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Introduction
- Women
activist-refugees from Burma, displaced to Burma's borderlands with
Thailand, India and Bangladesh, have been working to create networks
of women's political and social welfare organisations from their
position of effective statelessness. The formation of the Women's
League of Burma (WLB) in 1999, an umbrella organisation consisting of
twelve border-based women's organisations, has facilitated a dramatic
increase in women's participation in Burma's opposition movement. The
production of reports documenting systematic gender-based human rights
abuses in Burma by WLB member organisations has particularly
embarrassed Burma's ruling military regime, the State Peace and
Development Council (SPDC), in international circles and has raised
the profile of the organisation and its members.[1]
- Increasingly,
interest is emerging in post-positivist international relations (IR)
theory concerning the subjectivity and agency of people in
refugee-related situations. It is argued that the site of refuge
provides valuable insights for understanding contemporary ethical and
political life and how it is transforming.[2]
Political philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, suggests a starting point for
understanding and exploring new forms of political agency and
subjectivity, that moves beyond the stifling logic of sovereignty,
lies with the figure of 'the refugee.' This figure, he argues, is
banished by regimes of sovereign power to a state of exception, a zone
where distinctions between inside and outside, law and fact, and
exception and rule break down and lose their meaning.[3]
In these ambiguous and hidden spaces, where the judicio-political
order is permanently in suspension, refugees are subject to
power/knowledge regimes that depoliticise their agency and cast them
as 'bare life.'[4]
As Agamben argues, however, '[i]t is on the basis of these uncertain
and nameless terrains, these difficult zones of indistinction that the
ways and forms of a new politics must be thought.'[5]
It is such a zone of indistinction—namely, Burma's interstate
borderlands—that women activist-refugees from Burma inhabit and from
which Burma's first modern women's movement has emerged.
- In
this article, I theorise how women activists displaced in Burma's
borderlands can be understood as political agents. I identify the ways
in which sovereign power relations attempt to capture and depoliticise
these women and how, over time, they develop strategies to renegotiate
violent sovereign relations to reinstate the possibility of genuine
non-violent political resistance. Women activist-refugees of Burma
represent and embody new forms of political agency and subjectivity.
These new forms are significant because they disrupt the state-centric
categories of agency and subjectivity through which sovereign regimes
of power—the Burmese military dictatorship and the international
humanitarian and refugee regimes[6]—gain
authority and exercise control.[7]
Central to this argument is the claim that Burma's interstate
borderlands where women activist-refugees live, are structured, in an
Agambian sense, as states of exception, as zones of indistinction.
- In
this I study apply concepts of trauma, sovereign relations of
violence, and transversal political practice to women activists
located in the interstitial position of interstate borderlands and
between boundaries of human-citizen, ethnicity and gender. In doing
so, I contribute to the field of feminist IR in two ways. First,
through an empirical focus on women activist-refugees of Burma, I draw
attention to a gendered set of political practices in which refugees
as political agents engage in a broader way than has been previously
discussed.[8]
Secondly, this discussion reinforces a feminist IR argument that a
more fluid concept of power and politics is necessary to capture a
fuller range of power relations and appreciate the agency and power of
both dominant and non-dominant actors.[9]
- This
article is structured into four main sections. First, a brief
background of Burma and the WLB is provided. Second, I draw on
Agamben's concepts of 'bare life' and 'state of exception' to show how
ontological categories associated with sovereign power are imposed on
women activist-refugees of Burma to limit their capacity for political
agency. Third, I focus on transformative dimensions of trauma and the
significance of the act of constituting one's identity to explain how
women activists reform their political subjectivity. And finally, this
new subjectivity is discussed as a line of flight beyond hegemonic
control of sovereign relations of power. Two examples of transversal
political strategies are given to illustrate this new political
subjectivity and agency.
