Suchergebnisse

Legal pluralism in Myanmar is a reality that is not sufficiently recognized. A lack of recognition of and clear mandates for the informal justice providers, along with the absence of coordination between these providers and the judiciary, present critical challenges to local dispute resolution and informal legal systems. This results in a high level of unpredictability and insecurity concerning the justice outcomes and in the underreporting of cases. The lack of jurisdictional clarity represents an even greater challenge in areas of mixed control and where numerous armed actors are present. Discussion of reform of the justice sector in Myanmar and debates surrounding peace negotiations and the role of the ethnic armed groups in service provision are separated. This situation reinforces the divide between ceasefire areas and the rest of the country and raises concern that the improvement of justice systems will leave conflict-affected populations behind. Recognition of and support for community-based dispute resolution are crucial to reducing the escalation of conflict at the local level. Justice systems like those of ethnic armed groups can contribute significantly to stability and order at times when the official system has limited territorial reach and is mistrusted by civilians.

AbstractThis article applies the concept of frontier to analytically understand the forms of border governance that are developing in a former combat zone after the signing of a ceasefire agreement between the Myanmar government and the Karen National Union (KNU). In particular, it explores border governance through the lens of judicial interventions, moral ordering, and control of crime. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in 2016–2018, it shows how a Karen-populated area changed from being a military combat zone to an area that is the target of civilian state-making efforts by both the KNU and the Myanmar state. These efforts intermingle and compete, and yet each form of state-making remains incomplete and contested. This has resulted in pluralized authorities and partly overlapping forms of what I conceptualize as 'frontier border governance'. With its focus on two competing state-making actors, the article adds new insights to the burgeoning literature on frontiers, which predominantly focuses on a single expansionary state.

AbstractThis article explores the politics produced by civilian community policing groups in the urban margins of Mozambique and Swaziland. By taking over those streets that no one else could control, young unemployed men established themselves as alternative police forces and vectors of power in the neighborhoods. This made them politically significant to local leaders, politicians, and state police officers who both saw them as competitors and enrolled them in their own political agendas. By expanding upon the concept of "street politics," I argue that the community policing groups developed into what I conceptualize as "street authorities." Street authority involves a style of politics that relies on the capacity for swift, direct actions, often through violent means, to order the streets, but it is also characterized by momentariness that prevents the formation of stable organizations. Such politics emerge in urban contexts where poor urban citizens mistrust the state and where there is a preference for immediate outcomes because livelihood uncertainties are high, security is low, and it is difficult to express grievances through official political channels.

Since the turn of the millennium 'Community Policing' has become a significant and widespread element of everyday policing in poor rural and urban areas of Mozambique. This development is not unique to Mozambique, but reflected globally. Community policing (CP) has since the 1990s enjoyed widespread popularity as a philosophy and strategy of 'democratic policing' that seeks to substitute centralised, paramilitary-style state policing with active citizen inclusion in policing. In Mozambique, councils of community policing members have been formed since 2001, with the purpose of reducing crime as well as making the state police more transparent and accountable to the public. This paper explores how community policing has been appropriated in practice in Mozambique. It asks what CP has meant for everyday policing practices, and what it has implied for the ways that public safety and justice provision is organised in different local arenas. A key focus is on the interaction of actors enrolled in CP with state officials as well as with other non-state institutions that engage in conflict resolution and assert some form of authority locally. The paper shows that everyday practices not only deviate from the original CP model launched by the Ministry of Interior, but also that CP has given way to new layers of collaboration, overlap and competition between different state and non-state policing and justice providers. This result, the paper argues, is only partly caused by the lack of a clear legal framework. It is equally informed by the fact that policing itself is an avenue to power, prestige and resources over which different actors compete. From a human rights and rule of law perspective, this poses key challenges: CP actors mimic problematic state police practices in their attempts to assert power, even as they help to reduce crime.

Nine months after the 1 February 2021 military coup in Myanmar, an estimated 2,000 soldiers of the 300,000-350,000 strong Myanmar military, the Tatmadaw, had defected. This has occurred in the context of massive popular resistance to the coup, which the military leadership has tried to quell with large-scale arrests, killings of civilians and various forms of intimidation. Since the first defections in late February, resistance has shifted from being exclusively non-violent to waging a low intensity and defensive warfare against the Tatmadaw's troops. As a result, the gap between the civilian population and the armed forces has widened, with significant loses on both sides. Yet this trend has been challenged mainly by some of the younger, lower-ranking soldiers, who have joined 'the people's side'. Some defectors take part in the armed resistance, while others are actively engaged in campaigns to mobilise more soldiers to leave the army or to tacitly circumvent orders from within. Increasingly, these defector groups have been supported by the political opposition to the military. This report draws on the narratives of active defectors to analyse what has motivated soldiers to defect after the military coup, and to conversely understand what obstacles there are to an increased scale of defections. We argue that while moral concerns regarding the violence against civilians after the coup has been a strong motivating factor, defections are also driven by deep dissatisfaction with the internal workings of the military system that existed prior to the coup. The support mechanisms, exit options, and alternative visions of order proclaimed by the civilian opposition to the coup also play an increasingly important role and would likely be decisive in motivating more defections. Yet the obstacles to defection are also pertinent and are intrinsically woven into the fabric of the Tatmadaw's long tradition of nurturing cohesion and loyalty among its armed forces - e.g., through ideological programming, isolation, hierarchical patron-client relations and a stringent system of commands, rewards, and punishments. While defectors suggest that many more rank-and-file soldiers would desert or defect if they did not fear punishment and for their family's security, our analysis also points to the fundamental structural obstacles that likely inhibit the cultivation of wide-spread motivations to split from the Tatmadaw. This report offers insights into the increasingly strong conviction that the disintegration of the Tatmadaw through internal splits and large-scale mutinies will be decisive in reversing the coup and for bringing Myanmar onto a genuinely democratic path. So far in Myanmar, there are no clear signs of impending major military splits, but the defections that have occurred can be considered a significant, albeit mainly symbolic, blow to the Tatmadaw's internal coherence and stability.

Myanmar is confronted with a contested peace process after over six decades of armed conflict between the national army and around 20 ethnic Armed Non-State Actors (ANSAs) in the country's resource rich borderlands. Although a Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) was signed by eight ANSAs in October 2015, other groups have not, and fighting continues in some areas. A key controversy is insecurity about the future political and economic positions of the ANSAs, along with mistrust in the army's commitment to peace. In this article we discuss five re-integration options for ANSA members, including not only economic integration, but also integration into political parties, local government, civil society organisations and the security sector. We argue that conventional DDR programming is unrealistic in Myanmar, because the ANSAs are strongly opposed to any disarmament and demobilization before a far reaching political settlement towards federalism is reached. This calls for a more flexible sequencing of DDR that begins with reintegration options or what has been called RDD. In addition, reintegration efforts should not only be technical exercises, but be firmly embedded in disaggregated power-sharing guarantees, including for lower- and middle-ranking ANSA members at the local level. This will not only support more sustainable peace, but also help build more trust in the peace process. We conclude the article by considering the role of the international community.