Introduction
This article explores the forms of ‘border governance’ that are developing in a Karen village, which I call Htee Ka Lay, following the 2012 ceasefire between the Myanmar government and the main Karen ethnic armed organization (EAO), the Karen National Union (KNU).Footnote 1 I explore, especially, border governance through the lens of judicial interventions, moral ordering, and crime control. The village is not located directly on an international border; in fact, it is approximately 70 kilometres from Thailand, inside what is officially the Myanmar state. Instead of focusing on the international border, I approach the region around the village as a contested ‘internal border area’ between two encroaching states: Myanmar and the KNU. To make analytical sense of this internal border area, I apply the concept of frontier, which, I argue, adds valuable insights to discussions of ‘border governance’ in my particular field site for two reasons. First, it allows me to analytically capture the reality of limited state control and the unfixed political-territorial boundaries that indicate shifting spatial dimensions of governance. Secondly, the notion of frontier, as described in the literature, denotes the politically constructed imaginaries of particular areas and their inhabitants as underdeveloped and empty ‘spaces of desire’ for state and military expansion, capture, and development.
Over the course of the 70 years of armed conflict between the KNU and the Myanmar military, there have been consistent attempts by both sides to expand their control into the ethnic Karen areas. The ceasefire has added new dynamics to these expansions. In this article, I show that, since the ceasefire, Htee Ka Lay village is gradually changing from a military combat zone to an area where different forms of civilian state-making efforts by the KNU and the Myanmar state intermingle and compete—and yet where each remains incomplete. While the empirical findings reveal stronger loyalties among Karen villagers to the KNU's judicial institutions, which are de facto more consolidated than those of the Myanmar state, territorial and jurisdictional boundaries remain unclear, and the KNU has to operate in a cautious and mobile fashion, especially when it comes to the policing of crime.Footnote 2 Meanwhile, Tatmadaw (Myanmar army) troops remain in their positions and the civilian Myanmar state apparatus and government are making gradual incursions, like building schools, organizing elections, and moving township demarcations into the Karen areas. This has resulted in pluralized and parallel forms of border governance, emerging from two sides, where borders are continuously pushed forward and withdrawn. No permanent and completely solid or fixed form of singular political authority has been established. These characteristics have drawn me to analytically conceptualize the area as a frontier and the expansionary practices of state-making as frontier border governance.
Focusing particularly on judicial interventions and crime control, as I do in this article, provides a privileged analytical and empirical entrance point for investigating the stakes that are at play in frontier border governance, namely the efforts to secure state-like control over territories and populations.Footnote 3 Echoing Mampilly, who writes about rebel governance, the ‘establishment of a force capable of policing the population, followed by a broader mechanism to regulate disputes’ denote efforts to lay claim to a ‘key component of Weberian sovereignty, that is, the monopoly over the use of violence within a specific territory’, which is ‘an essential precondition for the development of a comprehensive system of governance’.Footnote 4 For rebel or insurgency organizations, like the KNU, a functioning justice and security system can help to nurture popular legitimacy, granting them the kind of credibility that is necessary for the provision of other collective goods, taxation, and resource control.Footnote 5 We could also say that justice and security systems are central components of building a social contract between insurgent groups and their grassroots, and constitute significant elements of what Brenner terms the ‘rebel social order’.Footnote 6 In this article, I also touch upon schools and native language education, other particularly important and supportive elements of this form of social ordering and state-making, which, besides being part of service provision, are also centred on nurturing political community.Footnote 7
The article has five main sections. I begin with a short note on methodology, followed by a discussion of the concept of frontier and how it analytically captures the forms of state-making and governance that characterize my fieldwork area. I then explore the expansion of the KNU into the lowland Karen area. This is followed by a review of how the Myanmar government engages with the Karen area since the ceasefire and how the Karen village residents view and relate to the Burmese side. Finally, in the conclusion, I discuss the value of using the frontier concept for understanding border governance, and what this tells us more broadly about the peace process in Myanmar.
Methodology
The insights of this article draw primarily on qualitative, semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, and participant observation. These methods were combined with a quantitative survey, which focused on people's preferences for justice providers and types of remedies, covering 40 respondents in the field site. Data were collected over four fieldwork periods of eight to ten days each in May and September 2016, January 2017, and November 2018. A total of 60 qualitative interviews were conducted with a mixture of KNU officials, village leaders and elders, female leaders, and ordinary male and female villagers.Footnote 8 Fieldwork was done in small teams comprising Myanmar and Danish researchers, with the assistance of translators for the Danish researchers. Translations of key concepts, like ‘justice’, ‘law’, and ‘crime’, between English and Burmese and the local Karen dialect, were carefully discussed with the translators and key informants, like village elders, in order to improve understandings of local perceptions of these concepts.
Overall, the article is based on unique empirical material from an area where access is very limited. While providing new insights, the constraints related to the limited time periods for fieldwork naturally compromise the depth of data collection. In addition, the findings cannot be generalized to all KNU areas, as governance arrangements vary greatly across KNU brigades and districts.Footnote 9 Another important limitation is that the research in this field site could not cover interviews with Myanmar state officials and Tatmadaw soldiers as this would have compromised personal security, trust building, and access to the KNU. I realize that this biases the findings towards interlocutors who are part of, or sympathetic to, the KNU. This article should therefore be read as an analysis of border governance, based on the interpretation of interviews with Karen officials and villagers in the particular field site—a partial, but nonetheless important perspective.
The concept of frontier
Under British colonial rule, Burma's hilly regions, bordering China, India, and Thailand, where multiple ethnic minorities resided, were classified as ‘frontier’ or ‘excluded’ areas. These were politically divided from ‘lower Burma’ or ‘Burma proper’ in the interior of the country and put under a different administrative system. Whereas lower Burma was subject to a centralized and bureaucratized form of direct rule which heavily restricted the powers of local leaders, the frontier areas were placed under a form of indirect rule with a high degree of autonomy granted to the indigenous leaders, with little interference from the colonial administration.Footnote 10 The area under study in this article is situated at the foot of a hilly region; according to colonial maps, it was just within the borders of an area classified by the British as a frontier area.Footnote 11 This suggests that it has a long history of being somewhere in-between, or on, the border of direct state administration and indirect rule by indigenous leaders. While it has not been possible, within the scope of this study, to gather data on the significance of colonial administration on present-day governance in the area, other sources suggest that it would have had a very low level of colonial state intervention and presence.Footnote 12 According to a village history book written by a Baptist pastor in 2000, the village was formed in 1895, during colonial rule, by people moving from the hills to the lowlands in search of better livelihoods through farming and trade. Already Christians at the time, they founded a church there in 1901.Footnote 13 While the book provides a list of previous pastors and village leaders from 1901, it includes no records of how the colonial administration operated.
After independence from the British in 1947, attempts to integrate the frontier areas into the Union of Burma failed, as many representatives of the minorities wanted a large degree of self-determination. In this sense the colonial division of territories also left its legacy on the Bamar majority's efforts to bring the entire territory under central rule. Ethnic minority resistance to this expansionary and unifying project led to the formation of numerous ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) that revolted against the central government.Footnote 14 One of the oldest of these EAOs is the Karen National Union (KNU). During the early years of resistance, many hilly regions came under the partial control of EAOs, and various surrounding lowlands were subject to combat and military incursions.Footnote 15 For many Karen inhabited areas, this lasted until the 2012 ceasefire.
