a large degree of latitude in formulating day-to-day rules and regulations governing access and use of these areas and their enforcement. The rules and regulations laid down by a community that hold a collective title to their land are both semi-autonomous of, and have some legal backing from, local KNU and KFD authorities. While, as I demonstrate in chapter 5, the process of obtaining them was not always straightforward, this made community forest land titles highly attractive to many in the Mutraw hills. Off the back of the 2015 land policy and growing acceptance of community forest titles, KESAN pushed the KNU to extend collective land titles to kaw lands.

At the beginning of 2017, after years of lobbying, the KNU eventually acceded and began issuing kaw titles—with the proviso they start tentatively with a “test phase.” This official decision allowed KESAN, together with the KFD and Karen Agriculture Department (KAD), to continue and intensify their work demarcating each kaw within the limits of the Salween Peace Park. The process of demarcations required careful and protracted collaboration with the inhabitants of each kaw. To achieve this, KESAN again worked across scales, building on the deep ties and trust they have forged with communities across the Mutraw hills over many years of extensive activist work and with KNU policy makers. Elders, activists, and experts were brought together with GPS technology to translate and map the indeterminate practices tied to kaw into discrete demarcated areas. Following the demarcation and mapping of each kaw, with the official go-ahead from the KNU, the next step (which happened after my fieldwork had ended) was for the residents to be awarded with titles to these (kaw) lands. This new form of tenure, much like community forests, entailed collective legal rights over the land but, beyond forested areas, also covered fallow fields, swidden patches, rivers, lakes, and mountains—indeed all territories within the kaw’s borders that were not individually held. Under a kaw land tenure title, the community themselves dictated the local rules and regulations, including the allocation of conservation areas such as community forests.

In one fell swoop, KESAN’s protracted and intensive activism with local communities and their advocacy in the highest echelons of KNU governance finally culminated in a situation in which the various patches marked on the Salween Peace Park map (see map 1 in the introduction) went from purely illustrative to demonstrative of the de facto political organization of this area. These different categories of land—the reserve forests and wildlife sanctuaries, the community forests and kaw or “customary territories”—were gently shepherded into KNU policy in no small part through KESAN’s diligent efforts.

This activism and advocacy, as I argue, emerged out of pragmatic politics of translation and constant messing with scales. KESAN simultaneously translated and messed with the scale of situated Indigenous practices, KNU policy, and global resolutions, bringing them to bear upon one another to garner legitimacy for the Salween Peace Park. These different forms of activism and advocacy were directed toward the same goal of wedging open a gap in the KNU’s legal system and a physical space in the Mutraw hills to stage an encounter between different modes of politics, allowing the Salween Peace Park to take root and flourish.

In bringing together different scales—situated Indigenous land possession practices, KNU policy, and the transnational United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People—these activists were subtly unsettling and subverting established notions of scales as self-contained, unable to form relationships with one another and arranged vertically in a neat and nested fashion (Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Tsing 2012). In doing so, they also upset notions of social movements as either top-down or bottom-up (Hong 2017). This becomes clear in the opening pages of the charter of the Salween Peace Park, where it is stated that “in the spirit of self-determination,” the peace park aims to open up a space (or indeed “territory” as the charter declares) in which the Indigenous people themselves may “manage and govern their natural resources and lands” (Mutraw District et al. 2018, 3–4). These struggles to create a gap in KNU policy and a space for self-determination to flourish in the Mutraw hills became most evident on one of my last days in Chiang Mai.

On the same day that I met Saw Jonny for the last time at KESAN’s main office, I learned that one of the final pieces of KESAN’s ongoing struggle, to create “good governance” and clear a space in the legal landscape that would allow the Salween Peace Park to flourish, had fallen into place. Not long after Saw Jonny abruptly disappeared again, Doh K’Oh turned to me and rather casually informed me that, during the last meeting convened by the KNU’s Executive Committee, the Salween Peace Park had been accepted into the KNU legal fold as official policy. As Ta Thoo had predicted in our first meeting almost a year earlier, by appealing to the KFD’s policy of protected landscapes and the land policy (especially Article 3.6.2 on reserve land), this “crazy idea” (as Doh K’Oh referred to it) of an Indigenous-managed decentralized peace park had officially acceded to mainstream KNU policy, becoming part and parcel of their continued struggle for autonomy. Yet, as Ta Thoo continually stressed, the peace park itself was by no means the end goal of KESAN’s combined labors. By naming this protected area a peace park, they were thinking very big indeed, gesturing toward a prefigurative politics that went far beyond both conservation and protective countermovements.

THAT WHICH WE CALL CONSERVATION: WHAT IS IN A NAME?

