Saw Ner Dhu Da | ယခုဆောင်းပါးကို မြန်မာဘာသာဖြင့် ဖတ်ရှုရန် ဤနေရာတွင် နှိပ်ပါ

Cite as: 
Saw Ner Dhu Da. (2026). Episodic Rupture in Klerlweehtu: Chronic Crisis, Conflict, and Climate Change in Everyday Life. Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship, 7. https://ijbs.online/?page_id=5661

Abstract

This article examines the intertwined dynamics of slow violence, conflict, and climate change in Myanmar’s east Bago Region (Klerlweehtu), focusing on the lived experiences of Karen communities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2023 across two villages—Kaser Lah and Htee Hee—the study employs the concept of episodic rupture to demonstrate how historical disruptions, such as the 2011 Shwe Kyin dam construction and the dispossession of customary pastureland in the 1990s, are not isolated incidents but rather part of an ongoing process of chronic crisis. These ruptures are deeply embedded in layers of slow violence accumulated over time, gradually eroding traditional agricultural livelihoods, social cohesion, and land relations. Rupture is not a one-time event but an episodic phenomenon arising from the accumulation of slow violence, thereby shaping the community’s vulnerability to both state-led militarized interventions and the evolving challenges posed by climate change.

Introduction

In this article, I focus on life in east Bago Region, or Klerlweehtu,¹ to situate Karen peoples’ everyday experiences of climate change, conflict and state territorialization within longer histories of violence and the political economy of frontier state-making.² I introduce the concept of ‘episodic rupture’ to capture how Karen communities in Myanmar have experienced various ruptures over time. Past ruptures continue to reverberate in peoples’ everyday struggles to maintain agricultural livelihoods, even as new ruptures erupt and people face new waves of violence.

The Karen communities of Klerlweehtu have long lived at a frontier site of conflict and ethnic insurgency, which is characterized by the intersecting interests of armed groups competing to produce “sovereignty on the ground”³ through different territorialization strategies.⁴ During “open moments” of rupture, increased competition over authority can lead to profound reconfigurations of polities, institutions, norms, and prevailing social contracts.⁵ Land, people, and territory become sites of both contestation and deepened vulnerability. In the Karen communities of Klerlweehtu, ruptures over time have involved the destruction of customary lands and natural forests, impacting agricultural practices and food security, through processes of both state territorialization and wartime military violence. Albeit less noticeable, climate change is slowly but incrementally deepening these effects, and accumulated forms of violence are affecting communities’ abilities to cope with its impacts. In line with Mahanty et al.,⁶ I argue that ruptures—big moments of change—are often embedded in and build upon deeper layers of “slow violence”, a novel temporal dimension.

The concept of slow violence refers to violence “that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales”.⁷ Baird similarly treats temporality as the key distinguishing feature that dissolves the binary categorization of catastrophic violence and slow violence, using this to explain how catastrophic violence can also transform into slow violence and how slow violence can morph into catastrophic violence.⁸ While this thinking is valuable, I focus on the fundamentally relational and processual nature of episodic rupture as emphasized by Mahanty et al., how disruptions transform social relations, create new possibilities for agency, and ripple across scales through interactive effects.⁹

The episodic ruptures referred to in this article do not map neatly onto Nixon’s discussion of contemporary environmental crises—such as industrial pollution and global climate change—but they remind us of the ‘attritional lethality’ of war and a greater sensitivity to the slow-moving temporal dispersion of the structural and environmental consequences of military-led efforts to reshape and control landscapes and people. Nixon’s notion of “displacement without moving” is particularly relevant, in that it refers to how slow violence can prompt the “loss of land and the resources beneath” and leave “communities stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it habitable”.¹⁰

In this article I compare the experiences of two conflict-affected Karen villages in Klerlweehtu, based on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in 2023. My fieldwork was conducted after the 2021 coup, but I use two case studies of past ruptures to discuss the post-coup present. The first case study is the destructive effect a newly constructed dam had on Kaser Lah village in 2011,¹¹ following a period of intense military violence. The second case study is how Htee Hee village¹² lost its customary pastureland due to the military’s state-led counterinsurgency and territorialization processes during the 1990s. I embed these case studies within an analysis of peoples’ current livelihood struggles in the context of violence and insecurity following the 2021 military coup, struggles which have also been worsened by the impacts of climate change.

In contrast to most analyses of the 2021 coup, which predominantly focus on spectacular forms of oppression and violence as instances of a single rupture, I explore the longer-term intersections of different episodic ruptures and experiences of slow violence. Episodic ruptures, I argue, resemble the shape of mountain ranges with their peaks, horizontal stretches, and valleys. After each rupture, the process does not simply end. Instead, it gives rise to various consequences with enduring changes and new developments that accumulate over time, setting the stage for future ruptures.

I employ the metaphor of paddy husk fire as slow violence to illustrate the prolonged and degrading nature of these processes. Paddy husk fires are known for their capacity to sustain intense heat over extended periods, smoldering slowly and subtly without producing prominent flames. Such fires are not easily extinguished and retain a high temperature, making them both persistent and intensely hot. Although they usually burn without visible flames, paddy husk fires can occasionally flare up into more prominent blazes before reverting to their steady, potent smoldering. This metaphor aptly captures the subtle, yet enduring nature of slow violence experienced by the villagers, which, although often inconspicuous, periodically erupts into acute crisis or rupture.

This article contributes to debates about climate change and conflict by showing how Karen people’s struggles to survive and cope with insecurities are not simply caused by the most recent intersections of climate change impacts and conflict, but by longer patterns of slow violence, recurrent crisis, and episodic ruptures, centered in part on land dispossessions. Following the case made by Franco & Borras for the importance of “climate change politics”, ¹³ I demonstrate how people’s vulnerability to climate change needs to be seen in a deeper historical perspective and against the background of the destructive capacity of war as a catalyst for environmental change and insecure land rights.¹⁴ Albert Park writes:

The wartime collision of landscapes has often started a process of slow violence through which (1) a gradual attack against the natural ecological order has caused a steep decline in the diversity of an ecosystem; and (2) the rhythms of communities and people’s everyday lives have been ruptured, unsettled, and ultimately transformed over an extended temporal frame. ¹⁵

In this article, I focus on the second part of Park’s slow violence: how are the lives of people exposed to episodes of violent rupture transformed over time? How does war reconfigure the relationship between people and nature? In asking these questions I highlight the importance of understanding what came before the political rupture of Myanmar’s February 2021 coup. While Baird focuses primarily on how catastrophic violence may morph into slow violence indistinctively,¹⁶ my episodic rupture framework captures the progressive degradation and opportunity where slow violence also accumulates to fuel new ruptures, creating a more dynamic understanding of how violence operates across temporal scales in contexts of protracted conflict and environmental change. I argue that ruptures create both immediate disruption and long-term structural transformations that establish conditions for future ruptures, making episodic rupture a more comprehensive analytical framework for understanding protracted conflicts and environmental changes. The analysis reveals that rupture is not a one-time event but an episodic phenomenon arising from the accumulation of slow violence, thereby shaping the community’s vulnerability to both state-led militarized interventions and the evolving challenges posed by climate change.