In this article I apply frontier not as an administrative-colonial category, but as an analytical one to help understand the forms of border governance that are developing today in one of those Karen lowland areas which has a long history of military combat. I approach the concept, first, in a territorial-physical sense and, secondly, in a politically discursive sense.Footnote 16 First, frontier connotes the physical outer limits of central state control, where the political authority and administrative capacity of any given state apparatus is limited and diffused.Footnote 17 As opposed to international boundaries, the frontier has no fixed and legally established political-territorial borders. It is a moving and more open-ended area where the state's boundaries that are associated with the assertion of sovereignty and law are not (yet) established.Footnote 18 As Kristof notes, the frontier is not ‘an area or zone, which marks a definite limit or end of a political unit’ as with modern state boundaries, but is rather characteristic of rudimentary, unsettled, and semi-autonomous social-political relations that are open to influences from different sides.Footnote 19 Frontiers have similarly been defined as ‘debatable lands’ between incumbent polities where the laws of neither are fully enforced.
The Karen village discussed in this article is today on the official Myanmar state administrative map, located in one of the lowland regions close to the Karen state border where a sizeable ethnic Karen population resides. According to KNU's designation, it is, however, located within the Karen territory or the Karen nation (known as Kawthoolei). Since the insurgency began, just after independence, it has been situated on the outer limits of both KNU and Myanmar state-military control, but without any de facto consolidated political-territorial border. The headquarters of the KNU and its armed wing—the KNLA (Karen National Liberation Army)—are located in the hills closer to the Thai border in the east, where several Karen hillside villages have long been under KNU governance. The Myanmar state only exerts direct civilian governance over villages that lie 20 kilometres further into the interior of Myanmar to the west, by the tarmac road, which is likely to correspond to the colonial ‘lower Burma’ area. In practice, in the lowland area between the hills and the tarmac road, where Htee Ka Lay village is located, state-territorial and jurisdictional boundaries remain fluid in spatial terms, thus possessing the above characteristics of a frontier.
Secondly, in a politically discursive sense, the concept of frontier denotes an area that is open to intrusion, settlement, and colonization by outsiders, an empty space to be occupied, developed, and governed. Frontier here means ‘front’ or the ‘forehead’ of state-making that connotes a forward-moving settlement bent on occupying an entire area.Footnote 20 As Eilenberg notes, this notion of the frontier is infused with politically constructed state imaginaries of it as wild, underdeveloped, lawless, and unexploited, which works to justify natural resource extraction and state or military control.Footnote 21 These discourses and imaginaries of the frontier are, above all, a matter of political definition of geographical spaceFootnote 22 that do not reflect the cultural and social realities of the margins of the state, which are never actual ‘empty spaces’ but instead ‘non-state’ spaces with their own forms of organization, as Scott argues.Footnote 23 Consequently, frontiers are moving zones that shift according to different external definitions and desires for expansion.Footnote 24
Following on from this is the idea that the frontier also denotes an area of transition, as Rösler and Wendl argue: in the eyes of expanding states, frontiers are to be transformed from wild and disorderly to civilized and governed political territories.Footnote 25 It continues to be a frontier when there are ongoing processes of intermingling of different practices and influences, and it ceases to be a frontier when a singular political authority is stabilized.Footnote 26 Although frontier conditions are sometimes created by states, for example, during a civil war, modern states tend to view frontiers as a temporary expedient and appropriate only in a period of transition. The ultimate goal is a boundary, that is, of integrating the frontier lands into the state's unitary socio-economic-political system or, alternatively, to exclude them from its realm, also with a boundary.Footnote 27 According to Einzenberger, state-making in the hilly regions of the Chin state in Myanmar, which he conceptualizes as frontier areas, has been driven by capitalist expansion whereby the state exploits natural resources through control and reorganization of territorial space.Footnote 28 Although this has happened mainly after the end of open combat, the frontier conditions were already created during the years of conflict. In the area discussed in this article, it is not, however, only the Myanmar state, but also the ethnic armed organization—the KNU—that is engaging in state expansion.
At least since independence in 1948 the lowland area where Htee Ka Lay village is located has been politically construed by external forces as a space for military and state expansion, integration, and exploitation. From the 1950s until the ceasefire in 2012, these processes have been shaped by armed conflict, which has made the area into a predominantly combat zone, one where military enemies met and Karen insurgents were believed to hide. It constituted what Anderson describes as a military frontier.Footnote 29 Over longer periods since the 1980s, the village was subject to direct control by the Tatmadaw, which involved violent military incursions, forced taxation, curfews, and extraction of resources, including land confiscations, with little or no public service provision in return. Between the 1990s and 2007, the whole village's residents were forced to move five times to relocation sites in nearby Bamar villages close to the military camps. The aim was to cut off the villagers from supporting the KNU and to bring them firmly under military government control.Footnote 30 It construed the Karen villagers as unlawful people, aligned with the insurgents, who needed to be removed to Burmese territory and become ‘Burmanized’.Footnote 31 Here the Karen were subject to forced labour, extortion, and restriction of movement, but were given no land or stable incomes. So, our village interviewees recounted, during calmer periods, villagers returned to their villages or fled to the hills or joined other refugees in Thailand. The efforts by the Tatmadaw to control the villagers coexisted with secret KNU alliances, donations, and the recruitment of villagers to join the KNU's armed wing, the KNLA. This continuous movement and shifting, but unstable, control of people resonate with the characteristics of a frontier, as described above. The forced removals and the ways in which the Karen villagers were treated in the relocation sites have further left a strong imprint on the villagers’ perceptions of how the Myanmar state operates.
During the years of conflict, the village itself did not enjoy any actual civilian governance structures or service provision from either side, although villagers could avail themselves of the KNU's governance institutions, located further away in the hills. Some also moved to the main town on the Myanmar side to secure education for their children. Village leadership was also highly disputed. While elders in the village told us that there had been a government-recognized village leader since colonial times, their links to the central Myanmar state were always weak and during the conflict years they were principally subject to orders from the Tatmadaw soldiers stationed nearby. It was difficult to exert any civilian governance, let alone resolve disputes. Secret links to the KNU were maintained, including through relatives who were in its armed or civilian wings. From 1972 the village also had a KNU village chairman, but he had to operate in secret. The village elders introduced a dual-village leadership system, which included one leader who responded to the Burmese side and another who responded to the KNU. During the 1990s–2000s village leaders were often subject to violent attacks by the Tatmadaw, as they we suspected of collaborating with the KNU.Footnote 32
Since the 2012 ceasefire, militarized governance has gradually been replaced by the expansion of civilian governance by both the KNU and the Myanmar state. Although the Tatmadaw still maintains a battalion camp, just ten minutes’ walk from Htee Ka Lay village, the soldiers no longer interfere in the daily lives of villagers. Instead, the civilian departments of the KNU are expanding into the lowlands—literally ‘coming down from the hills’—while the Myanmar state is making more non-militarized efforts, like the provision of education and elections, to establish a presence in the area.
In the following sections, I delve deeper into what I conceptualize as civilian forms of frontier border governance. As I illustrate, the expansion of both the KNU and the Myanmar state carry frontier characteristics, expressed in the continued fuzziness of territorial-administrative boundaries. This is partly because the ceasefire agreement has come with no clear territorial demarcations and divisions. In addition, political authority on both sides remains unstable and negotiated. Yet, there is a clear desire and mixed efforts from both sides to fix and order the space, by bringing it under one singular state. First, I focus on the KNU's efforts to expand its laws, justice system, and moral ordering, including through education. Secondly, I explore the incursions from the Myanmar state and the continued presence of the Tatmadaw.