The ideas underpinning the Salween Peace Park sit uncomfortably alongside descriptions of peace parks in other places around the world. As mentioned above, peace parks are commonly spoken of as “transfrontier conservation areas” or “transborder protected areas.” This left me to ponder: What exactly was KESAN implying by choosing to name this Indigenous-run protected area a peace park? Through my conversations with KESAN staff and their supporters I learned that the very indeterminacy and playfulness of the way they used the term peace park was central to the political efficacy of this protected area more generally. A conversation with the director of KESAN made this line of thinking clearer to me.

The first time I met the director was at KESAN’s main office in Chiang Mai. Like many of his colleagues, he, too, sported a long ponytail, his reaching nearly all the way down his back, and he wore thin metal-framed glasses that kept slipping down his nose as he spoke, such that he was constantly pushing them up again with his index finger. Beaming as he introduced himself, he explained how they had not always envisioned the protected area along the lower Salween basin as a peace park. As Ta Thoo had mentioned earlier, when they first brainstormed how to stitch together their disparate conservation projects to their ongoing work protecting and promoting kaw lands to compose a wider protected area, they leaned heavily on the KNU’s forest policy and the IUCN’s terminology—that is, labeling it a protected landscape. However, they soon found such terminology too constricting for their means. The IUCN’s category of “Protected Landscape” expressly aimed to “protect and sustain important landscapes/seascapes and the associated nature conservation and other values created by interactions with humans through traditional management practices.”⁶ In this definition, there is no provision for how these interactions would be protected and sustained in (former) war zones and heavily militarized areas, such as the Mutraw hills. The activists then began looking closer at the notion of a peace park. Thus, the origin story of the Salween Peace Park’s conception was constantly reworked.

A few weeks after meeting the director, during the opening speech on the first day of the consultation meeting, I found that—not dissimilar to the highlanders’ constant refashioning of colonial debris and of histories (see chapter 1)—he regularly reworked the tale of the peace park’s formation to better fit the audience and situation at hand. In this particular version, he explained to the assembled crowd that KESAN first conceptualized this conservation area as a kind of wilderness (category Ib in IUCN’s now defunct classification of protected areas) but, for obvious reasons, quickly found this characterization to be a poor fit. Eventually they settled on the notion of a peace park, translated into Pwakanyaw as Ta Mu Ta Hku K’Ruh (literally, pleasant-and-cool/peace garden). Much to his chagrin, the director added, Karen people often came up to him and said, “We hear that you are building a flower garden.” To this he added, “I don’t know where this rumor is coming from,” followed by a hearty belly laugh. The last particle, k’ruh, usually denotes a patch of land beside a house where flowers and fruit trees are planted, or an allotment close by where fruits and vegetables for household consumption are grown—not unlike a flower garden.

When I inquired about this lexical slippage, the director conceded that it was a slightly unfortunate translation. They were unable to find a Pwakanyaw term that better encapsulated the aspirations and ideals of this project. However, as Walter Benjamin (2006, 250) argues, there is a value to “bad” translations in that they can lead to productive misunderstandings. Such lexical slippages were less errors than part and parcel of KESAN’s pragmatic politics that aimed to cultivate indeterminacy as they messed with scales and evoked the “spirit of self-determination.” This became most apparent when the director made public speeches about the Salween Peace Park.

As the public face of KESAN, with several decades of public speaking under his belt, the director had developed a well-rehearsed presentation of the Salween Peace Park, in both Pwakanyaw and English, which appealed to broad audiences. Each time I heard him speak about this conservation zone, he followed a similar routine, culminating in an articulation of the three core aspirations of this peace park. While in English he talked of these aspirations as “the three pillars” that the peace park rested upon, in Pwakanyaw he evoked a more poetic image. Holding up the first two fingers and thumb of his left hand so his fingertips formed a triangle, he talked to the crowd of these aspirations as the “hearthstones” that propped up this protected area. The three “hearthstones” were environmental integrity, cultural survival, and peace and self-determination.⁷ The first two, to protect biodiversity and to protect Indigenous peoples’ culture and livelihoods, were not entirely unexpected aspirations for a project led by a network of ecological and Indigenous activists. The final stone, however, intimated aspirations far beyond the remit of the other two.

The first two aspirations of the Salween Peace Park, taken on their own, gestured toward a protected area that resonated strongly with the IUCN’s category of a “Protected Landscape,” albeit a radical, bottom-up, Indigenous-run vision of this category. The third aspiration, however, by ingeniously bundling self-determination together with peace, radically refigured the whole project. While for the activists the third aspiration was what made this protected area in the Mutraw hills a peace park, this was in fact a highly unorthodox translation of the notion. By paying close attention to the discrepancy between how peace parks have been conceived previously and the aspirations of the Salween Peace Park, I hope to shed light on what the activists hoped to achieve with this radical experiment in conservation.