This article begins with a discussion of the methods used for my research. It then provides a background of the historical experiences of conflict and military-state violence in Klerlweehtu. I then discuss my two case studies, demonstrating how people’s vulnerabilities to climate change and the current conflict dynamics are rooted in highly localized experiences of violence and episodic rupture, which are also embedded in frontier dynamics.

Methodology

This article is based on two months of fieldwork from March to May 2023 in Klerlweehtu, one of the seven districts of the Karen National Union (KNU), in the operations area of Brigade 3 of the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA). I spent approximately one month in each of the pseudonymous villages Kaser Lah and Htee Hee, which are situated in different townships of Klerlweehtu. As I outline in more detail later, the villages differ in their histories of governance, agricultural practices, and ecological makeup. Kaser Lah village is a highland village, which has mainly relied on rotational farming of rice and vegetables for family consumption. Since 2008 it has been under full administration by the KNU. Htee Hee village is a lowland village and people there have traditionally relied on paddy farming. Prior to the coup, it was a contested area with mixed administration from the KNU and the central Myanmar state. The military withdrew from the area in early 2022 due to pressure from the KNLA and newly formed People’s Defense Forces (PDFs). This made Htee Hee the target of military attacks, as I return to later in this article.

During my fieldwork, I carried out key informant interviews with twenty villagers and had dozens more informal conversations with others across both villages. In addition, I used participant observation to capture the everyday lives of the villagers and their struggles amid the intensifying violent conflict, which I also myself experienced during my visits. Over the course of two months, I stayed with local people, participated in their daily routines and traveled between villages as the conflict situation allowed and restricted. During this time, I observed how villagers responded to the daily challenges of armed conflict, noted the shifting power dynamics in the area by observing armed authorities, and examined the ways in which communities continue their lives despite ongoing disruptions. In addition to village-level fieldwork, I also interviewed KNU administrators, such as township, finance, and forestry officers, and one KNLA brigadier.

It is important to note that I identify as Karen, and my ethnicity played a significant role in gaining trust from my Karen research participants. It also influenced how I approached people and the sensitivity with which I approached issues related to the current conflict and previous trauma linked to decades of military and state violence. At the same time as this insider status, I was also partially an outsider, because I identify as Poe Karen and come from a different area of Karen State. This dual positionality as geographical outsider and cultural insider significantly shaped my research approach and the trust-building process with participants.

As a Karen researcher, I share crucial cultural understanding and experiences with my research participants, particularly regarding living under the administration of an ethnic armed group, and the complexities of navigating relationships with the central Myanmar state. My hometown is a mixed-control area, though predominantly administrated by the central Myanmar authorities, which mirrors the historical governance dynamics that Htee Hee village experienced before the coup. This shared experience of living in contested territories under shifting authorities provided common ground for understanding participants’ stories about state-society relations and territorial control. However, my reliance primarily on the Burmese language during interviews and using a local S’gaw Karen-speaking interpreter in some situations created moments where I felt like an outsider despite sharing the ethnic identity of my interviewee. While most respondents were sufficiently fluent in Burmese to conduct interviews without interpreters, this linguistic dynamic reminded me of the cultural distances that existed alongside our similarities. This insider-outsider tension ultimately enriched my research by encouraging participants to provide detailed explanations while allowing me to approach their experiences with both cultural sensitivity and analytical distance.

Throughout my fieldwork, I employed a rigorous approach to security and ethics for my own safety and for the safety of my research participants. All participants provided verbal consent after I identified my position as a Ph.D. candidate from Chiang Mai University and explained the purpose of my research. Participants were generally receptive, with most expressing concern about whether their experiences would be useful for my study rather than raising objections about participation. My presence alongside local youth interpreters did not create significant power imbalances in interviewees, as we did not have any affiliation that could influence participants’ responses. I recorded interviews using handwritten notes in field notebooks rather than audio recording devices, given the sensitive security context. These notes were transcribed as soon as possible to ensure accuracy while details remained fresh. To protect participant confidentiality, I immediately implemented pseudonyms for all respondents and village names in my transcriptions and field notes. All names used in this article, including those of participants, villages, and specific locations, have been changed to ensure anonymity. Since most respondents were sufficiently proficient in Burmese, no interpreter was required. Interviews were usually conducted on benches surrounding a tea table under stilt houses, providing a comfortable setting for both note-taking and conversation. Respondents often chewed betel nut during these discussions, which contributed to a relaxed atmosphere in their own homes.

It should be noted that my initial focus of research was on villagers’ experiences with climate change amidst conflict. However, my ethnographic approach, comprising open-ended questions and participant observation, often led people to discuss issues far beyond climate change. On most occasions questions related to climate change morphed into discussions about agricultural livelihoods, food insecurity and experiences of past and present violence, displacement and land dispossession. Hence this article also reflects how we cannot isolate climate change experiences and vulnerabilities from wider political processes and histories of violence.¹⁷ At times, I felt uncomfortable trying to keep conversations focused on people’s experiences of climate change and their agricultural livelihoods, given the ongoing insecurities and military attacks they were facing in their daily lives. While climate change contributes to environmental challenges, field evidence suggests communities often experience other ecological disruptions as more immediately impactful. In Myanmar’s Salween Peace Park, Karen communities prioritize addressing armed conflict and threats to Indigenous conservation over climate concerns,¹⁸ while along the Mekong River in Cambodia, upstream dams have devastated flooded forests and fisheries through altered water flows, overshadowing climate impacts.¹⁹These cases demonstrate that environmental and ecological changes—such as dam construction, deforestation, and resource conflicts—have more obvious and immediate impacts on daily life than climate change. In Htee Hee village in particular it was clear from the moment I arrived that conflict and insecurity were more pressing in people’s daily lives than climate change.

Introducing Klerlweehtu

Most Karen villages in the eastern part of what the Myanmar national administration refers to as Bago Region sit along or between the Sittaung River and the densely forested areas of the eastern Bago mountain range (yoma). The area has been the site of intermittent armed conflict between the KNU/KNLA and the Myanmar military since 1948, and most residents have suffered direct violence and human rights abuses. In terms of governance, the upland, forested regions have long been governed by the KNU, while the lowland villages along the Sittaung River have mostly been sites of contested and mixed control between the national and KNU administrations.