Frontier expansion from the east: the KNU comes down from the hills
As we drive along the tarmac road from the main town on the Myanmar side towards the junction that will take us to the KNU base near Htee Ka Lay village, we notice a heavy Tatmadaw presence, represented by military bases and various businesses and farming fields that it owns and operates. However, as we get on the gravel road towards the hills, the visible Tatmadaw presence decreases and soon vanishes from sight. Twenty minutes later, we see a large new construction comprising several buildings, and soon discover the Karen-KNU flag waving from a flagpole in front of a large building. It is a new school of the Karen Education Department (KED), which falls under the KNU: building started in 2015 with KNU funds and private donations, mainly from Karen businessmen. The main architect behind this school is P'Doh, the KNU chairman of this district of the KNU, who is also native to the area—in fact, from Htee Ka Lay village.Footnote 33 He is passionate about education, he tells us, as he was himself a schoolteacher before he joined the KNLA in 1997. He studied at Moulmein University (Mon state), but when the 1988 student uprising led to the closure of universities by the military government, he went back to his village to teach children. At that time, the military government had closed the government school. However, soon after, he was arrested by the Tatmadaw and imprisoned for six years and eight months, charged with having connections to the armed rebellion. After his release he joined the KNLA and later became part of its standing committee. He has been chairman in this area since 2010. P'Doh is sceptical about the peace process and his long history of KNU membership has nurtured a strong resentment towards the military and a lack of trust in the Myanmar government. However, he also sees opportunities, he tells us, in the new political situation and uses the openings that this and the ceasefire has brought to strengthen the KNU's presence and influence in the Karen areas.
P'Doh is officially supposed to work from the KNU district headquarters, situated in the hills adjacent to the main KNLA camp—about three hours’ drive and one day's walk from the KED school. However, when construction started, he moved down from the hills to the lowlands because, he tells us, he wanted to help build the school and also because it is more convenient to meet outside visitors, like foreign donors and investors, here. It also makes it easier for the Karen villages in the lowlands to get assistance from the KNU, he tells us, including his own native village, Htee Ka Lay, which lies about a kilometre away from the KED school. It is soon clear to me that his presence in the lowlands at a fixed location—the school—is part of the KNU's wider efforts to expand its administrative, educational, health, and legal system to the lowlands. The school itself is a physical marker of this territorial-administrative expansion. Besides being a materialization of KNU's presence, it is also part of a deeper moral-educational expansion of the KNU's state and its nurturing of a unified Karen national identity in the Karen-populated lowland villages.
As South and Lall have thoroughly documented, ethnic education and minority language teaching are deeply political matters in Myanmar and have a long history of association with ethno-nationalist resistance to the central state.Footnote 34 The demands of ethnic armed organizations, like the KNU, for ethnic language education developed in opposition to the military state's education policy (1962–2011), which only permitted teaching in Burmese, banned the use of ethnic minority languages, and used textbooks that taught history through a Bamar lens and promoted nationalism and militarism linked to a Bamar majority identity.Footnote 35 The public school curriculum centred on Burmanization,Footnote 36 which, in the context of schooling, has been a form of attempted forced assimilation of ethnic minority children into the dominant Burmese culture.Footnote 37 To resist this, the KNU, along with other EAOs, set up parallel education systems, not just to secure the survival of minority languages and access to education in conflict-affected areas, but also to ‘promote and reinforce ethno-nationalist identities as well as opposition to the militarized state’.Footnote 38 The KNU education system, for instance, ‘emphasizes a clearly articulated Karen identity, with regard to the Bamar-dominated society’.Footnote 39
The building of the KED school in the area under study should be understood against this historical background. It is a boarding school for Karen internally displaced persons (IDPs) and Karen children who live in the hills. It also caters for nearby lowland Karen villagers who cannot afford the Myanmar government's high school. English and Sgaw Karen are taught, along with Karen history and nationalism. The school does not follow the Myanmar government curriculum and Burmese is only a minor subject. Most of the teachers, including P'Doh's own daughter, were educated in the Mae La refugee camp in Thailand. Before the KED school opened, the lowland villagers only had access to Burmese schools and only the churches taught Sgaw Karen. The KED school can therefore be regarded as a significant development for the KNU's consolidation in the lowlands after the ceasefire.
P'Doh calls the KED school a ‘peace school’, he tells us, because as well as making education available to the Karen people and strengthening the Karen language and nationalism, he also hopes that it will help build trust with the Myanmar government. Simultaneously, it is apparent that by representing a parallel ethnic education system, the school can also be used to demonstrate to the Myanmar state that the KNU claims authority over this Karen-populated area. This was enacted by P'Doh on World Peace Day on 20–21 September 2016, when he organized a huge event at the school to which he invited the Tatmadaw, members from the ruling party—the National League for Democracy (NLD)—and the Myanmar police force as well as representatives from other ethnic groups in the lowlands. Even the chief minister of the sub-national state from the Myanmar side attended the event.
By hosting such an occasion and speaking in the name of peace, education, and development, P'Doh says he is trying to negotiate and create tolerance among Myanmar government officials for the KNU presence in the lowlands. This is the only way forward because the school and the KNU presence are not officially sanctioned by the Myanmar government.Footnote 40 This becomes clear when we ask P'Doh how he acquired the land for the school. He did not ask the Myanmar government for permission because, he says, ‘this is a KNU area’. Simultaneously he is aware that according to Myanmar law, the land is owned by the Myanmar state. When the school was officially opened, a Myanmar border affairs official came to question him, asking if he had a land form from the government, but the chairman replied: ‘it is not in my interest to own the land, but to help the poor children in the area with education’. He thinks that the official just wanted to remind him that all the land in Myanmar is owned by the government. After the school's opening day, the border affairs official did not return. Thus, so far the presence of the school is tolerated, but it is clear that ethnic minority education is still a controversial topic. The chairman also still worries about the land. The boundaries are unfixed and the Myanmar state is also trying to consolidate its administrative areas. The chairman explained:
The problem is that there are no clear demarcation lines […] Today there are many demarcation cases with land and forestry. It is not clear so there are different ways to resolve the problems. No one really knows who owns this land here or not. It is not confirmed. Because of this it is also difficult to develop projects for the KNU. The government should have clear boundaries for Karen areas and ethnic areas like using rivers and so forth. In government-controlled areas there are boundaries that are clear, but this was not the case when they gave the area to Karen State. And also now they [Myanmar state] are all the time moving the signposts for the [Myanmar state defined] townships. This place where we are right now it is not even clear if it is government controlled or KNU controlled.Footnote 41
This statement indicates that the KNU has a desire for clear boundaries, and thus for turning what can be conceptualized as a frontier into a fixed political-administrative space, in line with the logic of state sovereignty.Footnote 42 The school is just one among other means to try to reach this goal. Since 2013, the KNU has also set up Forestry Department ‘outposts’ in the lowlands and at the foot of the hills, patrolled by uniformed forestry police officers who use KNU laws to try to restrict logging and protect the remaining forest. There is no actual KNLA camp in the lowlands, as this would be likely to provoke the Tatmadaw, but KNLA soldiers move in and out of the outposts. Civilian expansion by the KNU in the name of environmental protection is safer, but it is not uncontroversial, as indicated by the chairman:
After the ceasefire [agreement] the [Myanmar] government wanted KNU areas because there are a lot of good trees, but the KNU took care that this did not happen. The government also said that they wanted to make a nursery for replanting new trees in the KNU [lowland] areas, but the KNU forestry department told them to go to the government area. The government just wanted to look good and take credit for the trees.Footnote 43
There is a clear sense of competition between the government and the KNU over the control of natural resources and territorial space, and this is part of reproducing this area as a kind of frontier with unclear boundaries and unfixed political authority. In the next section I address how the KNU is also now implementing its administrative and justice systems in the Karen lowland villages more openly.