“Parks for Peace”

The CEO of the Peace Parks Foundation, Werner Myburgh, defined peace parks, or “transfrontier conservation areas,” as a “way to ‘link’ those protected areas that are divided by an international boundary” (quoted in Büscher 2013, 27). The then–director general of the IUCN similarly stated that these “transboundary protected areas” should “involve a degree of cooperation across one or more boundaries, since plants and animals clearly do not recognize artificial boundaries” (Marton-LeFèvre 2007, xiii). Moreover, the South African environmental minister Pallo Jordan reiterated in his opening address to the IUCN meeting on Parks for Peace in 1997 that “the earth’s environment is the common property of all humanity and creation, and what takes place in one country affects not only its neighbors, but many others well beyond its borders” (quoted in Marton-LeFèvre 2007, xiv). These various statements and the academic literature bring home how the guiding principle of the global peace park initiative is that peace between nations, ethnic groups, armies, and people can be forged through the practice of cooperating to conserve a protected area, straddling a boundary they share (Ali 2007; Büscher 2013).

Bringing this literature to bear on the Salween Peace Park project, however, we find that it straddled no borders. From its inception, the entirety of the Salween Peace Park rested within the borders of what the KNU claimed as its Mutraw District and the Karen National Liberation Army’s 5th brigade (thu kay yeh), an area almost solely under KNU’s jurisdiction. Up until 2022, when it was expanded to include nine new village tracts in the Thaton/Doo Tha Htoo District, the borders of this protected area aligned neatly with the KNU’s political-economic boundaries while only partly corresponding to the ecological boundaries of the Salween River basin. The extent of cooperation involved in the Salween Peace Park was thus restricted to that between the different village tracts, townships, and political departments of the Mutraw division of the KNU, the KNLA, and the inhabitants of these highlands, human and otherwise.

When I took up this seeming incongruency with KESAN, between “standard” notions of peace parks as “transboundary protected areas” and the Salween Peace Park, James responded a little curtly that this was, of course, by no means new information to them. “But in any case,” he added, what I was talking about were “international peace parks,” while the project they were working on in the Mutraw District of Myanmar was a “national peace park.” After quickly picking up that I was not entirely satisfied with this explanation, he changed tack. He softened his tone and explained that, in truth, “you have to do what works best.” Getting to know these activists better, I encountered this highly pragmatic outlook time and time again.

The director, for example, often told of how he and some of the other activists had originally envisioned that the Salween Peace Park would straddle this great river, linking this conservation zone with the current Salawin National Park on the eastern bank in Thailand.⁸ They hoped to then continue expanding the peace park outward, eventually covering the entire Salween basin, from its headwaters on the Tibetan Plateau to its mouth in the Gulf of Martaban. Given the political climate, however, a cross-border conservation zone was not yet feasible. In the meantime, the Thai government continued to forge ever closer links with their Myanmar counterparts following their “battlefields to marketplaces” strategy that began in the late 1980s (Brenner 2019, 40–46; Magee and Kelley 2009, 115), and special economic zones began cropping up all along their shared border (Aung 2023; Campbell 2018). As a result, the KESAN activists decided to begin small, first plowing ahead in Mutraw where they had the support of the KNU. With time, they planned to slowly expand this conservation zone into areas not held by the KNU when, or indeed if, the political climate shifted.

As the peace process continued to unravel, and as the ceasefire was increasingly punctuated by armed scuffles and land grabs, these activists held out little hope that the Myanmar state government would cooperate on this conservation project anytime soon. In response, they often attempted to “jump over,” leap-frogging the Myanmar state “for now,” seeking legitimacy for their project from the wider international community (cf. West 2006, 10). Almost as if to confirm this, the director ended our first conversation by apologizing that he had to dash off home and pack. He had to catch a flight in a few hours to Cancun in Mexico, where he was to attend the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP 13) in a panel on Biological Diversity and Conservation Monitoring.⁹

A great deal of the academic work on large-scale Conservation projects foregrounds the misunderstandings they tend to provoke, where the various actors involved grasp their aims in, at times, wildly different ways, leading to considerable conflict. In Paige West’s (2006) classic monograph Conservation Is Our Government Now, for example, she focuses on a Conservation project in Papua New Guinea premised on the notion that biodiversity can be protected through the sustainable development of economic markets. Here, she demonstrates a fundamental disconnect whereby the NGO workers behind the protected area understood that they would get conservation from the local population in exchange for financial incentives and development, and the local population understood these exchanges as an opening for a relationship in which they would gain access to things they desperately needed, such as medicine and education. Much of West’s ethnography centers on the violent conflicts this disconnect provoked and the seemingly Sisyphean task she was assigned of translating between these two groups (see also West 2005).