- The
substantive data is derived from interviews with twenty-four women
activists located in the Thailand-Burma borderlands between 1999 and
2001.[10]
The participants, aged between 20 and 55 years, identified themselves
as belonging to nine ethnic nationalities from Burma: Karen, Karenni,
Shan, Mon, Pa-O, Padaung, Burman, Kachin, Tavoyan and Burmese.[11]
These women have lived on the borders for varying lengths of time
experiencing a variety of circumstances.[12]
They each have their own paths to becoming activist-refugees in
Burma's borderlands, but they are brought together by their common
gendered experiences of political violence and 'bare life' as well as
their common decisions to act to address these injustices.
Burma and woman activist-refugees
- Space
for political activism in Burma is all but closed given that
opposition to the military regime is a life-threatening pursuit. In
Burma, a state of emergency where the judicio-political order is
suspended has been the rule for several generations. Relations between
the ethnic minority groups and the Burman-dominated state quickly
deteriorated into violence shortly after Burma's independence from
Britain in 1948 and insurgent and counter-insurgent warfare has been
on-going around Burma's border areas ever since. A military dictatorship
permanently installed itself as the Burma Socialist Program Party
(BSPP) in 1962 and in response to the 1988 civil uprisings a state of
emergency was declared. The national constitution was suspended and a
'temporary' military council, currently called the State Peace and
Development Council (SPDC), continues to rule by decree.[13]
- While
ethno-political and pro-democratic resistance (as opposed to violent
resistance) in Burma continues, these activities are treated by the
state as criminal. Politicians and activists are detained under
decrees of martial law. Leading political opposition figures such as
the National League for Democracy's (NLD) Aung San Suu Kyi and Tin Oo
and the Shan National League for Democracy's Khun Htun Oo are either
jailed or imprisoned under house arrest. NLD members are surveilled
and harassed, driving most pro-democratic political opposition
underground. Imprisonment is to be expected for political activists,
as this woman activist explains recalling a visit to her friend, a
jailed NLD member.
Her first question was, 'What do
you think about prison for political activists? Are you afraid of prison?'
My answer was, 'Yes, I am afraid of the prison, I am afraid of being
arrested by the military'…She encouraged me not to be afraid…'That is the
normal life— the normal life for politicians and activists.'[14]
- The
emergence of a rights-based women's movement of Burma, as I have
argued elsewhere, has only been possible in Burma's borderlands. This
is particularly the case in the Thailand-Burma borderlands, because of
their political, social, geographic and historical characteristics.[15]
Many women's organisations have emerged or have been reinvigorated
amongst the displaced communities located in Burma's borderlands. Some
have their beginnings as the women's branches of the traditional
ethnic political leadership structures; others have developed in
relation to conditions of on-going conflict and life-threatening
poverty in Burma. In a triple, sometimes quadruple, sense, 'bare life'
and politics merges in the subjectivities of these women activists: as
women, refugees, members of politicised ethnic minorities and
pro-democratic opponents to the Burmese military regime. The WLB
focuses on building cooperation and understanding across ethnic and
political differences, and developing programs on peace, women against
violence, capacity building and political empowerment.[16]
It has a particular focus on advocacy campaigns designed to link
global, international and local activities.
Women Activist-Refugees and Sovereign Relations of Violence
- Women
activist-refugees of Burma are mostly located in Burma's territorial
and political borderlands. As areas involved in armed conflict, mass
human displacement and the creation of special economic zones, Burma's
interstate borders are intensely politicised. For those displaced by
state-related violence in Burma, interstate borderlands are lived as
extreme states of exception; they are ontologically structured as
spaces of permanent anxiety and liminality.[17]
These are spaces of exclusion, confusion, uncertainty and indiscriminate
violence, where nothing is resolvable, fixed or sure. Pressure on
individuals and communities caught in these zones is amplified by the
permanent suspension of the normal state of affairs; or, in other
words, a permanent 'state of exception'. These relational
characteristics of borderlands overflow into the socio-political
landscapes that more broadly span interstate borders.