Expansion of KNU laws and moral ordering at the village level
Htee Ka Lay village is just five minutes on a motorbike from the KED school. According to the village leader's data, it has 192 households (population 933), the majority of whom are Christians and belong to one of the smaller Karen sub-groups.Footnote 44 There are both Baptist and Anglican denominations in the village, and only four households where a Karen is married to a person of another ethnicity. Since the ceasefire, we were repeatedly told by various villagers, Htee Ka Lay has become a KNU-controlled village. The KNU is perceived as the ‘upper-level’ (Ta Paw Ko in Sgaw Karen) state when it comes to administrative and judicial matters that cannot be resolved inside the village. Most villagers have KNU land grants and the KNU now also extracts a tax of 2,500–10,000 Kyat (US$ 1,75–7) plus one-and-a-half baskets of paddy per acre per year from each household (the monetary amount depends on the economic circumstances of the household).
Although the dual system of village leadership persists, since the ceasefire the KNU village chairman can now work openly. He liaises closely with the village leader, who is supposed to deal with matters from the Myanmar government side. Both leaders are explicitly aware that Htee Ka Lay lies within an area that, legally speaking, has no clear boundaries between KNU and Myanmar government jurisdictions, but their loyalties and connections to the KNU are strongest and they have no regular contact with the Myanmar government. The village chairman accentuated the importance of their shared language and ethnicity with the KNU:
We see ourselves as the children of the KNU. When we have a case that we cannot resolve we hand it over to the KNU. It is easy to deal with the KNU, because of the language and also because they are Karen.Footnote 45
Family relations and a shared identity between the village leaders, the elders, and the KNU help to secure the village leaders’ loyalty to the KNU, which in turn are embedded in a long history of secret connections to the organization during the years of conflict and occupation by the Tatmadaw. The government-side village leader, a 55-year-old man who is native to the area and whose father held the same position, was never in the KNU, but his brother was and he is himself personally connected to the KNU, as his wife is P'Doh's sister. The strongest of the two key elders in the village (who selected the village leader as a candidate for the leadership position) is P'Doh's eldest brother, now in his seventies, who in the past also used to be a village leader. The 53-year-old village chairman, also native to the village, was previously a KNLA soldier and before that he served as a secretary to the village leader. So, local leadership connections to the KNU are strong. The leadership is supposed to change every two years: the two key elders in the village propose candidates whose names are posted on a board at the church; village residents can then vote by making a mark next to the name of their preferred candidate.
According to the two village leaders, the ceasefire has led to significant changes for local governance. It has enabled the KNU to expand and consolidate its administrative structures and laws to the lowland villages. In 2013, not long after the 2012 ceasefire agreement, the KNU came to Htee Ka Lay (and other surrounding lowland Karen villages) to recognize the village leaders and to form a five-member village committee. The intention, according to P'Doh's elder brother, was to connect this committee to the KNU's three-tiered justice and administrative system—township, district, and central—and its associated written laws, which recognize the village as the primary level of justice provision.Footnote 46 This intervention began when a KNLA captain, dressed in civilian clothes, called a mass meeting in the village in early 2013. The captain's main message was that now that a ceasefire had been agreed it was time to create law and order, and to ensure peace in the village. His speech signalled that there was a certain perception that disorder had reigned before. He explained the KNU laws for punishing more serious offences, like murder and robbery, and said that minor cases should be dealt with inside the village and that the villager leaders could forward cases they could not handle themselves to the KNU. The captain also asked the village leaders and elders to get together and write down the village rules and dispute resolution procedures. Although the KNU did not decide on what these rules would be, the village chairman told us, it provided overriding guidelines and eventual approval. In practice, the village elders and the village chairman got together with the two members of the village women's group to decide on the rules. The head of the women's group, Naw Paw, wrote them down in a notebook, which was then presented to the KNU and later posted on signboards and at the church. During fieldwork, Naw Paw, a 52-year-old widow who is native to the village and largely lives on remittances from her children, shared the notebook with us. She is active in resolving village disputes and, together with another, slightly younger, widow, keeps the case records. The women were selected by the elders in 2006, and after the ceasefire they were trained in matters concerning women's rights by the KNU-aligned Karen Women's Organisation (KWO). The KNU has granted the women the right to sit on the village committee and to decide cases together with the men, Naw Paw told us.
The village rules are focused on regulating morally unacceptable behaviour that is seen to make the village disorderly and impure. They include prohibitions on selling alcohol, riding motorbikes on Sundays, drinking in groups, humiliating others, touching unmarried women, making a public nuisance, and destroying property. When we asked the village chairman and Naw Paw where these rules originally came from, we were told that they had been around for a long time, but were only written down and proactively enforced after the KNU intervention in 2013. During the years of conflict, Naw Paw told us, it was impossible to impose the village rules, but with KNU's backing it was now possible.
The village dispute resolution procedures that were codified in 2013 are directly linked to the KNU justice system, which is considered as an upper level authority. The procedures follow a three-step warning approach. First, the committee confronts the perpetrators and makes them promise not to repeat the offence, after which they have to sign the case-record book accordingly. If they offend a second time, the perpetrators are fined or asked to undertake free communal labour, like road repair. If the perpetrators commit the offence for a third time, the case is reported to the KNU. Transfers to the KNU system involve not only crimes, but also repeated violations of the village rules. For instance, in 2016, a man was sent to the KNU justice committee because he had persistently broken the rule governing selling alcohol in the village. He served two months’ imprisonment in the KNU headquarters in the hills. In 2018, a case of adultery was also sent to the KNU, because the male perpetrator disrespected the decision of the village leaders. Both the woman and man involved were given prison sentences—seven and three years respectively—which they had to serve at the KNU headquarters.
During fieldwork in 2016–18, most disputes, especially those related to marriage (including adultery and domestic violence), violations of the village rules, and inheritance disputes, were settled by the village committee. At the time of fieldwork, the committee included the two village leaders; the women's group leader, Naw Paw; the elder who is P'Doh's brother; a judge who is native to the area and who served as KNU village chairman from 2006 to 2008; the KNU village secretary, an elderly bachelor born in the village, who has done voluntary work for the KNU, including at the KED school; and the village security group leader, a 37-year-old married man, native to the area, who served two years in the KNLA when he was 18 and 19 years old. In short, these are people who have a history of affiliation to the KNU and who were selected as candidates by the elders in the village, led by P'Doh's brother. The candidates were approved at meetings with the village population at the church.
According to these village committee members, there was a clear preference for concluding cases inside the village through reconciliation or paying compensation or fines, but transfers to the KNU were considered an effective option if village resolutions failed. This preference was confirmed in qualitative interviews with various village residents—men and women of different ages—and by our survey which was completed by 40 village respondents in September 2016. Of those who took part, 93 per cent answered that they preferred village-level resolutions and saw them as fair and effective (one respondent answered negatively, and two said that they did not know). When asked about the higher tiers of the KNU justice system, 95 per cent answered that they saw them as fair and effective (one respondent answered negatively, and one that she did not know).