In the Salween Peace Park, however, the activists were actually leaning into and torquing certain misunderstandings. They found that the peace park translated differently for different actors in productive ways, allowing them to appeal to different audiences. For many Pwakanyaw speakers, Salween Peace Park as Ta Mu Ta Hku K’Ruh connoted a “flower/peace garden,” evoking notions of a shared space. Furthermore, as I discuss below, a “peace garden” carries with it positive undertones of a plot of land for growing new ideas. As it so happened, these different connotations dovetailed with several of KESAN’s central aims. For global Conservation organizations and other transnational groups, however, peace park implied a “transfrontier conservation area” that coincided with and reinforced their efforts to meet global development goals and targets on the protection of biodiversity and participation. While these various connotations did not mesh perfectly with the vision of the Salween Peace Park in its entirety, they did capture many important aspects of it and gestured toward a deferred future goal. It was precisely these misunderstandings of this “park for peace,” including my own, that allowed KESAN to pitch the notion of the Salween Peace Park to different actors and evoke different connotations. Pragmatic translations in turn played into KESAN’s ongoing messing with scale, in which they strategically deployed scale as they simultaneously upended it.

In the face of both resistance and silence from the Myanmar government, the activists once more messed with scale, leap-frogging directly from situated small-scale politics and practices, conservation with a small c, to the global scale of international Conservation organizations and bodies. This was done quite literally. While I had heard from Ta Thoo how KESAN was deeply engaged in a central government-led initiative in 2014 to revise state land laws (i.e., the VFV Law and Farmland Law), bar a few concessions (such as a partial recognition of customary lands), these laws continued to promote widespread land grabs and dispossession. Following these frustrated engagements with the central government, the director spoke of “jumping over” the national scale of the Myanmar state to negotiate with the UN directly at the global scale. This could be seen in the way the Salween Peace Park was hedged in global concerns for biodiversity loss and Indigenous effort to prevent it. By messing with scales, KESAN was, in process, effectively unsettling and remaking notions of how such “parks for peace” were conceived and practiced. The Salween Peace Park, therefore, outstripped notions of both “transfrontier conservation areas” and countermovements, prefiguring “a grassroots, people-centered alternative” (Mutraw District et al. 2018, 4).

PREFIGURING A KAWTHOOLEI IN MINIATURE AND “REAL FEDERAL SOLUTIONS”

What these activists were hoping to evoke by explicitly naming this conservation project a peace park becomes clearer still when the Salween Peace Park is considered alongside similar grassroots experiments in conservation, such as those addressed in chapter 4. When I discussed the Tenasserim River and Indigenous Peoples’ Network’s (TRIP NET) work on counter-mapping their landscapes with the director of KESAN, for instance, he was quick to point out that, while Saw Jonny is an old and good friend of KESAN, their two movements were of a fundamentally different kind. He took pains to point out that the Salween Peace Park played a pivotal role in KESAN’s concerted efforts, in close accordance with the KNU, to generate “real federal solutions” to the ongoing peacebuilding efforts in southeast Myanmar. In the director’s words, “We shall achieve this [federalism] through strong governance, not by sharing power. In this way [by sharing power] we do not have the decision-making power, allowing them [the Myanmar government/Tatmadaw] to build dams and other projects on our land. What we need is action, not debates.” In laboring this point, he demonstrated that the aspirations of the Salween Peace Park went far beyond those of a peace park as they are conventionally conceived to a radically different way of understanding and practicing peace parks and conservation more generally.

The vision of this large-scale conservation project along the Salween basin was intimately entangled with, and inseparable from, the KNU’s seven-decade-long struggle for greater autonomy. The ramifications of the ties between conservation and struggles for liberation crystallized for me during a long car ride with Doh K’Oh from the border back to Chiang Mai. The director had asked me to meet Doh K’Oh, one of KESAN’s leading activists, who wore thick square glasses and had seemingly boundless reserves of energy, to discuss my upcoming fieldwork in the Mutraw hills. As it transpired, Doh K’Oh was (nominally at least) on “holiday” in a Thai border town, visiting his wife and children—yet still very much working. When I learned that he was there to be with his family, I tried to reschedule, only for him to insist, “It’s fine, they are getting used to it by now.” Thus, with his (understandably exasperated) family in tow, sitting at another table at a small café, Doh K’Oh and I discussed suitable villages for my research. It was during this conversation that we agreed upon an area where “traditions are still strong” and that could still be reached during the height of the monsoon season. We continued our conversation on the ride back home to Chiang Mai the next day in his slick black pickup truck, but soon the topic turned to politics.