- The
position these women occupy within the nation-state system is
exemplary of a gendered form of Agamben's figure of 'bare life' or homo
sacer. Banished by sovereign power to the state of exception, the homo
sacer is one who:
is excluded from the religious
community and from all political life: he [sic] cannot participate in the
rites of his gens, nor…can he perform any judicially valid act. His entire
existence is reduced to bare life stripped of every right by virtue of the
fact that anyone can kill him without committing homicide; he can save
himself only in perpetual flight or a foreign land. And yet he is in a continuous
relationship with the power that banished him precisely insofar as he is at
every instant exposed to an unconditional threat of death. He is pure zoe[18]
but his zoe is as such caught in the sovereign ban and must reckon
with it at every moment, finding the best way to elude or deceive it. In
this sense, no life, as exiles and bandits know well, is more 'political'
than this.[19]
- Sovereignty's
production of 'the refugee' as subject, Jenny Edkins argues, not only
produces an order of governmentality but also an order of sovereign
power. In producing 'the refugee' as outside but simultaneously
entrapped by the logic of sovereign power regimes, sovereignty is
produced.[20]
Those banned from political community by a sovereign regime because
they challenged its legitimacy must also be prevented from challenging
the same regime from the 'outside.' Hence, strategies to capture and
control figures subject to the sovereign ban are necessary in order
for the state to retain its legitimacy. When people in refugee-related
situations attempt to define their own identity and, more radically
still, act upon it, they run the grave risk of exposing the arbitrary
and contingent nature of sovereignty's architecture.[21]
They risk exposing the violence inherent in sovereign regimes'
strategies to maintain the status quo. Women activist-refugees embody,
in this South-Southeast Asian context, the very figure of 'bare life'
upon which Agamben argues modern sovereignty is founded.[22]
Understanding them as political in this way illuminates the highly sensitive
and gendered responses of states to non-citizens, particularly
non-citizens who engage in political activities on their territory.
- While
crossing beyond the territorial limit of Burma may have been a
relatively straight-forward (though neither easy nor safe) task for
these women activist-refugees, moving beyond the limits of sovereign
power regimes is not. Sovereign regimes of power work in multiple ways
to capture and forcefully reassert their control over individuals.
Those who qualify as 'persons of concern'[23]
in neighbouring states, for example, may register to live in camps on
the condition they do not pursue political activities. Those excluded
for political reasons from receiving humanitarian support, such as the
Shan, must survive as migrant workers who are at constant risk of
arrest, detention and deportation.[24]
- Through
the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), individual
refugees can apply to resettle to third countries and eventually gain
citizenship. In this way, the UNHCR—by its nature an inter-state
agency—functions as a de facto enforcer of the nation-state
system's regime of belonging. An effect of these programs is also to
undermine the growth of political activism by people displaced in
Burma's borderlands. As Anne McNevin highlights in the case of
non-status migrants in the United States, the radical potential of
activist-refugees' political agency becomes significantly diffused
once they are returned to the 'legal fold.'[25]
Women active within the 1988 student groups described the Thai
Government's attempts to dissolve Burmese student political activism
through resettlement programs. Consequently, decisions by some
individual activists to resettle in third countries caused tensions
within some border-based organisations.[26]
As this woman activist recalls:
At the beginning, we didn't like
the UNHCR policy. At that time, we were trying hard to build our organisation.
