'All Necessary Instructions': State-Society Relations in Burma's Ethnic Minority States

Mary P. Callahan, International Studies, University of Washington

Citizens in the ethnic minority states of Burma live under the authority of multiple “states” or “statelike authorities” that extract from citizens, both mediate and cause conflict, and provide some services for residents and commercial interests. Competing systems of authority sometimes creates ambiguity that leave people, businesses, and the international community profoundly bewildered. This ambiguity also generates opportunities for personal advancement and wealth generation for some, but most of the population is left with fewer resources for strategies of survival. The mosaics of power in Burma today are fluid and complex. They vary from one region to another and sometimes from one month to another.

This presentation will map some of the strategic, flexible and adaptive networks that link state officials to domestic and foreign business concerns (some legal, others illegal), traditional indigenous leaders, religious authorities, overseas refugee and diasporic communities, political party leaders, and non-governmental organizations in the ethnically-demarcated states around the border regions of Burma. All of these players make rules, extract resources, provide protection, try to order a moral universe, and provide “all necessary instructions,” but none of them are able to or perhaps even inclined to trump the others for uniform, supreme national supremacy. They exist in a competitive, yet often complicit and complementary, milieu that varies across geographical space and time.

Mary P. Callahan is an associate professor of International Studies at the University of Washington. Callahan is author of Making Enemies: War and State-Building in Burma (2003), which received the Harry J. Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies in 2006. Author of numerous articles on modern Burmese politics, Callahan’s current research looks at relations between the international community and Burma, the privatization of security in Southeast Asia and comparative civil-military relations. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Cornell University in 1996 and taught previously at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

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