In line with other research on areas under mixed control,²⁰ I consider my fieldwork area as historically constituting a frontier, not only in terms of contested governance, but also in terms of capitalist accumulation, involving land and resource grabbing.²¹ “Frontier” is a contested term in the social sciences literature, both as a social space that is real and imagined.²² However, as argued by Ballvé,²³ it can denote a space where state formation often takes place through violent disputes among an ensemble of competing armed actors and relations of power. Ballvé describes how in Columbia, capital accumulation and development interventions in frontiers often intersect with the reproduction of cycles of violence, enabling and legitimating land and resource dispossession. A variety of projects can be used to facilitate this, including mega dams, highways, industrial parks, forest conservation initiatives, and large-scale agricultural plantations for palm oil, rubber, etc.²⁴ Ballvé uses the term “frontier effect” to show that frontiers are created as spaces where powerful actors employ projects of capitalist accumulation through the language of progress, development and welfare.²⁵

These descriptions of frontier spaces reflect well the historical developments in Klerlweehtu, where military violence, administrative expansion and land grabs in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ have unfolded over a long period of time. Across both of my village research sites, people described in detail the many hardships they had endured over their lives, often beginning with accounts of the devastating effects of the military’s four cuts (pya ley pya) counterinsurgency operations from the late 1970s onwards, designed to cut off rebel groups like the KNU from access to food, funds, intelligence, and recruitment. As part of Myanmar military operations, customary and communal lands were the target of land grabs, and people were forcibly resettled away from their homelands.²⁶ This had profound implications for land tenure and land relations.

The bilateral preliminary ceasefire that was signed by the KNU in 2012, shortly after the military’s introduction of a semi-civilian government in 2011, impacted rural livelihoods in multiple ways. It brought a pause to open combat in Karen communities and many other benefits, including an increase in freedom of movement, improved livelihoods, more opportunities for income generation, increased healthcare and education services, and a reduction in reported human rights abuses.²⁷ However, for ethnic minority and Indigenous communities in frontier areas like east Bago Region, the ceasefire also meant an increasing penetration of corporate-driven land deals and investments, resulting in land grabs and reallocations for the benefit of large-scale agribusinesses and natural resource extraction.²⁸ This happened as the country opened up after 2011 and the semi-civilian government pursued an extractive developmental model of economic growth that facilitated land grabs. The Myanmar government also started using the language of forest conservation and climate change to justify “green grabbing,”²⁹ deepening systems of structural violence and inequalities, causing many subsistence farmers to lose their livelihoods and seek alternative opportunities in cities and neighboring countries. In some regions, green grabbing also exacerbated land conflicts and struggles over authority.³⁰ In research conducted prior to the coup in east Klerlweehtu, Chambers & Butta³¹ describe how Karen customary and communal territories was being increasingly threatened by agribusiness and natural resource extraction:

While people across all research sites spoke of the multiple benefits of the ceasefire, they noted that it also resulted in a new set of challenges related to the protection of their customary communal lands. Two of the emerging issues are people’s access to and restrictions on the use of community forests and shifting cultivation land. Since the 2012 ceasefire many of the forest areas that were used as customary communal lands have been taken over by private companies for growing rubber and other perennial plantations.³²

Similar to other areas of Myanmar with ceasefire deals, the Karen people’s land rights remained unprotected even after 2012. While the KNU’s 2015 land policy recognizes people as landowners and protects customary and communal tenure,³³ including land for rotational farming, community forestry, orchard lands, and grazing, its implementation was difficult in areas where Myanmar national authorities had control and influence, including Klerlweehtu and other frontier regions of southeast Myanmar.³⁴ The Myanmar government only grants land-user rights, and these are easily overridden by investment and conservation projects that often classify communal and customary lands as vacant and thereby disposable for state-led encroachment.³⁵

Much of the land in east Bago Region was relatively untouched by commercial plantation economies and mining before the ceasefire,³⁶ similar to the parts of Tanintharyi Region once known as conflict zones described by Naw Htee Ku & Hoffman.³⁷ However, according to reports from local villagers and members of the KNU, this changed dramatically after the ceasefire in 2012, when gold mining in particular erupted. During the 2010s the acceleration of investments and expansion of agribusiness in customary Karen lands also expanded, akin to what Kevin Woods describes as ‘ceasefire capitalism’.³⁸ In contrast to Tanintharyi Region and Hpapun District, which is a stronghold of the KNU’s Brigade 5, east Bago Region does not have strong civil society and environmental conservation organizations on the ground, so these commercial activities went relatively unchecked.

While Karen communities in Klerlweehtu have experienced many decades of direct and structural violence, the 2021 coup was still experienced as a rupture. Protests erupted in Klerlweehtu soon after the coup, and the KNU supported the non-violent and then armed resistance. The KNLA collaborated with the new PDFs forming in the region. Since then, the KNLA and PDFs took more territory. At the time of my fieldwork and interviews, I noted that most villages east of the Sittaung River were under KNU administration. This meant greater insecurity for villagers, because as the anti-coup resistance movement expanded, the Myanmar military retaliated by escalating its attacks on villages, employing airstrikes, artillery, and arson. In addition to these overlapping struggles and insecurities in the past and present, my research participants face mounting challenges from climate change, which are deeply related to their high dependence on agrarian livelihoods. In the next two sections I go into more detail about Kaser Lah and Htee Hee villages and discuss past events there as major case studies, explaining how they relate to people’s everyday struggles following the coup.

Kaser Lah: Dam Construction as Violent Rupture

Kaser Lah village was historically situated at the bottom of the Dawna mountain range, near the border between Karen State and Bago Region. Due to the village’s proximity to the dense forests of the Dawna mountain range, the area came under the control of the KNU in the early years after independence, when they initiated their struggle against the central government in 1949 for Kawthoolei.³⁹ The residents of Kaser Lah predominantly belong to the pgha k’nayaw, or S’gaw-speaking Karen ethnic group, and are today primarily Christian Baptists. Prior to the arrival of Christianity, villagers practiced animism, maintaining strong connections to the spirits or ‘owners’ of the land. Villagers engaged in shifting cultivation as their primary means of subsistence. As described in numerous studies on pgha k’nayaw people, land, known as kaw, provides a basis for agriculture, food security and family life. Relationships of care to the ‘owners of the land’ are a key component of everyday sociality and play a significant role in agricultural livelihoods.⁴⁰ Kaser Lah residents also held arable farmland and cultivated a variety of fruit trees, which they would sell to people in neighboring towns. I was told that the village’s lowland paddy production supported people living in the nearby, but more remote, upland forests, especially when these upland villagers failed to grow enough rice to meet their own needs. This status quo was undisturbed until Myanmar military operations started intensifying throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. These decades led to the construction of the Shwe Kyin dam at the original Kaser Lah village site in 2011.

Prior to the construction of the dam, military operations during the 2000s sought to clear out the KNU/KNLA from areas around Kaser Lah, with many Karen civilians classified as ‘enemies of the state’ simply by virtue of their ethnicity. The nearby forest is quite deep, favoring the style of guerilla warfare long carried out by the KNLA, so the Myanmar military tried to destroy these lands and the people that lived there. Many villagers were forced to move to military-controlled areas alongside major roads, while others sought refuge in nearby upland areas under KNU control. Villagers were frequently forced to migrate between the uplands and lowlands, where their original agricultural lands were, without secure land tenure in either location. As described in a human rights report at the time,⁴¹ although military offensives occurred intermittently over years, the systematic goal was to break down all forms of resistance and take complete control over the civilian population and territory. Offensives included burning down village houses and rice fields, arbitrary arrests and detention, extortion, forced labor and movement, and trade restrictions, which consistently undermined people’s ability to sustain their livelihoods.⁴²

Villagers from Kaser Lah told me this period was extremely difficult. Many people were obliged to borrow money from relatives and neighbors to purchase rice, and then they would try to pay back the loan back by harvesting wild seasonal cardamon seeds in the uplands. The violence also disrupted families over the long term, with some children relocating to refugee camps along the Thailand border in order to be able to continue their education. Others, however, were entirely deprived of educational opportunities. The violence led to a fragmentation of social structures, amplifying the community’s vulnerability and deepening the cycle of displacement and indebtedness. Despite these difficulties, many people remained committed to returning to Kaser Lah when they could. This commitment was dramatically disturbed by the construction of the Shwe Kyin dam not long before the 2012 ceasefire and the so-called ‘transition’ to democracy in Myanmar.