After a brief silence, Doh K’Oh turned to face me and said, “I don’t know what federalism is.” I was initially a little taken aback by this statement, especially given that it came from a person working so explicitly on federal solutions to armed conflict. Before I had time to comment, he pressed on, explaining in an increasingly animated fashion, how the Tatmadaw and transnational corporations were slowly “moving into areas and the war continues.” Echoing a now familiar sentiment, he lamented that people were still steadily being displaced, even after armed conflict had largely abated. As he breathlessly exclaimed, “Refugees are beginning to return, but their customary lands are now palm oil or rubber plantations, and they have no way of securing their livelihoods.”

After a short pause, Doh K’Oh asked rhetorically, “But what do they mean by a federal union?” The point he was alluding to, he swiftly interjected, was how can federalism work when the land slated to be “handed back,” so to speak, was now occupied and effectively owned by corporations and the military? Here, he took what, as I mentioned previously, was often labeled the “hard-line” position. “They accuse us,” he said—meaning the more militant sections of the KNU—“of being inflexible, yet they [the Tatmadaw] won’t compromise on anything and keep demanding DDR [disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration].”¹⁰ Now thoroughly riled up, he pressed on, referring to the Vacant Fallow and Virgin Land Law and Farmland Law: “And what is more, in their laws our fallow lands become unoccupied or waste land. Then they sell it. But it is not theirs to sell. It belongs to the Karen communities.”

Building to a crescendo, he continued, “when they talk of federalism, like in the United States, they have no idea how they could actually achieve this, they just say ‘it’s coming, it’s coming.’” This last part was accompanied by a sardonic laugh. By now rather impassioned, he added, “The way I see it, after sixty-seven, nearly sixty-eight years of war [now well over seventy years] where thousands if not tens of thousands have died, it is not okay to just give up.” After a short break to catch his breath, he elaborated that, in some respects, he viewed the National Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) as a form of surrender. Yet unlike the hard-line general introduced in chapter 4, he quickly tempered this sentiment by adding, “It is not that I want fighting again. Nobody wants that to happen, but this ‘national’ [spitting out the word] ceasefire agreement lacks any real vision for a federal union.” For him “there should be another way.” He envisioned that federalism could only come about through self-governance, where the people themselves had a greater ability to decide their own destiny.

“This is why the Salween Peace Park came about,” he concluded. The Salween Peace Park, for these activists, was a novel alternative approach to what most sides in the conflict agreed was the only way forward—to achieve a federal solution. Yet, as Doh K’Oh concluded, “People think we are crazy. Such a crazy idea, that it [the peace park] could be maintained by the Indigenous people; it has never been done before.”

* * *

Over the course of this long car ride with Doh K’Oh, the lineaments of this “crazy idea” of a conservation zone, maintained by Indigenous people, gradually became more defined. In the conventional sense of a peace park, the Salween Peace Park is a pragmatic attempt to build a “transboundary protected area”: a peace park in waiting. If, however, we take up Doh K’Oh and the other activists’ invitation to follow where this “crazy idea” leads, we see that the Salween Peace Park is also a diminutive model, a sketch, of a radical experiment in building peace and federalism that simultaneously kept alive the KNU’s protracted struggle for autonomy. In the process, the very notion of a peace park becomes unsettled and broadened far beyond a “transboundary protected area” to also embrace wider struggles for federalism and liberation.

This was exactly what Ta Thoo was pushing me to do on my first visit to KESAN’s main office. As I have shown, he spoke of the Salween Peace Park as “just an idea, a local solution that could not be applied in all places,” on the one hand, and as “one of the ways to work on the federal situation” such that both KNU and Indigenous sovereignty could be retained and enhanced, on the other. In his words, the Salween Peace Park was “part of our movement to claim land and control this land, as we are Karen.” He emphasized that this project should be led by the people themselves, “as part of their rights as Indigenous people.” The peace park was then part and parcel with the KESAN’s ongoing attempts to prefigure modes of alter-politics: radically different ways of building federalism and autonomy.

The architects of the Salween Peace Park were deeply invested in what Hong describes as a “prefigurative politics that embodies political autonomy” as they attempted to “build federalism from the ‘ground up’” (2017, 233). This prefigurative orientation distanced the Salween Peace Park from the (counter)movements I describe in chapter 4. Rather than simply turning the Myanmar state’s attempts to make these lands legible and investible on their head by reversing the valences, the Salween Peace Park was an experiment in “a grassroots people-centered alternative” (Mutraw District et al. 2018, 4) to this dialectic.