Among the village committee members there was a strong conviction that after the ceasefire the KNU had granted them the necessary authority to resolve most disputes in the village, partly supported by the possibility of moving cases upwards in the KNU system. For instance, the village committee frequently used the threat of sending perpetrators and disputants to the KNU to facilitate the enforcement of village decisions. In the legal-administrative sense this kind of expansion of KNU authority was combined with elements of moral ordering and claims that Karen villages were being cleansed of destructive and intoxicating elements that are seen as coming from the ‘Burmese side’. We encountered a strong discourse among the village leaders that construed criminals as outsiders and non-Karen, and which held that drugs and, especially, alcohol come from the non-Karen areas and are contaminating the Karen villages. There is a belief that the Bamar are selling the alcohol to destroy the Karen people, the village leader told us. These ideas, I suggest, play into the KNU's politically discursive imaginary of ‘their’ Karen people as being endangered by lawlessness and disorder, which in turn forms part of the legitimization of KNU expansion and moral ordering.
Since the 2015 Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA), the KNU has prohibited the sale of all alcohol in the Karen villages, and this is supported by the village rules in Htee Ka Lay. While sellers of alcohol can be prosecuted inside the village, young village residents who consume alcohol have also been taken to the KNU headquarters to be ‘educated’. In mid-2016, the KNU also encouraged the policing of the gravel road that leads to the township on the Burmese side, where male Karen villagers go to drink and buy alcohol.Footnote 47 This task was performed by the women's group in Htee Ka Lay, which set up a small checkpoint where they stopped men coming back from the township on motorbikes. Those who were caught with alcohol were fined and given a warning by the village committee, which said that if they were caught again with alcohol, they would be sent to the KNU. Karen men were fined, whereas non-Karen passers-by were not, because, as Naw Paw, said: ‘We worry that if we charge the Bamar we may create a conflict. But we stop the Karen people to make our Karen people good.’Footnote 48
These forms of moral ordering add an additional layer to the legal-administrative expansion of the KNU into the Karen populated lowlands, which aims to create ‘pure’ and ‘clean’ Karen communities, uncontaminated by the outside. We can see this as another way of claiming the frontier, not in spatial terms alone, but also by nurturing a political community that centres on fixing a boundary around shared ethnic identity. This element of shared identity was certainly also evident when ordinary villagers explained in interviews their preference for village-level and KNU justice. However, in practice, this did not necessarily imply a full agreement with all the rules and procedures.
During fieldwork in 2018, we sensed a growing dissatisfaction among some village residents, especially men, with the prohibition on and policing of alcohol. This was particularly directed at the women's group, which had received some complaints and threats from the perpetrators who asserted that they were enforcing the rules too strictly. The abovementioned adultery case, which ended up with the imprisonment of two villagers in the KNU prison in 2018, also led to confrontations between the involved families and the village committee, as the families thought the latter had gone too far in referring the case to the authority of the KNU. It should have been resolved in the village with compensation and reconciliation, the families complained. While these complaints were not widespread in the village, they do hint at varied reactions to the greater social ordering and regulation by the expansionary KNU state. This did not, however, translate into a preference for Myanmar state justice and, as I address next, there were, conversely, other Karen who actively sought the authority of the KNU. These insights further accentuate the still-unstable and insecure frontier quality of the expanding KNU justice system.
Going beyond spatial borders and the frontier quality of KNU justice
Some of the incidents that the KNU justice committees dealt with actually took place in or near the towns fully under the administration of the Myanmar government. The parties in all the cases were Karen. They underscore the non-spatial dimension of frontier governance, but also its unstable qualities. In 2018, for instance, a murder that took place on the Myanmar side was adjudicated by the KNU district-level justice committee. This happened after the perpetrator turned himself in to the KNLA and the victim's wife agreed to have the matter resolved by the KNU, rather than by the Myanmar state system. One KNU district judge and a female KNU police officer explained the case to us in November 2018. Here is a short summary:
The perpetrator was riding with a motorbike taxi driver (both were Karen) and when they arrived at the destination, the perpetrator killed the taxi driver, stole his phone and fled on the motorbike. The Myanmar Police Force (MPF) was alerted by witnesses and took the dead body to the hospital for examination. They tried to find the perpetrator. Through postings on Facebook by witnesses and the victim's wife, which stated that the MPF was looking for the perpetrator, the perpetrator found out that the police were searching for him. When he acknowledged this, he turned himself in at a KNLA outpost, because he did not want to be prosecuted by the Myanmar justice system. He would rather serve in the KNU prison, he later told the KNU district judge. The perpetrator was put into a KNLA cell and the case was reported to the KNU justice committee, which firstly acted by forming an investigation group (comprising three Karen National Police Force (KNPF) officers, one KNLA captain, and one person from the Karen Human Rights Group (KHRG)). This group contacted the victim's wife (also Karen) to ask her if she would agree to have the case investigated and adjudicated by the KNU. She agreed, because she was of the belief that the Myanmar justice system would be very costly for her and because she did not understand the court procedures. ‘What did the MPF then do?’ we asked the district judge. He replied: ‘When the MPF visited the victim's wife, she asked them not to pursue the case further, however, without mentioning that this was because she had already agreed to settle it with the KNU.’ As far as we—the researchers—could understand, the MPF stopped investigating the case after that. With the KNU, the case took five months to conclude, as the perpetrator gave conflicting testimonies. In the end however, the investigation group was able to get their hands on the hospital report from a doctor they contacted, which confirmed that the perpetrator had beaten the victim until he died. The perpetrator got 20 years' imprisonment, and the motorbike and the phone were returned to the victim's wife.
This example, along with the KNU's impact at the village level, show that the ceasefire has enabled the KNU's justice system to be gradually strengthened and expanded, even beyond the immediate area where there is a physical KNU-administrative presence. It also shows that ethnic, rather than territorial, boundaries can be significant in how the KNU is able to assert influence and control. Simultaneously, it indicates, without this being verified through interviews with the MPF officers themselves, that the MPF, at least locally, may tacitly accept these ethnic boundaries, even if, legally speaking, cases like murder should be adjudicated by the Myanmar state. Conversely, I suggest, the failure of the police to further pursue the case also reflects the frontier-like qualities of the state justice system itself, even within what is regarded as an area with full Myanmar state control: in short, the Myanmar state police lack de facto solid jurisdiction—and this shapes how the system works.