The Shwe Kyin dam project was initiated in 2009 by the military’s State Peace and Development Council (SPDC). It was built by a Chinese company, China Gezhouba Water and Power Group Co. Ltd., and completed in 2011. According to news articles cited by Naw Noreen, around twenty villages were submerged due to extensive flooding on the Shwe Kyin river, with Burmese troops destroying thousands of acres of farmland, crops, and fruit gardens in the lead-up to its completion.⁴³ Many of the villagers from Kaser Lah resolved to return to the village after the signing of the 2012 ceasefire and were unaware of the dam’s construction. When they came back, they found that their former houses and ancestral lands where they had grown rice and fruit trees were now underwater. None of the villagers received any compensation in exchange for their loss. They established a new village entirely from their own resources on the banks of the dam, near where their old village used to be.

One KNLA brigadier in the area said to me that he understood the dam as part of the military’s tactic of strategic warfare to eliminate the forest and pasturelands where the KNLA traditionally retreat to from the military.⁴⁴ He said that although the SPDC claimed to build the dam for “development” and to generate electricity, what they really intended was to undermine resistance to their rule by ‘drowning’ the KNLA’s areas of influence, with little care for the impact on ordinary Karen villagers. This use of infrastructure, especially dams, as a counterinsurgency weapon has historical precedent in Southeast Asia. The Nam Ngum dam in Laos exemplified this strategy during the Cold War, where infrastructure development served as a geopolitical tool against communist expansion. Completed in 1971 with support from ten countries under American-backed planning, the dam represented a calculated attempt to prevent communist influence not through military force alone but through modernization projects that would theoretically build prosperity and allegiance to Western-aligned governments.⁴⁵

Yet as both cases demonstrate, dams marketed as “development” projects often serve dual purposes: while ostensibly providing electricity and economic benefits, they simultaneously reshape the physical and political landscape in ways that undermine opposition movements. Whether flooding KNLA-controlled forests in Karen State or displacing rural populations who might support communist forces in Laos, these infrastructure projects function as instruments of territorial control disguised as national development initiatives.

The dam’s establishment in my study area indeed brought severe hardship upon local people. It destroyed Kaser Lah and its ancestral farmlands, disrupting residents’ food systems, land management, agriculture, and means of survival, while also cutting them off from healthcare and education. The people I spoke with in Kaser Lah felt that the destruction also disrupted their strong connections to their ancestral lands, village and community, which had been persisting despite previous experiences of displacement. Despite attacks from the Myanmar military in the past, they felt secure about their livelihoods, because they could return to their lands and homes once the military retreated. This was no longer possible due to the dam.

In 2012, after the ceasefire, some of the villagers described how they had decided to return to the village full of hope, only to find that their original village could only be seen underwater. One farmer, Tee Kler, described how the impact of the dam devastated many in the village:

Our lands were submerged by the dam water. Our village was at the bottom of the mountain. (My family) had lived in that village since our parents and grandparents’ time. When they started building (the dam), nobody informed us. My family had 20 acres of land on the mountain and five acres of paddy fields in the lowland. In the mountain areas, we grew lemon and djenkol bean. We also had a clinic and a school in our old village. After we came back, it was all underwater.⁴⁶

In my conversation with Tee Kler, he reminded me that they did not live peacefully before the dam, but at least they still had their lands and original homes. Against this background, the dam’s construction marked one of the biggest ruptures in the lives of Tee Kler and other villagers, on top of previous decades of violence and repeated displacement.

In other interviews, villagers revealed their histories of working on the land and their livelihoods from before the dam. A sixty-year-old man, Tee Htoo Kapaw, described a life of episodic moments of rupture and slow violence:

I lived in the old village that’s now underwater. In 1975, the payaw (Myanmar military) used their four cuts strategy, and we had to run all the time. At that time, we used both shifting cultivation and grew paddy in the fields. We ran back and forth from the mountains and finally went to Mae La Oo refugee camp in 1997. I had a lot of land, four pieces … If I had to guess, the total area would be around 20 acres. It’s all under water now. We came back to the village area around 2014 when there was no more conflict. Nobody encouraged us to come back and resettle here. Living in Mae La was comfortable. We knew (from others who had already returned) that our land in the old village was all gone. However, we wanted to come back and live here … Many people who lived in the old village are already in other countries now. I also had the chance to go (to another country) but I didn’t want to. I just want to live in my place.⁴⁷

Throughout Southeast Asia, emerging large-scale hydropower dam projects are highly contentious, frequently provoking disputes due to their associated extensive land dispossession, forced displacement, and devastating environmental consequences.⁴⁸ As has been described in other parts of the world,⁴⁹ the ancestral lands of Karen villagers in Kaser Lah were transformed into a frontier of extraction, where both KNU and the military state compete for territorial control by erasing existing forms of life. The construction of the dam was only made possible by dispossessing the local people of both their homes and farmlands, and it was used as a strategic tool of territorialization “to neutralize or eliminate” the KNU.⁵⁰ Situated within a broader history of violent conflict, territorialization, and the central state’s ongoing processes of dispossession and exploitation of ethnic nationality populations, the dam was experienced as a rupture, with violence an integral part of the process, erasing the existence of local people and their connection to the wider land.

The devastating impact of the Shwe Kyi dam on Kaser Lah people’s lives continues to affect how they attempt to cope with the rupture of the 2021 coup and with the increasing impacts of climate change. I suggest that the dam construction represented the apex of a chronic crisis and the catalyst for subsequent transformations to the land and people’s livelihoods. In this context, the 2021 coup was not as dramatic for Kaser Lah villagers as it was for other people, such as those living in Yangon. Instead, the coup sits on top of decades of episodic rupture and slow violence, which have gradually degraded the villagers’ lives and the traditional livelihoods they have long survived on. In conversations with residents about climate change, increasing heat, irregular rainfall, and pests affecting crop yields, the dam came up again and again as the main rupturing event affecting their thinking about survival.