KESAN was prefiguring an alternative way in which federalism might be practically achieved in one specific landscape, at one particular conjuncture, where “the struggle and the goal, the real and the ideal become one in the present” (Maeckelbergh 2009, 67): one “local solution,” as Ta Thoo insisted. These efforts were not simply prefiguring. By giving form to the indeterminable, they were also “a figuration of the future … materializing the otherwise in the here and now,” as Stine Krøijer (2010, 149) puts it. The groundwork of clearing a space within the KNU legal system allowed these activists to open up a gap in these highlands. In this interstitial space, alternative modes of (re)possessing landscapes were encouraged to come into contact and become intertwined, prefiguring a federal union and evoking “the spirit of self-determination” by building on actually existing practices of everyday autonomy.

Returning to the director’s quip that he still encountered villagers who referred to the Salween Peace Park as a flower garden, since the Pwakanyaw translation of peace park can be literally rendered as “peace garden,” these villagers may have not been so far off the mark after all. In a sense, the Salween Peace Park, as KESAN conceived it, was not unlike a k’ruh, a garden patch. It was a space for cultivating new ideas of how peace could practically be achieved.

In the Salween Peace Park, Indigenous land possession practices such as those described in part 1 of this book—patchworks of different categories of land, held together by shared practices and cosmologies of ephemeral and nesting ownership, and the sovereignty of the spectral realm—were cultivated, and subtly translated and rescaled, then grafted onto wider notions of federalism and autonomy. The Salween Peace Park was then itself a patchwork in the sense that it was composed not of various “units” of lands, scaled up to form a protected area, but of heterogeneous “patches” (Tsing, Deger et al. 2024; Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt 2019) roughly stitched together to form a possessed landscape.

Along similar lines, when speaking to an academic with many years of experience as an adviser to the nationwide peace process, I was initially taken aback when they confided in me that, while positive toward the Salween Peace Park, they worried it may simply become “a diminutive Kawthoolei”—a miniature version of the KNU’s protracted and stymied struggle for autonomy. With this statement, they appeared to echo a common sentiment that certain (hard-line) factions of the KNU were myopic when it came to the peace process. However, spending time with the KESAN activists, I learned that describing this protected area in the Mutraw hills as a diminutive Kawthoolei, rather than being a cutting critique, quite succinctly summed up the vision behind it.

Depicting the Salween Peace Park as a miniature version of the ongoing struggle for federalism and greater autonomy evokes similar imagery to that of a peace garden. Both as a diminutive model and as a garden patch, the Salween Peace Park emerged as a space where different modes of politics could come into contact: a space for cultivating new ideas and practices of how both peace and autonomy might be attained, offering an alternative vision. Ta Thoo made a similar point when he stressed that this conservation project up in the Mutraw hills was simply “one way to work on the federal situation … a local solution,” not the only way. Far from being myopic, simply rehashing hackneyed notions of ethno-nationalism rooted in “Blut und Boden,” or blood and soil (which the academic seemed to intimate with “diminutive Kawthoolei”), the Salween Peace Park may be grasped as one specific and local way—highly pragmatic, practical, but also playful—to unsettle and rethink stymied notions, not only of conservation and federalism but also of peacebuilding and autonomy. The third aspiration of the Salween Peace Park, to attain “peace and self-determination,” pushed this protected area beyond a “protected landscape” to embrace a “park for peace.” Following this aspiration, the peace park aimed to act as a model or a garden for cultivating alternative ways of engendering federalism and peace through conservation.

Through the third aspiration of the Salween Peace Park, the call for self-determination was smuggled in with an unequivocally laudable call for peace. Consequently, the commitment to build peace in the highlands along the Salween River was inextricably tied to the KNU’s revolutionary commitment to achieve greater autonomy for the Indigenous peoples of these uplands. The commitment to conservation and peace was married to the commitment to the liberation of the inhabitants of the Mutraw hills. To better grasp the wider vision of this protected area, I describe the Salween Peace Park as a form of liberation conservation. To unravel the differing implications of the notion of liberation conservation, I return to the car ride back to Chiang Mai with Doh K’Oh.

CONSERVATION AS SELF-DETERMINATION

Back in the pickup truck, Doh K’Oh had begun to wind down after venting his frustration toward the current peace process. It was already getting dark, and the deep forests of one of Thailand’s national parks slipped past the windowpanes as we sat quietly in the cab of the truck. Breaking this silence, I eventually asked him how he first came to work with KESAN. He smiled sweetly, but wearily, and began telling the story of how KESAN was formed.