Similarly, the KNU system, despite its expansion, is also characterized by frontier qualities in the sense that it is partially institutionalized and lacking in solid jurisdiction. While there are elected KNU judges at the township and district levels, there are no physical court buildings. There is only one actual prison at the district headquarters in the hills, which is guarded by a prison warden and the Karen National Police Force (KNPF). During fieldwork in 2016 it had 20 inmates, according to the district judge. Alternatively, prisoners are accommodated in simple cells within the compounds of the township administrations. Most recently, the KNLA and forestry department outposts, which frequently shift locations, have also been used as temporary prison cells.Footnote 49 Court sessions are supposed to be conducted in district or township headquarters, with the participation of at least two to four committee members, but most hearings take the form of ‘mobile courts’ and sometimes only involve the judge and one other person, sometimes a KNLA soldier. This is partly because the headquarters are too far away to be easily reached by the lowland villagers and partly because it is difficult to summon the committee members. Courts are instead set up in localities that are most convenient at a given time, like an outpost or the KED school. In general, the KNU has insufficient human resources and legal training—concerns raised by the judges and justice committee members we spoke with. Although they were familiar with the KNU laws, they had no legal background or higher education, but rather a history of serving in the armed rebellion. The district judge, a man in his sixties who is native to the area, studied until grade 10 at the public government school before he joined the KNLA, later becoming part of its administration. In 2016 he had been a judge for two years and also served as a tax and revenue officer, a forestry secretary, and a border affairs official for the KNU. Human resources are limited, and it is difficult to find people to carry out the different tasks. Judges receive no salary or compensation, so the district judge makes a living from farming. He emphasized that he has spent 40 years in the jungle, being part of the rebellion, and this means that he has not been able to pursue further education. Similarly, the township judge we interviewed was also a man in his sixties, who joined the KNLA in 1978. He served for 34 years, until he requested and got an administrative position, but was dissatisfied with the lack of opportunities for legal education and with the inadequate human resources. While he uses the codified laws of the KNU as much as he can, this situation means that the judgments do not strictly follow a legal framework, but are mainly based on strong elements of negotiation and reconciliation, based on the judge's experience and common sense. In some cases, for instance, the perpetrators of crimes are immediately sentenced, but in others they are given another chance to show good behaviour.
Thus, in practice, the KNU justice system involves legal compromises and is not fully institutionalized. Simultaneously, its mobility and flexibility also mean that it can be adjusted to current conditions. Mobile courts and flexible procedures allow for the gradual expansion of justice into the lowlands, where permanently set-up courts and prisons would be risky because the KNU justice system is not officially recognized by the Myanmar state. The KNU cannot openly punish criminals, at least not to the extent that it reaches the ears of the Myanmar government or becomes too visible to the Tatmadaw. This was the fate of the checkpoint for alcohol that was set up in 2016 outside Htee Ka Lay: in 2017 it was destroyed by the local Tatmadaw battalion, on the grounds that the KNU had no authority to police the area. These matters point to a situation of yet-unfixed jurisdictions and authority, thus reflecting what I conceptualize as the frontier characteristics of governance. This situation is even more evident when the KNU faces non-Karen perpetrators, especially Bamar, or when its policing activities come close to the interior of the Myanmar government areas, which I address in the next section.
Policing boundaries of Karen areas and prosecuting non-Karen
Rösler and Wendl argue that frontiers are characterized by being open-ended and not bounded, but the ultimate goal of expansionary states in frontier areas is precisely to consolidate a boundary around their claimed political spaces.Footnote 50 Similarly, since 2015 the KNU has expanded its policing activities further into the interior of Myanmar, which is part of producing a boundary around the Karen-populated areas that it intends to govern. Apart from efforts to keep out illegal loggers, these policing activities mainly target illicit drug trafficking (notably of methamphetamine pills) which, according to the KNU chairman and the judges, has been a growing problem since the ceasefire. Although, there are very few drug users in the Karen villages in this particular area, they fear that illicit drugs, just like alcohol, will spread and corrupt the villagers, as has already happened in many areas further south in Karen state.Footnote 51
The district judge said that in early 2015 the KNLA had already begun to sporadically police drug traffickers moving through Karen-populated areas from two neighbouring sub-national states. In 2016, the KNLA set up checkpoints on the roads, stopping suspicious-looking passers-by and searching for narcotics.Footnote 52 Several non-Karen traffickers were caught and arrested. At that time, there were no actual court hearings or official prosecutions, the district judge told us; the traffickers were simply kept at the KNLA ‘outposts’, handcuffed and chained around their feet, because at that time the KNU in this area had little experience with drug cases, as drugs had mainly been a problem in other KNU districts. The head of the KNU justice department confirmed to me in an interview in February 2016 that the KNU was only just beginning to strengthen its capacity to deal with the growing problem of narcotics, and for that purpose it was drafting an anti-drugs law that would enable its system to convict buyers, users, cultivators, traders, and producers.Footnote 53 In August 2016, this law was effectuated in the area under study: one of the KNU's Supreme Court judges, a woman who was based in Mae Sot in Thailand at the time, came to the area to instruct the district judge on how to implement the KNU's new anti-drugs law. During her visit, a Bamar dealer was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and fined ten lakh Kyat (US$ 660), but because he had already spent one-and-a-half years at an outpost where he had been confined by the KNLA, he was released a month later, after his family paid the fine. On the same day, two other drug trafficking cases were adjudicated and five non-Karen perpetrators were either fined or sent to prison for transporting 8,000 methamphetamine pills. They too were confined at the outpost.
These prosecutions and the roadside checkpoints signal the growth of a gradually more institutionalized form of policing of the Karen frontier, the intention of which is to establish a boundary around a pure and uncontaminated KNU-defined Karen political community. But these activities must be covert and done with caution. The checkpoints are done secretly at night, the district judge told us, because ‘the Myanmar government does not want the KNLA to do them’. A justice committee member, who also works as a forestry department police officer, added: ‘you have to understand that the politics are not very good yet so the KNU cannot work very freely. We are not free to investigate properly.’Footnote 54
The prosecution of drug traffickers clearly violates the sovereign authority of the Myanmar state, and the KNU is aware of this and must tread carefully. This becomes even more controversial and risky when it involves non-Karen perpetrators. For this reason, they are confined in outposts in the lowland frontier, rather than taken to the headquarters in the hills, where KNU authority is more secure and consolidated. The outposts are small temporary settlements or bases, which can be easily disbanded with low losses, if problems arise with the Myanmar side. Simultaneously, they are physical markers of a cautiously expanding KNU area of control. The KNU judges and the chairman nonetheless perceived the activities as legitimate: the KNU is policing its Karen areas to keep them free from drugs and to discipline destructive forces from the outside. This is happening alongside a critique of the Myanmar state's failure to deal with a rising narcotic problem. In the name of providing security for the Karen villages, the KNU is simultaneously engaging in the production of state-like, yet unofficial and porous, boundaries. As I address next, this coexists with other, much less successful, governance efforts from the other side: the Myanmar government.
The Myanmar government and linkages to the Burmese side
Htee Ka Lay villagers have multiple linkages with the Burmese side, marked by back-and-forth movements from the village to the Myanmar government-administered towns, where Karen people also live, alongside other ethnic groups. These movements are primarily concentrated around small-scale trade, leisure (men go to drink alcohol), Christian religious activities, and government-provided schooling and healthcare. It became much easier to travel freely after the ceasefire and the reconstruction of the road. Small-scale Burmese traders also come to Htee Ka Lay. Many connections to the Burmese side are through Karen networks: some young villagers attend the Myanmar high school, but they stay with Karen relatives or friends in the Karen-populated parts of town. Religious activities are concentrated around Karen Baptist or Anglican organizations, which from time to time also visit the Htee Ka Lay churches. Education and health constitute the two main areas where the villagers orient themselves towards government services, as McCarthy also notes,Footnote 55 based on a wider assessment of public goods provision in Karen-populated areas of the region.
However, when it comes to matters concerning state security and justice provision, and thus public ordering and moral education, there is a strong disconnect from and distrust of the Myanmar state. In addition, the Myanmar state has a much weaker physical presence in the village and has made far less persistent efforts to consolidate civilian governance than the KNU has, with the exception of primary education. While the government of Myanmar has financially supported the gravel road network linking Htee Ka Lay to its neighbouring village, it did not provide sufficient money to finish the road, so the villagers had to pool its funds and apply for additional assistance from the KNU district chairman. The Myanmar government also does not provide any healthcare, so people have to make do with that provided by the KNU at the KED school. For more serious health matters, however, the villagers travel to the government town.