Food insecurity, another common concern in conversations, was linked to the dam, the coup, and weather changes. Due to the dam flooding its new reservoir, the villagers have very limited space for traditional rotational farming and growing orchards. I witnessed how the submersion of naturally fertilized paddy fields and fruit groves forced communities into an unreliable new system of upland shifting cultivation that produced inconsistent harvests. Through participating in the community’s daily activities, I could also see the concurrent ecological disruption, including declining fish populations in both the dam and mountain streams, deforestation that destroyed wildlife habitat and reduced hunting opportunities, and stream depletion that eliminated traditional fishing spots. One respondent told me that “the streams [in the village areas] slowly disappeared [compared to the past], and I worry that people might have difficulties with drinking water in the future.”⁵¹ When I interviewed villagers about crop failures, they consistently described being compelled to seek wage labor in gold mining or purchase rice with borrowed money rather than rely on traditional resource extraction, revealing how large-scale environmental interventions can trap communities in cycles of food insecurity by destroying both primary agricultural systems and the fallback subsistence options I had initially expected them to utilize. As one respondent noted:

After the dam (Htee Tha Mel) was built, the good times were gone… Along the bank of Shwe Kyin creek, there were villagers’ paddy fields [before the dam was built] … The paddy fields near Shwe Kyin creek … are gone. All people from the old village have been on the mountain.⁵²

Like what Baird and Thorne show for Cambodia, dam overflows have accumulative and cascading ecological effects that strongly affect and reshape livelihoods.⁵³ In the Karen villagers this further interacts with conflict and climate change.

The irregular weather patterns, especially rainfall, have impacted agricultural productivity. In some years, farmers do not have enough rice for family consumption and their fruit trees do not produce as much fruit as in the past. While villagers continue to raise chickens and pigs, and some still go hunting, meat consumption is only for special occasions and ceremonies, such as rituals related to the preparation of land for planting rice. People also describe how wild animals for hunting are also disappearing. Kaw Tar Say, a 30-year-old father of two, shed light on the difficulties facing people in Kaser Lah due to the combined effects of climate change, increased pests, rising prices of fertilizers, and difficulties in accessing cities after the 2021 coup:

I’ve been practicing shifting cultivation on my parents’ land since I was very young, first with my parents and then with my own family after my marriage. I grow rice paddy, lemons, and beans. In this coming year, I will grow durian and betel nut. However, in recent years we’ve been having more problems on our farm, like an increase in pests like mice and ants. They destroy the plants. It’s really difficult. There used to be very few pests in the past. But now there are many. We can’t deal with it … The only solution is to buy more pesticides and fertilizer from the city, which is very expensive (because access is limited and prices have gone up since the coup). Everyone in the village tries to continue planting in the traditional way without using any chemical fertilizer, but it doesn’t solve the pest problem.⁵⁴

Kaw Tar Say further explained that farming has become very risky for many people in Kaser Lah since the escalation of conflict after the 2021 coup. He explained that his parents’ land is now in an active conflict zone and that there might be land mines there. “I don’t have a spare leg to lose there,” he joked, laughing out loud. He added:

Before the coup, there were brokers who’d come to our village and buy the fruit we grew. Now, the roads are closed, and they no longer come. We can’t sell fruit anymore. People from highland areas are also changing. They aren’t helping one another like before. I don’t know why. The culture is changing. In the past, people helped one another when they planted seeds. Now, they help one another less and less. People don’t happily work together on the farm anymore. Even though the situation was hardly good in the past, people had goodwill for one another. People have less goodwill for one another now.⁵⁵

As reflected in this quote, the history of episodic ruptures has not just affected people’s livelihoods but also fractured social relations. Park argues that wars frequently trigger a shift in our values regarding nature and culture, resulting in a transformed interaction between humanity and the environment.⁵⁶ In Kaser Lah, conflict and the Shwe Kyi dam, a project of state territorialization and capitalist expansion into the resource frontier,⁵⁷ resulted in significant cultural and social devastation, leading to a gradual degradation of human and non-human life. Violence and insecurity increased after the coup, with arbitrary detentions, road closures, and sporadic air strikes. The village has become more isolated. The enduring, low-intensity conflict and environmental degradation experienced by the villagers of Kaser Lah, which periodically erupts into more visible crises, often at the personal or household level, resembles a smoldering paddy fire conflagrating into rupture. The slow violence, characterized by protracted displacement and ecological destruction, exacerbates the vulnerabilities of the community, leading to a cycle of hardship and instability, which also makes it difficult for villagers to adapt to climate change impacts in the area effectively.

Htee Hee: Dispossession of Pastureland

Htee Hee village is situated in the lowlands along the banks of the Sittaung River. Like Kaser Lah, it is also predominantly inhabited by Christian S’gaw Karen, but with a small number of Bama individuals who settled there and married locals. It has around 200 households and most residents sustain themselves through farming, growing rice and beans as staple crops. Armed conflict in surrounding areas frequently disrupted the village until the year 2000, when clashes between the KNLA and Myanmar military became less frequent and the military established total control. Between 2014 and 2021, the village experienced a hybrid democratic system that featured reduced direct involvement from the Myanmar military. The village had access to central government services, such as Myanmar state schooling, but the KNU still maintained a presence. After the coup in 2021, the military then largely controlled the village until 2022, when the KNLA and PDFs took control of the village.

After Htee Hee village came under control of revolutionary forces, it was hit by frequent, almost daily, mortar shell attacks by the Myanmar military, including during my fieldwork. As I discuss more below, the violence unleashed by the coup changed the lives of villagers dramatically. However, when I inquired into the lives of individual households, including the climate and other challenges facing farmers, I understood this was not their first experience of rupture. Instead, long term cycles of violence, conflict and episodic ruptures had been an ongoing feature of life for people in Htee Hee. One of the recurring topics that came up in all my conversations with people in Htee Hee was food security and how their current survival was affected by the village’s loss of important pastureland in the 1990s. People explained to me how, when violent conflict broke out in the past, they could always rely on that pastureland for their basic needs. However, the conflict was more difficult to endure these days, due to the loss of these lands.

The village lost its pastureland when a military-affiliated militia group known as the baungbi toe, which can be roughly translated as the “short pants army,” so-called because they wore shorts, ravaged the local area committing human rights abuses. The militia group burned down structures and then confiscated the Htee Hee pastureland, resettling strangers from other villages to the pastureland as part of the military’s strategy to territorialize contested areas under KNU/KNLA influence. The KNLA used forested parts of the pastureland to ambush Myanmar military soldiers, so in this way, the military’s expropriation of the village’s pastureland was an example of calculated territorialization to reduce the size of areas benefiting or supporting the KNU/KNLA. This process not only dispossessed local people but also coerced them into clearing forest and constructing new dwellings in other parts of the pastureland. Consequently, with the passage of time, the pastureland was gradually transformed into a landscape of new settlements and farms. The new settlers, mostly Karen but with some Bamar among them, lived under the control of the baungbi toe militia.