KESAN has its origins in the Mae Ra Moe refugee camp in Thailand in 1997 as a small-scale environmental protection organization, the Karen Nature Conservation Group. This organization was formed by a group of friends, including Doh K’Oh, who wanted to help clean up the vast amount of rubbish piling up in the refugee camp they all lived in. In the camp they first met the goh la wah (white foreigner) whom they still fondly refer to as simply Hpu (grandfather). Hpu, who still works with them as a consultant, was volunteering at the refugee camp at the time, teaching young refugees about environmental issues and environmental movements from all over the world. Around this time Hpu helped form the first, though short-lived, multiethnic environmental alliance for people from Myanmar. This encounter with Hpu and environmentalism more generally helped spur this group of friends to start “thinking bigger,” beyond the confines of the camp, or “temporary shelter area” as they were officially designated.

By 2001, these young refugees had raised sufficient funds to found the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network, or KESAN. The first major environmental report they produced under this new moniker was on illegal logging in 2004. These were wild times, Doh K’Oh added. At one point, to gather information for the report, he was embedded with a troop of KNLA soldiers to document illegal logging camps. Two heavily armed soldiers were detailed to protect him, but Doh K’Oh himself had only a camera to point at the loggers and Tatmadaw troops securing the area. The memory of these times caused him to pause for a moment and chuckle to himself before he affirmed that he would never do this sort of work again. Back then he was young and brave, but he has a wife and children to think of now. He still has the report and the pictures from this time at home somewhere, as a keepsake. Continuing to chat, he went on to stretch even further back in his history.

As the trees and forests turned to 7-Elevens and city streets through the windowpanes of the truck, Doh K’Oh told me how his family was, in fact, from the Mutraw hills. His parents were from a village cluster with its own kaw, perhaps one and half day’s hike north of Ta K’Thwee Duh. But he himself was not born there. At the time his mother was pregnant with him, the Tatmadaw had begun intensifying their counterinsurgency program, continually making incursions deeper into these highland areas. When armed conflict made its way to their front door, his parents and four older siblings were forced to flee, first hiding in the jungle. During this time, two of his uncles attempted to return to their granaries to fetch rice and were captured by Tatmadaw soldiers. Both men were then summarily executed. This event left an indelible mark on Doh K’Oh. He restated this tale several times, stressing, “they [his uncles] were not soldiers, only farmers, but they were murdered along with many others.”¹¹ Following these incidents, his parents, like countless others, eventually fled the area entirely, coming to rest in what he termed a “revolutionary area,” just behind the former KNU headquarters in Manerplaw (literally, field of victory).

A former KNU general, whom I met while he was visiting the Karen diaspora in the United States, described Manerplaw as the “second capital of Burma” during the 1970s and 1980s. For a time, it acted as the focal point for the revolution against the reigning junta, after 1988 also hosting most of the exiled National League for Democracy.¹² Subsequently, both of Doh K’Oh’s parents became what he called “revolutionaries.” Indeed, nearly all of the founding members of KESAN had similar trajectories, with deep roots in the “revolutionary area” around Manerplaw and kin well positioned within the KNU/KNLA. One of the other leading activists in KESAN, for example, was the grandchild of a former KNU chairman and a cousin of the former vice-chairman.

Doh K’Oh was the only one of his siblings who did not follow directly in his parents’ footsteps by joining the KNU/KNLA. He walked his own path, attending school in the nearby refugee camp where his parents later came to join him. While he regularly shuttled between the camp and Manerplaw, it was in the refugee camp, with other children of “revolutionaries,” that the idea of what was to become KESAN first took form. Like many of KESAN’s founding members, he was officially registered as a refugee by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 2005 and qualified for their resettlement program to a third country. His parents had, in fact, already taken up this offer and resettled to the heart of the Karen diaspora in the United States, in St. Paul, Minnesota. When I asked him why he did not accompany his parents to the United States, he stated plainly, “I have chosen to stay as I want to fight for my people, and it is too hard to do that from so far away.”

As the landscape over Doh K’Oh’s shoulder faded back into the deep greens of forests, he explained that the current wave of ecological and Indigenous movements in southeast Myanmar can be understood in terms of generations. The young women and men who first took up arms against the Myanmar government in 1949, such as the then-chairman of the KNU, Mutu Say Poe, were the “first generation” of revolutionaries. As they grew older, the second generation took up the mantel. This new wave was most commonly the children of the first generation, such as the hard-line general I met in Chiang Mai and Baw Kyaw Heh, the de facto leader of the Mutraw District. These men (only one woman was able to reach the highest ranks of the KNU at this time, herself a granddaughter of a former chairman) became the new vanguard of the revolution. I never got around to asking him, but I assume that Doh K’Oh’s parents were counted among this second generation of revolutionaries. Today, as these leaders, too, grew old and weary, Doh K’Oh and his KESAN compatriots saw themselves as the “coming generation,” the third wave of revolutionaries. He pointed out that, despite multiple waves of revolutionaries, the highest echelons of the KNU were still stacked with those from the first generation, such as both the then-chairman and then-vice-chairman. What was more, he lamented, these leaders were getting older and more stuck in their ways; they were steadily becoming less receptive to new ideas. As a result, it was up to his “coming generation” to push for more power and newer ways to carry on this old and tired struggle for greater autonomy.