The only physical marker of the Myanmar state in Htee Ka Lay is the government primary school, which was upgraded with entirely new cement buildings in 2014. A Myanmar flag waves in front of the school and a signpost provides the name of the school and the information that it falls under the neighbouring administrative region (not Karen state, as recognized by the KNU and the villagers). It is staffed by five Burmese teachers, but the regional education department has also now allowed one native Karen to teach Sgaw Karen for two hours a day.Footnote 56 While there has been a government school in the village since colonial rule, it was closed by the government during the worst years of the conflict and forced relocations. Thus, for many years there was no proper education provision in the village, only informal teaching at the church.
The 2014 reconstruction of the school is an example of Myanmar government expansion into the Karen areas, which is accepted and used by the villagers. Given that the children learn Burmese and follow the government curriculum, including Burmese versions of history and nation-building, the school contributes to at least a partial integration with the Burmese side. However, the Burmese teachers do not live in Htee Ka Lay but go back to town every night. In addition, few villagers are able to afford to send their children on to the Myanmar government's high school in town, so the majority will therefore either attend the KNU's KED school or go to the camps in Thailand for further education.
In terms of Myanmar state administration, there is both a sense of expansion and withdrawal or, perhaps more precisely, a cautious forward-moving process. The Myanmar township signposts are continuously being moved closer to the hills, further into the Karen lowlands, thereby signalling a territorial-administrative expansion. Conversely, the Myanmar state stopped collecting the annual land tax from the villagers after the ceasefire, and they do not actively enforce taxation of mills and small businesses, like the KNU does. There is a village tract administrator (VTA) who is registered by the Myanmar state administration in the neighbouring Karen village, some six kilometres away from Htee Ka Lay, just next to the Tatmadaw camp. He officially governs Htee Ka Lay and three other villages and he works with the township administration on the Burmese side, where he attends monthly meetings. However, he does not actively enforce administrative activities in Htee Ka Lay. During 2016 he only asked the Htee Ka Lay village leader to accompany him to a meeting at the township office twice. The topic of both meetings was problems with flooding. When we asked the Htee Ka Lay village leader what duties he performs for the Myanmar state, he said that he has not received any training or directives from it. His only responsibility is to receive outside visitors from the Burmese side, for example, an NGO that came to help with a one-off income-generating project for elders in 2015. The village leader, who explicitly said that the village was under KNU control, at the same time also said: ‘I know that the Myanmar government has this village on their map. It is registered.’Footnote 57 This sense of being ‘registered’ became evident to the villagers during the 2015 national elections, which led to a landslide victory for the NLD party and its leader Aung San Suu Kyi. The village leader explained:
A lot of [political] parties came here. The NLD, the USDP [Union Solidarity and Development Party—the former ruling party prior to 2016] and others. They told the villagers to vote for them, and we [village leaders] were told to tell people to vote for whoever they thought was a good government. We told them that it is their choice who they vote for.Footnote 58
While the elections illustrated to the villagers a clear effort on behalf of the Myanmar civilian government to expand its outreach into the village, participation was limited. Only about a hundred people from Htee Ka Lay were eligible to vote, the village leader said, because others were not on the voter registration list that was drawn up by the township administration.Footnote 59 Some villagers could have actively tried to get on the list, the village leader explained, but they did not want to go to the administration because they do not feel familiar and comfortable with it, as it is part of the state administration that at the time (and until January 2018) still fell under the military-run Ministry of Home Affairs. Other villagers, including the KNU village chairman, could not register at all, because they have no Myanmar identity papers. The precarious integration with and dissociation from the Myanmar state are likewise evident in the areas of land ownership and justice provision.
Avoiding and fearing the Myanmar state
While most villagers now have KNU land grants on their farmland plots, five villagers told us that they were in the process of applying for land certificates from the Myanmar government. They used old land tax receipts as proof of ownership, which they hold onto, they said, to safeguard land ownership in the future, in case the Myanmar government tries to encroach further into the area. As with education and health, this is a practical way of dealing with two coexisting states, but when it comes to land, the situation is slightly more precarious, because the villagers have a strong fear of losing their land. This fear comes from prior experiences of land confiscations and relocations by the Tatmadaw during the years of conflict, which still occur today in other parts of Karen state.
Up to today 15 households in Htee Ka Lay have not been granted their confiscated land back. These 60 acres of land lie between the village and the nearest Myanmar township, and is occupied by Bamar farmers who have official land register papers. The Tatmadaw sold the land to these Bamar farmers in the 1990s. The original Karen owners have asked the KNU to resolve the issue for them, because they do not dare to go to the Myanmar side to claim back their land, especially as they do not have official land papers. Some of the other villagers told them to make a complaint to the land records department at the township level on the Burmese side, but they are too afraid: ‘We do not speak Burmese and we do not know the land law,’ said one of the farmers, an elderly man. This fear is also motivated by the experience of a Karen man from another village who in 2015 had tried to get his lost land back. He went to the new Bamar owners and said that he would begin to cultivate the land again, but they threatened him with a knife. The incident was reported to the Myanmar police, but the case was never resolved. Now the villagers who lost their land hope that the KNU can resolve the matter at a higher political level, but they have no trust that the township administration on the Myanmar side will do anything for them. So far, the KNU has also not managed to resolve the issue.
In general, the many villagers in Htee Ka Lay that we interviewed found it unthinkable to take a crime or dispute to the Myanmar police or courts. They did not believe that the Myanmar state would provide security for them, and fear and unfamiliarity make them avoid the Myanmar state courts and police which, in addition, are associated with high costs, including official fees and bribery, and for taking a long time to resolve cases.Footnote 60 They contrasted the Myanmar state courts with the KNU system, which is both free and responsive.Footnote 61 Simultaneously, we did not meet or hear of anyone in the village who had ever been to a Myanmar state court, so the perceptions are based on ideas and stories about how the system works.
In the justice and security fields, there is a sense of avoidance, withdrawal, and an orientation away from the Myanmar state towards the KNU. This coexists with cautious contact between the villagers and the Myanmar state in the areas of land registration, elections, road building, schooling, and health services. The result is overlapping spheres and a pluralization of border governance, where Myanmar state and KNU efforts run in parallel and yet are evaluated through constant comparison. This situation is complicated further by the fact that the Myanmar state and government do not constitute a unitary actor but are associated with different meanings and move in different directions.
Importantly, and for good reasons, the many Htee Ka Lay villagers we spoke with still predominantly associated the Myanmar state with the Tatmadaw and the previous military government, especially with regard to justice, security, and administration. I suggest that experiences of an exploitative and oppressive military state, the result of armed conflict and forced relocations, inform the villagers’ feelings of fear and avoidance of the Myanmar state. In addition, the continued physical presence of the Tatmadaw camp, just six kilometres away, remains a strong reminder of the past and shapes contemporary understandings of the state. As one village man, in his fifties, said: ‘the Tatmadaw still calls the area an operation area, although we have a ceasefire. We will only believe the peace when the Tatmadaw moves out.’ While Tatmadaw soldiers no longer come into the village, and while the villagers are well aware of the changes in the Myanmar civilian government, the Tatmadaw still lurks in the background and, apart from the school, is the most pronounced physical representation of the Myanmar state in the area.