Based on the villagers’ narratives, up until the 1990s the pastureland covered approximately 800 acres, including forested areas. It had been under the stewardship of Htee Hee and adjacent villages since the British colonial period, and possibly earlier. The villagers told me that everyone had traditionally depended on the pastureland for medicine, herbs, and essential foods like vegetables, fish from the lake inside the pastureland, and meat hunted in the forest. They also depended on the pastureland for fuel, building materials, and cattle grazing. Loss of the pastureland also meant that most people eventually had no choice but to sell their cattle and buffalo, as they now lacked essential grazing land. This meant that they could no longer use cow manure as natural fertilizer for their paddy fields, forcing them instead to rely on expensive chemical fertilizers and machines for rice planting and harvesting. Thus, due to the dispossession of the pastureland, within two decades, the villagers’ customary practices of agriculture and land use had been fundamentally altered. This was experienced as a dramatic rupture, upending traditional agricultural livelihoods that had provided villagers with food security.

The struggle of Htee Hee village is not against a corporate or large-scale business project as part of processes of market liberalization and capitalist accumulation, but against the military state’s territorialization of lands that ignored customary land tenure and its importance to both agricultural livelihoods and local belief systems of Karen people. The dispossession of pastureland also had many other consequences. Many young people felt compelled to leave the village to seek more sustainable livelihoods elsewhere, becoming migrant workers in Thailand, Malaysia, and elsewhere. One 22-year-old Htee Hee resident noted dryly, “If you see a two-story house in this village, it is not because they earned it from farming, it is because they have family members working abroad.” Research on the impacts of agrarian change in other areas of Myanmar also documents the high rates of out-migration of young people.⁵⁸ Villagers described how in the past, before young people had left the village for work elsewhere, everyone had supported each other during the planting and harvesting season through pooling their labor. But, since the loss of the pastureland, families could no longer survive off the land.

Following the 2012 preliminary ceasefire between the KNU and the military and the relatively liberalizing political climate in Myanmar, residents of Htee Hee village had hoped to be able to reclaim their pastureland. However, during the 2010s, the dispossession was exacerbated when the Myanmar government issued land certificates to the new residents who were resettled to the Htee Hee pasturelands. Although Htee Hee villagers sought assistance from the KNU, the organization lacked sufficient influence to support their claims to the pastureland. Furthermore, given that many of the resettled individuals had already constructed houses and were actively cultivating rice on the pastureland, KNU authorities advised Htee Hee residents to stop stirring up hatred and desist from actions that created inter-communal tensions. The KNU said it planned to revitalize the pastureland in areas where the resettled population had not built new houses. Despite the ongoing attempts of people in Htee Hee and other villages, they failed to reclaim the land before the resumption of military rule in 2021. I spoke with a land activist who participated in the land reclamation process during both the semi-civilian Union Solidarity and Development Party government led by Thein Sein (2011-2016) and the National League for Democracy government led by Aung San Suu Kyi (2016-2021). She said that it was never easy to get the authorities to listen to villagers’ concerns and resolve the issue. As some of the new settlers had already received Form 7 land certificates from the government, the pasturelands were parceled out and in effect privatized as commodities.⁵⁹

The rupture initiated by the aggression of the baungbi toe and the dispossession and relocations of the 1990s significantly destabilized Htee Hee village, eroding its economic base and embedding deep vulnerabilities within the community that were long-lasting. As the villagers struggled with the loss of their land and the forced adoption of new, less sustainable farming practices, their resilience was severely weakened, setting the stage for further crisis.

When the 2021 military coup happened, it marked a second devasting rupture, compounding the village’s existing vulnerabilities. Food insecurity, economic instability, and loss of traditional practices worsened, as the coup essentially intensified pre-existing crisis conditions. This was especially so in 2022 when the KNLA and allied PDFs battled the Myanmar military in Htee Hee and surrounding areas, leading to a KNLA/PDF victory. Despite this change, the Myanmar military made continuous attempts to reclaim the village during my fieldwork, often employing arbitrary artillery barrages and engaging in military operations around the village’s edges.

When I first arrived at Htee Hee I immediately noticed the effects of violent conflict in the surrounding environment. There was a new KNU checkpoint manned by revolutionary soldiers just a few minutes’ drive from the main road connecting the village to the towns of Mone and Kyaukkyi, restricting villagers’ easy access to them. The presence of landmine warning signs and bamboo barricades blocking access to subsidiary streets underscored the ever-present threat of violence that the community was forced to manage daily. Every house had a bomb shelter. Despite these signs of war, the architectural makeup of Htee Hee was characteristic of Karen villages, with wooden houses on stilts, and suggested a semblance of normalcy and resilience amidst the turmoil. I witnessed the dual realities of life in Htee Hee, where traditional Karen lifestyle elements coexist with and adapt to the needs of a conflict-ridden environment.

The villagers’ response to these threats was notably measured through my everyday participant observation; they chose not to evacuate unless a military incursion was imminent or credible information suggested an immediate threat. This apparent resilience can be attributed to the villagers’ trust in the protective capabilities of the KNU and allied revolutionary forces. Their decision to stay also underscores a complex interplay of fear, resilience, resistance, and community solidarity in the face of ongoing conflict.

The accumulative effects of slow violence and chronic crisis, I suggest, fueled a people’s resistance movement in Htee Hee right from the beginnings of the coup. Villagers have resisted the military junta using both violent and non-violent means. Most of the young people from the village joined the armed resistance. Some lost their lives, such as Lah Poe, a former government schoolteacher. He participated in the Civil Disobedience Movement in early 2021 and later decided to join the KNU/KNLA to fight the military, taking part in the battle to liberate his village from the Myanmar military. In early 2023, he was killed near Htee Hee village in a confrontation with the military. His elderly mother was devastated by her loss but continued to support the resistance by cooking for the revolutionary forces. She said to me with a sad face, “Your brother (here referring to her son, who should have been around my age) died in one of the battles in this village. I cook for these kids every day (referring to the PDF and KNLA soldiers). It’s the least I can do for the revolution.”⁶⁰

The recent post-coup conflict has significantly impacted the already vulnerable lives and agricultural livelihoods in the village. One farmer, Tee Htoo, explained that he did not finish planting crops in his farmland for the 2022 harvest because the battle for the village broke out toward the end of plowing, when most farmers were still preparing to seed their new crops of rice paddy. While some were able to finish spreading their seeds, many could not, resulting in food insecurity in the village in 2023. While the conflict and restrictions on travel and trade since the coup created food insecurity, many people also raised the issue of having their pastureland taken in the 1990s, as they believed that with their traditional pastureland they could better mitigate food insecurity and respond to climate change.

In recent years chemical fertilizers have become more expensive and harder to buy, with many villagers complaining about high costs resulting from the national economic crisis after the coup. Tee Ghay remarked to me, “We farmers don’t have monthly income, only seasonal, so it’s difficult.”⁶¹ Another farmer, Tee Sel, similarly remarked: “The harvest’s yield last year wasn’t great because of the political situation. With the weather changing every year everything depends on using chemical substances. If you can use more, the yield is high. If not, the yield is poor.”⁶² When I asked the simple question, “So why don’t you use cattle and cow manure instead to fertilize the fields?”, people bluntly responded that they did not have enough pastureland, nor income, to sustain cattle. “It costs approximately 30,000 Myanmar Kyat per month to keep a single cow,”. Tee Ghay explained. “If we have pastureland, everyone in the village will have the space to breed cows, buffalos, goats or other animals. It’s really hard to breed these animals now. Without the pastureland we don’t have enough food to feed them and have to buy it.”

