In Rebel Politics, David Brenner pursues the question of a seeming anomaly. The literature on security studies and small-scale conflicts oversimplifies armed anti-government groups as monolithic actors with a unified strategy against the state groups to lend them easily to Euro-centric, reductionist, macro-level quantitative analysis. Armed rebels (Brenner eschews the use of “insurgent” as misleading and “revolutionary” as insufficient) become viewed as monolithic actors following a unified strategy against a similarly monolithic state. How can we explain, then, why in the early 2010s one rebel movement, the Karen National Union (KNU), undertook negotiations with the Myanmar government at the same time that another, the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), abandoned negotiations and returned to armed struggle? Brenner looks for these answers in the internal politics on nonstate armed groups, which takes us into new territory as conventional literature on civil wars, Brenner asserts, has not looked for answers here (p. 16).
In contrast with their mobilization in the prevailing theoretical literature, Brenner highlights a much more internally fragmented nonstate armed group. Drawing upon Paul Staniland's institutional approach, Brenner argues that factionalism and contentious inner group dynamics can do much to shape and direct strategies that privilege particular interests within the movement. Rebel authority dynamics shaped by vertical ties between particular leaders and their grassroots support, and how the former captures and loses authority among the latter, is argued to be the central mechanism that explains the shifting strategies of rebel groups. Brenner does so in the context of the overall political and economic environment of Myanmar's borderlands. Ultimately, he shows that the choices made by the KNU and KIO were the result of a social process between interdependent elite and nonelite actors and driven by their struggles for authority (pp. 8–9).
The book is divided into five chapters, in addition to an introduction. Adopting a relational approach, the first chapter examines how a rebel elite is viewed as having legitimate authority by the rebel movement and provides a theoretical basis for understanding the role of reciprocal exchange relations, social identification, and the struggle for recognition in driving leadership authority within rebel movements. Chapter 2 situates the Kachin and Karen rebels in their changing economic and political environment in the context of Myanmar's general civil war. Chapter 3 presents a case study of the KNU's cease-fire with the Myanmar government in 2012, while chapter 4 examines the KIO's return to war in 2011. Chapter 5 compares the case studies and identifies different stages in the trajectory of these rebellions, including “partial leadership co-optation,” fragmentation of the group, internal contention, and renewed internal resistance (pp. 99–102).
While there is no lack of research on highland groups in Myanmar, political scientists have tended to focus on lowland dynamics or the relationships between states that impact the area, leaving the highlands to anthropologists or to journalists with the necessary local connections and access. This work presents serious scholarship on political dynamics within rebel groups, and hence it is both an innovative and much welcome contribution. Brenner's book is also certainly well researched and contains in its bibliography a lengthy list of interviews with commanders and cadres of both organizations. Impressively, this involved a significant period of nine months of on-site fieldwork in the Myanmar highlands living among the rebel groups, as well as a reliance on subaltern studies literature for insights into how to understand rebel groups. Brenner discovered that in order to learn how the groups behaved, rather than how we are taught to understand how they behaved, he had to undergo a process of unlearning.
Different scholars will have their own takeaways and lingering questions. I was impressed that the direction of travel compared well with other directions in scholarship on the multifarious political problems in contemporary Myanmar. If I have any criticism, it is that, while very perceptive and valuable for understanding the present and future, Brenner could have enhanced the book's utility by casting his eyes backward into comparative history as well. The explanations for rebel group behavior, for example, seemed to offer, with more reflection, good explanations for the failure of the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines in the 1950s and the factionalism of Burmese Communists in the 1960s.
This study will appeal to a wide readership. It is recommended reading for postgraduates, but it is written in a sufficiently accessible way that it will be useful for undergraduates and a popular lay audience as well. A careful reading will grant insights into why ethnic rebel groups have acted in seemingly contradictory ways given the same overall contexts and explain why their behavior in the future when taken as a whole, may otherwise appear inexplicably hydra-headed—they are driven not simply by the overall economic and political context, but by a peculiar reflection of these dynamics in factional infighting within each group.