But the UNHCR gave the chance to go to a third country. Many of our friends
and colleagues left. So we hated the UNHCR![27]
- Living
in refugee camps, and outside, decisions about life and death in the
borderlands become arbitrary. As Agamben appreciated, when living in
this state of exception, 'whether or not atrocities are committed
depends not on law but on the civility and ethical sense of the
authorities who police them who temporarily act as sovereign.'[28]
Moreover, the lack of official political status leaves
activist-refugees vulnerable to multiple forms of physical and psychological
violence committed by anyone with impunity. In this way, people in
this void are forced to confront the fact of their own naked,
unprotected humanness. As a woman activist explained in the early days
of her displacement:
On the border I found myself
fighting for my own existence, just because I was of a different ethnicity
from the locals and just for being a woman. I felt more in fear of my own
personal security than men. Fear of being raped by anyone—it could be my
own friends, Karen soldiers, BSPP soldiers and also Thais.[29]
- As
Edkins and Veronique Pin-Fat point out, the relation of sovereign
power to 'bare life' is not a relation of power in any political
sense, but a relation of violence.[30]
The sovereign power affords no meaningful space for activist-refugees
to express their political opinions, but instead, responds to their
presence with various forms and degrees of force. As such, violence is
explicit or immanent in the state's dealings with women
activist-refugees both in Burma and in the borderlands. Their
narratives resound with incidents of the gendered, often intensely
sexualised and even fatal, character of encounters between agents of
sovereign power regimes and these women's politically unprotected
bodies. Inside Burma, these acts and threats include the use of rape
and other forms of sexualised violence as weapons of war against women
of ethnic minorities.[31]
Pro-democracy activists have testified to the gendered and sexualised
techniques the military dictatorship uses to interrogate and torture
women political prisoners.[32]
- Women
activist-refugees move to the border areas to escape the authority and
control of the Burmese military regime. Many come specifically in
search of space to pursue their political activism. In neighbouring
countries, women activist-refugees are no longer sought out as direct
targets of state violence as they are in Burma. Instead, they are seen
as aliens whose movements require containment and control. They have
been recast, no longer as citizens of a state in pursuit of a
political cause, but as 'refugees,' 'illegal aliens,' and
'undocumented migrants.' The discursive power carried through these
state-centric categories is highly successful in presenting people in
these refugee-related situations as voiceless, passive and helpless on
the one hand, or errant and deviant on the other.[33]
While their treatment by sovereign regimes of power in the borderlands
is not as intensely violent as in Burma, women activist-refugees are
nevertheless still treated as politically unqualified life and
decisions of life and death remain arbitrary. Incidents of rape,
sexual exploitation and other crimes are frequently reported from
encounters with security agents and citizens of neighbouring states.[34]
Women have no effective recourse to legal protection without risk of
arrest and possible deportation.
- Thus
in sovereign states of exception women activist-refugees are faced
with sovereign power regimes that mobilise multiple strategies to
recapture their bodies and their voices. Recast as 'outsiders' of the
state and the international political system, women activist-refugees
are predominantly treated by state security forces, refugee and
humanitarian workers, and local societies as lacking legitimate political
agency and identity. Particularly in the early years of the women's
movement, women activist-refugees experienced their displacement in
the borderlands as a form of trap.
At the beginning we felt [bad]
having to stay in the border; we have no country, we have no
citizenship...We cannot stay freely in the neighbouring country and we
cannot go back to our country. So it was a really disappointing problem, a
really big problem for us when we arrived in the border.[35]
- The
recourse to violence by sovereign power regimes in relation to women
activist-refugees demonstrates how the logic of sovereign power
functions to extinguish the possibility of genuine political
relations. Where relations of violence operate, the possibility of
effective political resistance is suffocated. This is not to suggest,
however, that resistance stops. Rather, it is necessary to find new
ways, new paths, or new lines of flight to access political space. For
women of Burma in refugee-related situations to continue to be or
become activists they must, as Peter Nyers says, make a break from the
state of exception.[36]
They must find a way to repoliticise their subjectivities and
their agency. Rather than running from and trying to forget the
traumatic events and realities caused by sovereign regimes of
violence, activist-refugees face this trauma head on. Speaking
publicly about their experiences and on behalf of those they represent
using human rights discourses, they find recognition in international
circles that legitimises their narratives of trauma and hence gives
them political leverage.
Trauma and hard decisions
- Whether
expressed directly or left unsaid, trauma dominates women
activist-refugees' narratives of political struggle. These women have
all experienced trauma as a result of violent encounters with regimes
of sovereign power, both inside Burma and in the interstate
borderlands. Traumatic events and their consequences surround them and
have come to structure their daily lives and constitute important
dimensions of their identities.