One evening as Tee Ghay’s friend served me goat curry and I realized the huge problem the village has with land mines. I was initially wondering why the household had not sold the goat meat instead of eating it, but Tee Ghay explained to me that the goat had died from stepping on a land mine. Following on from this, Tee Ghay explained that his paddy land also likely had land mines planted in it, so he was hesitant to farm it again. In addition, villagers were under constant threat of artillery shells, and there was no shelter in the fields. Given these insecurities, the villagers mostly ate rice and beans they had saved from the year before I did my fieldwork.⁶³ I wondered how they would find rice in the coming year.

Although the effects of climate change were not often centered on by villagers during conversation, when I asked about them, villagers shared their concern about irregular seasons and changing weather patterns, especially how increasing heat and erratic rainfall had amplified their vulnerability, much like in other areas of Myanmar.⁶⁴ Tee Htoo said, “Everything to do with farming has changed. The soil quality isn’t good anymore. Without fertilizer, the plants don’t stay healthy, and the yield isn’t high. There are also more pests that I’ve never heard of or seen before”.⁶⁵ Villagers described how, due to labor shortages, high prices for chemical fertilizers and farming machine rentals, changes in forest cover, and irregular rainfall and heat, they struggle to maintain agricultural livelihoods. Especially in regards to food supplies, food system patterns, and food accessibility, the villagers will face more difficulties in future from intersecting conflict and climate change.

In March 2024, one year after I finished my fieldwork, over eighty of the 200 homes in Htee Hee were burned down by the military, including several homes belonging to my research participants. The intentional and selective arson was carried out with the help of a military-assigned village administrator who targeted households he thought were opposing military rule. The cycle of slow violence and chronic crisis, leading to and resulting from ruptures, has influenced the agricultural practices and food security of the villages. The previous rupture resulting from the loss of pastureland instigated slow violence and chronic crises that accumulated over time, leading to another rupture, underscoring how accumulated vulnerabilities can transform into a nexus for new and more severe crises.

Conclusion

This article has examined how Karen communities in Myanmar struggle to respond to the conflict-climate nexus in the context of longer histories of state violence, land dispossession, and territorialization. Based on the experiences of communities in two villages in east Bago Region, I show how people’s traditional livelihoods and strategies for coping with both climate change and conflict have been disrupted by violent ruptures and longer-term processes of slow violence⁶⁶ which have reshaped the land in which they live and produced chronic crisis.⁶⁷ This dynamic illustrates the core of my episodic rupture framework: ruptures do not simply end but transform into new conditions of slow violence that accumulate toward future ruptures. While Baird’s conceptualization where catastrophic violence “shifts into becoming slow violence” in an obscure form is based on temporality, I use the mountain range metaphor for my episodic rupture framework because it emphasizes variable intensity and progressive degradation rather than repetitive patterns. My framework contends that ruptures, like mountain peaks, vary significantly in severity—the 2011 dam construction on the Shwe Kyin river represents a higher peak of disruption for Kaser Lah than the 1990s pastureland dispossession in Htee Hee, while the 2021 coup combined with climate change creates an even more extreme peak precisely because accumulated slow violence amplify its impacts. I conceptualize the valleys between peaks as periods where slow violence accumulates like sediment, gradually raising the baseline level of crisis so that communities never return to their original state after each disruption. This metaphor demonstrates my core argument that each rupture episode creates a new baseline that sits at a higher elevation of vulnerability than before, with past ruptures remaining embedded in the community’s social and ecological environment rather than disappearing. The 2011 Shwe Kyin dam exemplifies rupture as conceptualized through the relational and interactive lens of Mahanty et al.⁶⁸ by demonstrating how it operated simultaneously across multiple scales—from Chinese capital investment and Myanmar military strategy to local ecological networks—while fundamentally transforming the social relations that structured Kaser Lah villagers’ lives. This rupture was temporally embedded within decades of military violence and continues to shape how the community experiences current challenges, while simultaneously creating “open moments” that exposed state violence and generated new, albeit constrained, forms of resistance and adaptation as villagers chose to rebuild near the dam site rather than accept permanent displacement.

The two case studies therefore highlight the importance of situating contemporary experiences of the political and violent rupture caused by the coup within longer-term histories of violence and what I refer to as episodic rupture. Furthermore, they also show the deep political histories of climate change vulnerability⁶⁹ and the destructive capacity of war- and state-making on both people and the land.⁷⁰ As pointed out by community members in each of the two villages, people’s capacity to survive and endure both conflict and climate change in Myanmar has been eroded by previous experiences of state-based violence, which I liken to a smoldering paddy husk fire.

The experience of villagers in Kaser Lah illustrates the attritional impacts of slow violence, where life conditions are increasingly degraded by long-term histories of conflict and state territorialization creating a situation of chronic crisis. While the immediate, rupturing violence of the dam construction and military oppression in 2011 has ceased, the slow violence persists, manifesting in disrupted livelihoods, altered land use, and the permanent loss of ancestral lands. Experienced as a rupture, the dam construction not only destroyed their lands and traditional livelihoods but also set off a series of enduring crises, like a paddy husk fire—smoldering quietly yet persistently with devastating consequences over time. In the context of the current political rupture and increasing threats to agricultural livelihoods from changing climate-related conditions, villagers have been forced to migrate elsewhere to support their families. In contrast to the spectacular forms of violence that dominate media narratives about Myanmar’s current political rupture, the Karen community’s ongoing suffering remains largely unnoticed and unheard. Yet these former experiences of rupture fundamentally continue to alter the fabric of the community in ways that will continue to reverberate across generations.

The experiences of villagers in Htee Hee also exemplify how experiences of chronic crisis and slow violence over time degrade people’s capacity to respond to both climate change and conflict in this ‘open moment’ of political rupture.⁷¹ My fieldwork in Htee Hee coincided with a time of heightened contestation between the Myanmar military and the KNU/KNLA and other resistance forces fighting to control the village. However, in conversations with villagers, it was immediately apparent that this was not their first experience of crisis and conflict and that former experiences of state violence deeply shaped their ability to survive. The loss of common pastoral land and the imposition of a new agricultural system had enduring effects, which also altered villagers’ capacity to respond to climate change. As Park argues⁷² in the context of South Korea, the current conflict in Htee Hee has also had direct and devastating impacts on the physical landscape of the village itself, further eroding people’s food security. The metaphor of the paddy husk fire illustrates the cumulative nature and historical result of ruptures, such as those experienced during the 1990s, which continue to smolder within the community, and flare up, as they currently are now.