On revisiting the village in November 2018, the expansion of the KNU and the Myanmar civilian government was continuing and the Tatmadaw was also still active. A new water pump and generator had been erected in the village by the NLD government. A few hundred metres away, near the church, the KNU district chairman had helped sponsor a new statue for the village; with the Karen colours, a Christian cross, and the Karen national emblem, it essentially marked the village as KNU. The KED school had also expanded, with new buildings, a small university college, and a health centre. Simultaneously, Tatmadaw soldiers sometimes appear at the KED school to remind the KNU that this is a government/Tatmadaw space and it actively prevents the setting up of new KNU and village checkpoints. These different developments all constitute physical-spatial markers of a dual effort by two states to claim a space that de facto has no fixed, singular form of authority and administrative-territorial border. The plurality and apparent competition over who controls the area remains open and porous, carrying the characteristics of what can be conceptualized as a ‘perpetual frontier’.Footnote 62
Conclusion
This article has explored what could be termed ‘internal forms’ of border governance, which are taking place not on or across an internationally recognized border between two official states, but well inside the Myanmar state. The peculiarity of this lowland area, at the foot of the hills, is that it is neither a ‘non-state space’ (in the sense defined by James Scott as a sanctuary for people who evade or avoid state-making projects), nor a clear ‘state space’ where one singular unifying authority has managed to consolidate territorial-administrative control.Footnote 63 Instead, the area is the target of two approximating states that are attempting to expand their governing outreach, namely the official Myanmar state and the ethnic armed organization, the KNU. As combat has paused, both sides are building schools, becoming involved in road construction, trying to manage land, governing through village administrative representatives, and aiming to claim territory by setting up signposts, checkpoints, or statues. In this process of dual state expansion, both sides attempt to produce borders, but these are continuously shifting, overlapping, and porous, because in practice there are no clear jurisdictions and fixed administrative boundaries. Administrative-territorial borders only really exist on the official maps drawn up by the Myanmar state, as well as on the KNU's alternative maps. But these borders are under continuous negotiation and are subject to competing forms of expansion and moments of withdrawal. This reflects a plurality of state-making actors, including administrative personnel, soldiers, village leaders, and service providers, which is also a core characteristic of ‘border governance’ in other places in Myanmar and beyond.Footnote 64
In this article I have tried to argue for the value of using the concept of frontier to grasp and analyse these forms of border governance in a ceasefire area. I have applied ‘frontier’ to convey both an unfixed territorial space where state authority is limited and diffused as well as a political imaginary of an area that is open or available for state expansion, development, and ordering.
Htee Ka Lay village, as I have discussed in the article, has a long history of frontier border governance. During colonial rule it was situated on the border between the hilly frontier areas and lower Burma, and thus between two systems of governance, and yet with little colonial administrative presence. Shortly after independence, and for around six decades, it became an area of military combat and forced relocations, with hardly any forms of civilian governance and public goods provision. During all this time, the area was never fully under the control of either the Myanmar state or the KNU, even though the Tatmadaw tried to control and extract labour and resources from it, and there were secret alliances between Karen villagers and the KNU. This situation has gradually changed since the KNU signed a ceasefire agreement with the government in 2012. As a consequence of this agreement, the area around Htee Ka Lay village has increasingly become a space for the expansion of civilian governance.
While the majority of frontier studies focus on the expansion of a singular state from one core centre into frontier areas,Footnote 65 this article adds to the debate by exploring the dynamics of two parallel expansionary states. Even though the KNU is not an internationally recognized state, it operates according to similar nation-state and sovereignty logics in the way that it practises territorial-administrative expansion. In addition, both centres of political authority imagined and politically constructed the Karen lowland villages as a ‘debatable land’, a kind of frontier that is a desired space for capture and development, as part of consolidating the authority of each expansionary state. This expansion is not a straightforward process, however, but reflects a fragile situation, where both sides are moving forward, unevenly and in a cautious manner. Troops remain in their positions, as a constant reminder that the area is still in some ways a potential military zone.
In the bigger national picture, the fragility of the situation on the ground is strongly influenced by a contentious peace process. Although a political dialogue about a possible federal solution to the many years of armed conflict was initiated after the 2015 NCA, fighting continues in other areas of the country. Ceasefire signatories, like the KNU, are also losing trust in the Myanmar government and the Tatmadaw's position on the political future of federalism. As a sign of this growing mistrust, in late October 2018 the KNU leadership announced that it was temporarily suspending its participation in peace negotiations amid dissatisfaction over lack of progress in the peace process following high-level talks between the government, the Tatmadaw, and the NCA signatories.Footnote 66 Part of the reason is that the Tatmadaw continues to be active on the ground in KNU ceasefire areas, for example, in a district further south of the area discussed in this article, where KNLA troops clashed with the Tatmadaw after it commenced road construction, which led to the eviction of Karen villagers.Footnote 67 The KNU is now accusing the Tatmadaw of violating the ceasefire code of conduct.Footnote 68 In November 2018, the KNU district chairman in the area of Htee Ka Lay village told us that the peace process is severely challenged by the continuous, often covert, efforts of the Tatmadaw and the Myanmar state administration to further encroach on the Karen areas. As Brenner notes,Footnote 69 years of ceasefire ‘have enabled militarized state territorialization and played into the hands of outside business interests’, which is resulting in increasing frustration, particularly among the KNU/KNLA's rank and file, including dissatisfaction with the KNU leadership that agreed to the ceasefire in the first place.
Simultaneously, this study has shown that KNU actors are also using the ceasefire—that is, the interim situation of the peace talks—to consolidate the KNU's authority and position among its grassroots. By expanding and strengthening its judicial, policing, and administrative institutions, and providing services, like education, the KNU is trying to increase its legitimacy among Karen villagers in places like Htee Ka Lay village. This is combined with moral-educational ordering and efforts to nurture a united Karen national identity. As is evident in the wider literature on rebel governance, such efforts to build grassroots legitimacy and nurture a political community—what Brenner terms an ‘insurgent social order’Footnote 70—can contribute overall to a strengthening of the position of insurgent organizations, like the KNU, within the wider arena of political dialogue and peace negotiations.Footnote 71 However, as Brenner notes, such ceasefire dynamics can also result in renewed armed conflict, evident in Kachin state since 2011.Footnote 72 Here external pressure from the state and the military, through various forms of expansion into ethnic Kachin areas, linked with internal rebel group fragmentation and regrouping, led to a breakdown of the ceasefire.Footnote 73 While it is still too early, and indeed too speculative, to suggest a similar trajectory for the KNU, it is worth noting that the consolidation of the KNU in Karen villages does elevate the KNU to the status of a ceasefire state-making actor that challenges and competes with the Myanmar state.Footnote 74 This sustains, in practice, what I have referred to as a pluralized form of frontier border governance, which is characterized by insecurity surrounding future outcomes and by shifting and porous borders.
The implications of frontier border governance for ordinary Karen villagers in areas like Htee Ka Lay is intricate. While the dual process of state-making, and notably the KNU's efforts to consolidate village leadership and rules, has clearly provided more options for access to services and having disputes resolved, ordinary villagers must be constantly prepared to navigate between two approaching states and with plural state-making actors. The villagers we interviewed clearly had a preference for using the KNU's system of justice, which hints at the strengthening of KNU's legitimacy vis-á-vis the Myanmar state. Simultaneously, in some respects, the villagers are taking a pragmatic approach to the two sides, as evidenced by the use of dual land registers and government health and education services. The situation is unstable and they are unsure of what will happen in the future. In addition, as long as the Tatmadaw troops are only six kilometres away, the villagers continue to be alert and wary of the contested peace process.