- Whether
acted upon immediately or after some time, experiences of trauma were,
as Edkins describes, points of no return.[37]
Within the context of fear, insecurity, uncertainty and silence—and
across refugee camps, migrant and political dissident
communities—women activist-refugees' experiences of violence and
powerlessness gradually led to realisations of the thoroughly gendered
character of the operations of sovereign regimes of power. Repeatedly,
it was the gendered character of living in conditions of
statelessness that were cited by the women I interviewed as a primary
reason they decided to pursue women-focused forms of activism. This
was explained to me by one of the woman leaders.
There are so many big issues.
Trafficking and the abusive situation in the work places [for migrants],
and refugees. They have no rights. And domestic violence. All that![38]
- Traumatic
experiences of 'bare life' sometimes have forced women
activist-refugees to make political choices about what to do with
memories they cannot forget, accept, or make sense of in relation to
their expectations of the way the world should be.[39]
Further, as Slavoj Žižek argues, trauma requires the traumatised to
confront that which did not take place as well as that which
did. The missed opportunities that could have led to alternative
histories are also constitutive parts of what did take place.[40]
In this way, the traumatic events around which women activist-refugees'
lives have formed are intensely political moments where the radical
contingency of their existing social order has been exposed only to be
violently reinstated.[41]
- It
is the existential need to remain true to trauma and the knowledge
that things can be, and almost were, different—and possibly
better—that drives women activist-refugees to overcome the
demobilising fear that engenders silence and inaction. Their memories
of trauma drive them to overcome the fear that greases the operation
of sovereign power to constitute them as 'bare life.' In this way,
they engage in a fundamental political challenge of our time: far from
seeking to escape power relations, they attempt to reinstate them, and
with them the possibility of politics.[42]
Acting politically
- Resisting
subjectification by a powerful outside force simultaneously involves
the process of creating one's own new subjectivity. Drawing on
Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Žižek theorises this process as the
act of 'self-constitution' as subject.[43]
In contrast to action of a more ordinary rule-following nature, Edkins
identifies this as the most intensely political act.[44]
The political character of these acts of self-constitution as
political agents derives from 'the burden of decision in a situation
which, so to speak, force[s] the agents to invent new solutions
and make unheard-of moves without guarantee in "general laws of
historical development" [original italics].'[45]
It is in these impossible moments of openness and undecidability, with
the force of history pushing down, that the political subject, which
Žižek calls the 'unfathomable X,' is called upon to be responsible and
accountable for urgent decisions that establish new political
realities.[46]
In those moments when they are faced with seemingly impossible
decisions of whether to remain silent or speak out about political
trauma from a position of effective statelessness, the new
subjectivity of the woman activist-refugee is formed.
- This
process, Žižek explains, involves the self presupposing the existence
of the symbolic or social order that has not yet come into being but
which one must imagine in order to make sense of one's actions. In
contrast to ordinary rule-following acts, 'the political act' is a
move that defines its own conditions and then retrospectively defines
the grounds that justify it.[47]
As Edkins writes, '[t]he act has to take place without justification,
without foundation in knowledge, without guarantee or legitimacy. It
cannot be grounded in ontology: it is this "crack" that
gives rise to ethics.'[48]
Speaking out from the supposedly depoliticised position of
statelessness necessarily breaks the rules of sovereign regimes of
power but is driven from within the subject by a need to remain true
to traumatic experience. In making this break—in speaking out about
injustices perpetrated by sovereign regimes—actors crack through the
barrier of the sovereign account of the political to bring forth a new
form of political subjectivity. The ethics this ontological 'crack'
gives rise to is deeply appreciated by those forced to inhabit the
sovereign state of exception. This state has been eloquently described
by one of the women activist-refugees.