In both villages I visited, agricultural livelihoods and the cultural relationship with the land and natural environment were transformed by episodic rupture, followed by and interacting with slow violence, including climate change. The destruction of traditional food systems by both political and environmental forces illustrates a form of slow violence that, while less visible than episodic ruptures of natural disasters and armed conflicts, deeply impacts community sustainability and resilience. In areas controlled by the KNU, the extent to which current ruptures lead to destructive or constructive shifts remains uncertain. The outcomes will largely depend on the responses from the communities themselves, the KNU, and other local governing actors and authorities. In the midst of these violent conflict dynamics and territorial disputes, communities also struggle to survive with changes to the weather that impact crops.

The experiences of the Kaser Lah and Htee Lee communities underscore the complex interplay between episodic rupture and human agency. As Mahanty et al.⁷³ and other scholars point out, ruptures do not merely incapacitate communities. They can also create the conditions for new forms of agency and resistance. In Htee Hee, for example, episodic rupture contributed to residents’ deeply felt latent discontent, which in turn influenced and became part of a revolutionary movement across most of the country. The 2021 coup acted as a catalyst, or fuel to the fire, igniting community resistance against the military junta off the back of decades of violence. The coup not only exacerbated villagers’ grievances but also amplified the experiences of previous forms of slow violence, highlighting the complex interplay between past and present ruptures. The experiences of these two communities in Klerlweehtu underscore the importance of understanding historical contexts and the enduring slow violence and past episodic ruptures creating a situation of chronic crisis that shape current ruptures and community responses to them. This approach requires a re-evaluation of how rupture is perceived and addressed in relation to time, urging a broader, more inclusive and temporal understanding of violence and its enduring impacts on people, the land, and the environment.

Endnotes

¹ Klerlweehtu is a Karen designation corresponding to east Bago Region, as it is called by the Myanmar military’s State Administration Council (and previous administrations before it). Klerlweehtu is also known as Nyaunglebin District, and is under the authority of the Karen National Liberation Army’s Brigade 3, under the Karen National Union’s administration. Since 2021, the area also has People’s Defense Forces active in it. In this article, I use east Bago Region and Klerlweehtu interchangeably.
² Ballvé, 2020; Faxon, 2021; Kyed, 2021; Rasmussen & Lund, 2018.
³ Lund, 2011.
⁴ Rasmussen & Lund, 2018; Vandergeest & Peluso, 1995.
⁵ Lund, 2016, p. 1203.
⁶ Mahanty et al., 2023.
⁷ Nixon, 2011, p. 2.
⁸ Baird, 2021.
⁹ Mahanty et al., 2023.
¹⁰ Nixon, 2011, p. 19.
¹¹ Kaser Lah village is a pseudonym for a Klerlweehtu village I visited in 2023.
¹² Htee Hee village is a pseudonym for a Klerlweehtu village I visited in 2023.
¹³ Franco & Borras, 2019.
¹⁴ Also see Temudo & Cabral (2023).
¹⁵ Park, 2018, p. 367.
¹⁶ Baird, 2021.
¹⁷ Franco & Borras, 2019; Ribot, 2014.
¹⁸ Paul et al., 2023.
¹⁹ Baird & Thorne, 2023.
²⁰ See Kyed, 2021.
²¹ Rasmussen & Lund, 2018.
²² Lefebvre, 1991.
²³ Ballvé, 2020.
²⁴ For such examples, see Barbier (2012); Peluso & Lund (2011); Rasmussen & Lund (2018); Woods (2019).
²⁵ Ballvé, 2020.
²⁶ Aung Naing, 2024; Ferguson, 2014; Woods, 2020; Woods & Naimark, 2020.
²⁷ Also see Chambers & Butta (2019). Despite the ceasefire, conflict persisted on the Moo Thel road, where KNLA brigades 3 and 5 fiercely defended territory against Myanmar military advances.
²⁸ Borras et al., 2020; Doi Ra & Khu Khu Ju, 2021; Franco & Borras, 2019; Jones, 2014; Kramer, 2021; Park, 2021; Sarma et al., 2021; Woods, 2020. Also see Naw Htee Ku & Hoffmann (2026) [this issue].
²⁹ Fairhead et al., 2012.
³⁰ Borras et al., 2020; Franco & Borras, 2019; Park, 2021; Woods, 2015; 2019.
³¹ Chambers & Butta, 2019.
³² Chambers & Butta, 2019, p. 79. See South et al. (2018) for an in-depth discussion of the interim arrangements and how this affects land and natural resource management.
³³ Karen National Union, 2015.
³⁴ Kyed & Myat The Thitsar, 2020.
³⁵ Lue Htar, 2020.
³⁶ Karen Human Rights Group, 2013, pp. 74–86. Some land in mixed administration areas was disturbed by activities such as dams and logging by cronies and the military.
³⁷ Naw Htee Ku & Hoffman, 2026 [this issue].
³⁸ Woods, 2011.
³⁹ For details on the KNU’s long-running armed and political struggle against the Myanmar military see South (2011).
⁴⁰ See for example, Paul et al., 2021; Paul et al., 2023.
⁴¹ Karen Human Rights Group, 2006.
⁴² Free Burma Rangers, 2006; Karen Human Rights Group, 2006.
⁴³ Naw Noreen, 2010.
⁴⁴ Motta et al. (2023) analyze the infrastructural violence of dam construction by the Myanmar military in Karen areas.
⁴⁵ Hirsch, 2010, pp. 313-314.
⁴⁶ Tee Kler, personal communication, April 6, 2023.
⁴⁷ Tee Htoo Kapay, personal communication, April 8, 2023.
⁴⁸ Baird, 2021; Baird & Barney, 2017; Kiik, 2020; Lamb & Dao, 2017; Mahanty et al., 2023.
⁴⁹ Levien, 2013; Tsing, 2005.
⁵⁰ Also see Tilly’s work on war making and state making as organized crime (1985, p. 181).
⁵¹ Tee Doh, personal communication, April 17, 2023.
⁵² Tee Knyaw, personal communication, April 13, 2023.
⁵³ Baird & Thorne, 2023.
⁵⁴ Kaw Tar Say, personal communication, April 10, 2023.
⁵⁵ Kaw Tar Say, personal communication, April 10, 2023.
⁵⁶ Park, 2018.
⁵⁷ Wood, 2019.
⁵⁸ Doi Ra et al., 2021, pp. 468-478.
⁵⁹ For a detailed analysis of the failure of government restitution processes in Myanmar and the problems associated with land certificates during the 2010s see Mark (2016) and Mark & Belton (2020).
⁶⁰ Lah Poe’s mother, personal communication, March 10, 2023.
⁶¹ Tee Ghay, personal communication, March 14, 2023.
⁶² Tee Sel, personal communication, March 12, 2023.
⁶³ The communities grow different types of beans for household consumption and making oil.
⁶⁴ See Kyed et al. (2026) [this issue].
⁶⁵ Tee Htoo, personal communication, March 10, 2023.
⁶⁶ Nixon, 2011.
⁶⁷ Vigh, 2008.
⁶⁸ Mahanty et al., 2023.
⁶⁹ Franco & Borras 2019; Temudo & Cabral, 2023.
⁷⁰ Park, 2018.
⁷¹ Lund, 2016.
⁷² Park, 2018.
⁷³ Mahanty et al., 2023.

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