For Doh K’Oh, this coming generation should not be seen as rebels. “We are not rebellious,” he insisted, “however, like our parents before us, we are revolutionaries.” While the generations before them made revolution by bearing arms and pointing them at the Tatmadaw to effect change and gain autonomy, his generation was trying a new tack. Rather than bearing M16s and mortars, they now carry around digital cameras and GPS devices. These new technologies were pointed not only at Tatmadaw troops but increasingly also at themselves, forging a new path through Indigenous practices with the same goal of effecting change and attaining autonomy, albeit via a different route.

* * *

What bound these different generations together was their shared revolutionary zeal to continue the struggle for self-determination. As James urged the first time I spoke to him, we must grasp the KESAN’s experiments in conservation as “part of the revolution, as part of the struggle, not separate from it.” A visiting villager elder from the neighboring district of Taw Oo (Taungoo) of Kawthoolei in the north succinctly captured this sentiment when he told the crowd at the second consultation meeting of the Salween Peace Park at the end of 2016, “When you cut down a teak tree, an ironwood tree does not grow in its place. A new teak grows from the same stump. It is the same with the new generation; they grow out of the old.” For these activists the struggle to conserve biodiversity and to build peace was tightly bound up with, and inseparable from, wider struggles for liberation.

Recalling Michel Foucault’s inversion of Carl von Clausewitz’s famous adage, we might say that through the Salween Peace Park, conservation and environmental politics were the continuation of revolutionary war by other means.¹³ KESAN’s activism and advocacy were part of the third wave of the KNU’s struggle for liberation to attain the “Karen-land” of Kawthoolei. However, through the process of clearing a legal space and opening up a gap in these highlands where different modes of politics could come into contact and become entwined, the Salween Peace Park continually overflowed and unsettled the protracted KNU struggle for the state of Kawthoolei. This made possible radically alternate modes of self-determination, politics, and being enmeshed with the world.

KESAN’s protracted labors to establish this Indigenous-run protected area could not be disentangled from their continued revolutionary commitments to attain greater autonomy for the Pwakanyaw/Karen people. Taking seriously Doh K’Oh’s insistence that “like our parents before us, we are revolutionaries,” the pragmatic politics underpinning the Salween Peace Park was this “coming” generation’s renewed attempts to continue the long arc of KNU’s struggle to establish and legitimize their own (revolutionary) state, only by other means. In a sense, this Indigenous-run protected area was indeed a diminutive Kawthoolei, answering San C. Po’s (1928) revolutionary call at the turn of the last century for an autonomous territory to act as their “home country,” the establishing of a “Karen-land” that has guided the KNU struggle for liberation since its inception. At the same time, it was radically refiguring this struggle, gesturing toward more convivial and relational modes of autonomy.

Delving deeper into the Indigenous practices and cosmologies that the Salween Peace Park translated and rescaled into environmental policy, I found that the pockets of autonomy generated by spectral sovereignty (discussed in chapter 3) and local experiments in conservation (such as those described in chapters 4 and 5) were always nesting in, and indeed dependent upon, asymmetric relations to spectral persons, who were the true owners of the landscape. People in these highlands were continually engaged in the labor of “making friends,” building relations of conviviality with the spectral sovereigns and the landscapes they possessed. Through these relations, the villagers could make claims on powerful others, be they KNU leaders or the Ta Htee Ta Daw K’sah, the sovereign of all specters.

Like the mushroom growing on a termite mound, as the senior KNU official in Tanintharyi put it, or a dandelion pushing its way through the cracks in the pavement, in the minuscule gaps between things, life finds a way. But life is always interdependent on other forms of life. The Salween Peace Park, and the other radical experiments in conservation that this book explores, illustrate a novel mode of revolutionary politics: a modality of autonomy that was deeply convivial and relational. I want to close this book by revisiting the tagline of the Salween Peace Park: “all living things sharing peace.” In studying Indigenous practices and cosmologies and how they were translated and rescaled, I argue we can better understand both how people related to the more-than-human world and how radical alternatives to conservation and armed conflict were emerging in southeast Myanmar.