There are other words—
stateless, illegal, guilty or not guilty, against the law. But no one says
what is right or wrong, you know. People talk about rules and regulations,
yeah, but is it right or wrong? Or rights to be or no rights to be? People
don't talk about it like that! We talk about dead or alive, not against the
rules, illegal, stateless...People should think about it more. They could
get a better approach to things.[49]
- Significantly,
activist-refugees' assumption of an identity as legitimate subjects of
political rights, articulated through drawing on a specific language
of human rights, enables them to assert a new status. It is on the
basis of this self-defined identity and not on the terms of the state
that they claim a right to be recognised as legitimate political actors
prior to any formal recognition by the state.[50]
Further, as McNevin argues, it is their substantive integration into
(globalised) society while remaining technically 'illegal' that
inspires the radical potential of their non-state identity.[51]
- Women
activist-refugees displaced from Burma assume multiple and complex
identities which take little account of their legal status: political
activists, human rights defenders, and women's rights and empowerment
activists. They act and identify themselves in ways other than those
expected of 'refugees' or 'illegal aliens.' A mixed sense of naďvety
about, and defiance towards, the rules of sovereign power regimes is
conveyed in their approach to their work. As this Burma activist
notes:
There is a certain naďvety in
what they [activist-refugees] do, how they approach things. I mean, they
still get affronted when the Thai authorities crack down on them. It's like
the rules don't apply to them.[52]
- The
radical nature of the political act, as Žižek points out, is by
definition illegal as it necessarily violates the laws of the existing
social order.[53]
Prioritising their gendered political cause and all it entails,
sovereign rules that exclude women activist-refugees from realising
their rights are seen as logistical problems, as this woman leader
illustrates:
We selected an organising
committee from members of different groups for the next year's congress.
But the women were really afraid to do that. They said we have no passport,
no identity cards, no money, how can we arrange a congress?[54]
- As
Jean-Claude Milner has written of the nature of this political act,
'the aim is not to see [things correctly], but to blind oneself
sufficiently to be able to strike the right way, i.e., the way that
disperses.'[55]
It is the merging of a new gender consciousness related to the
experiences of 'bare life' with a decision to act in resistance to
sovereign power regimes that forms the basis of emerging gendered, non-sovereign
forms of political subjectivity and agency in Burma's borderlands.
Through their decision to act on their trauma in spite of tremendous
constraints enforced by sovereign regimes of power, women
activist-refugees are forced to create new paths to pursue justice
outside the conventional sovereign state framework. And further, they
are forced to do so without precedents, role models or clear paths
laid before them.
New lines of flight: women activist-refugees and transversal
politics
- The
process of self-constitution as pro-democracy and gender equality
activists began for women activist-refugees upon their arrival at
Burma's interstate borderlands. Through constant trial and error they
have learnt and continue to learn that a substantial source of their
rising influence is grounded in their ability to make new connections
across deeply politicised and legalised divides and across time and
space. Through the pursuit of all these activities from the interstate
borderlands, women activist-refugees of Burma are becoming something
'other' than refugees, ethnic minorities, migrants, or activists.
Their activism represents a particular process of
deterritorialisation, no longer shaped by the boundaries of existing
nation-states and sovereign regimes. Activist-refugees straddle the
ontological divide between citizen and non-citizen. They blur the
barriers between the interlinking sovereign power regimes of the state
and nation-state system and as such cannot fit into the symbolic order
of either. They, therefore, carry the real potential to reveal the
contingency—and hence the insecurity—of both narratives. In this way,
they are creating what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari refer to as
'new lines of flight.'[56]
By this Deleuze and Guattari mean a shift towards another quality of
life or life that is lived at another degree of intensity that carries
with it revolutionary and emancipatory potential.[57]
- While
women activist-refugees are sensitive to dominant state-centric
discourses and practices that work to disempower and depoliticise
them, they continue to struggle to find language that can accurately
express their new forms of subjectivity and agency. They seek a new
language to express their demands and new forms of community to enable
them to escape the circuit of power between sovereign power regimes
and 'bare life.'[58]
One woman explained this.
If we think we are refugees, all
we can do is wait; who will support us? Who will help us? We don't like
these meanings. We believe everybody should have hope. Every person can try
for what they need...It is very difficult for me to say who I am. I
am a Burmese person who wants to support the improvement of our society [my
emphasis].[59]
- Edkins
and Pin-Fat argue that depoliticisation and the production of 'bare
life' depend on drawing political lines or boundaries and excluding
people accordingly. Thus, an important form of resistance to sovereign
regimes entails a refusal to draw lines or make distinctions between
the forms of life upon which sovereign power relies.[60]
Hence, repoliticisation depends on a refusal to draw those same lines
and be excluded. The WLB relies on this strategy in their activism in
three main ways. First, they do not make the distinction between
citizen and non-citizen—a distinction on which sovereign power and the
nation-state system depends. Instead, they place the interests of
women of Burma at the centre, wherever they may be located. Second,
they hold complex relationships across ethnic difference. Finally,
they depend on activists in global social movements to similarly
refuse to draw the same lines.
- The
refusal to draw lines according to the categories that sustain
sovereign power regimes opens new opportunities for transversal
political action for women activist-refugees from the borderlands.
Roland Bleiker understands transversal dissent as the ability not only
to transgress political and mental boundaries erected by international
relations, but also to challenge the sovereign political order itself.[61]
The merging of ideas, values, identities and co-ordinated action
across interstate boundaries results in spatial and temporal
reconfiguration of political space, including the reconfiguration of
the local and global such that it no longer makes sense to categorise
political space in this way. Transversal forms of dissent, Bleiker
explains, unleash their power only through a long process that entails
digging, slowly, underneath the foundations of authority. Continual,
pervasive and subtle campaigns of information dissemination gradually
transform the basis of people's ideas to prepare them to take action
for change. The following examples illustrate the strategies of women
activist-refugees' transversal activism that derive their political
impact from the subversion of the condition of 'bare life.'
- With
the assistance of women's Non-government Organisations (NGOs) and the
global operations of the Burmese Opposition Movement, border-based
women activist-refugees have become engaged in United Nations human
rights processes as one method to directly contradict the regime's
claims to political legitimacy. UN human rights forums such as the
Human Rights Council (HRC) and the Commission on the Status of Women
(CSW) provide a forum where these women can challenge the authority of
the regime. One of these activists explains the increasing global
interconnectedness of the nation-state system that opens spaces to
pressure the Burmese political regime.
The SPDC don't like our
delegations being present at international conferences...When they see
opposition representatives in meetings and conferences, they get really
angry. So we are very sure they don't want us to come to the international
level. We should try to do more of this kind of work. At the international
level, one country cannot stay separate. So every country tries to
communicate to work together. Every country is trying to do that. This is a
really big point for SPDC, to contact the international community.[62]
- Developing
skills and strategies to attend UN forums has enabled women
activist-refugees to confront representatives of the Burmese military
regime without their own physical bodies being at immediate risk of
violence. In these forums, they are no longer constituted as 'bare
life,' but are in a position to exert political pressure on the
military regime through demonstrating the regime's failure to adhere
to international norms and values. As such, they have successfully
transformed themselves into legitimate political subjects and have
reinstated a political relationship with the regime at the
international level.
- As
a second example, the campaign centred on Aung San Suu Kyi's birthday,
celebrated on 19 June each year, is gaining global recognition because
of her continued house arrest by the Burmese military regime. On 18
July 2006, in a Thailand-Burma border town, this campaign took the
form of a blood donation drive amongst the local Burmese community. It
was organised by a local Burmese health care clinic with support from
the local Thai hospital and in conjunction with women
activist-refugees. Hundreds of people, mostly migrants from Burma,
lined up to donate blood, wearing yellow ribbons symbolic of Burma's
pro-democracy movement. At the heart of the campaign were two
interlinking themes. One was a health concern, as it provided an
opportunity for the health institutions to replenish blood supply.[63]
The other was an opportunity for these people to express their
political desires in support of Aung San Suu Kyi and for positive
change in Burma.
- Constituted
by sovereign regimes of power as 'bare life,' the campaign was an
opportunity for these undocumented migrants and activists—belonging to
the same displaced community—to express their political beliefs and
desires through subverting the meaning attributed to their politicised
'bare life.' Donating blood to health care clinics servicing their
displaced community, people gave their blood to repoliticise their
identities on their own terms. Instead of having their blood spilled
in encounters with sovereign regimes, they gave blood—gave life—back to
their political community in honour of Aung San Suu Kyi. As these
migrant communities flow across the Thailand-Burma border, so too do
messages from this joint health and political campaign.
Conclusion
- In
this article, I have theorised the political character of women
activist-refugees in Burma's interstate borderlands. They resist their
subjection to discursive and violent sovereign practices that work to
ban them from sovereign political spaces and constitute them, in
Agamben's terms, as politically unqualified or 'bare life.' Driven by
an existential need to remain true to their traumatic political
experience in Burma and in the borderlands, they decide not to remain
silent but to act. This decision to act out diverges from the rules of
the sovereign power in two ways. Firstly, it breaks the rules of
sovereignty by acting politically from a position of effective
statelessness. Secondly, their positioning also forces them to develop
strategies for political action that avoid and negotiate the restraints
of sovereign power regimes. The very possibility of emancipatory
political practices by women activists of Burma is grounded in their
ability to create alternative spaces of collectivity, belonging and
recognition.[64]
Thus, it is argued, their creation of a new non-sovereign political
subjectivity and agency can be understood as an intensely political
act.[65]
- Assuming
political identities as activists from the position of 'bare life'
merges these two supposedly antithetical ontological categories into a
new subjectivity. Consequently, the distinction between inside and
outside sovereign spaces becomes blurred, unsettling the borders upon
which sovereign power regimes depend for their legitimacy. In doing
so, these activist-refugee women become something other than 'refugee'
or 'activist': they become activist-refugees. From this novel
position, new forms of transversal political agency are opened up,
whereby struggle for change becomes possible. The significance of
their activism lies in their demonstration that it is possible to
engage in politics from the position of 'bare life' and the state of
exception. Their self-conscious activism thus represents a subversion
of the foundations of sovereign power.[66]
- There
are obvious limits to the degree to which Burma's border-based women
activists can renegotiate the terms of their relations with sovereign
power regimes in their various forms. The way to overcome the
perpetual temporariness of this alternative political subjectivity has
yet to be imagined. State sovereignty remains the hegemonic form of
political organisation. This is evidenced by women activist-refugees'
desire to return to the 'normal' citizen-state relationship.[67]
Nevertheless, the activism of women displaced to Burma's borderlands
is one site to examine the intrinsically co-constitutive relation
between 'informal' and 'formal' political spaces, and how they can
transform one other.
Endnotes
[1]
For reports produced by the WLB and its member organisations, see 'Women's League of Burma,' URL:
http://www.womenofBurma.org, site accessed 28 March 2006. Thanks to
Anne McNevin, Alison Vicary and two anonymous referees for invaluable
and constructive feedback. Thanks also to Jan Jindy Pettman, Richard
Devetak, Sue Blackburn, Dave Mathieson and Vicki Squires for important
feedback on earlier drafts that shaped the paper's eventual form and
Vera Mackie and Sarah Pinto for on-going encouragement.
[2]
Peter Nyers, Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency,
London and New York: Routledge, 2006, p. 122.
[3]
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life,
translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1998, pp. 133–35.
[4]
Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 126–35.
[5]
Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 187.
[6]
There are very significant differences between the sovereign practices
that constitute these two forms of the state of exception. It is not
appropriate to attribute a moral equivalence to practices by which the
Burmese military dictatorship constitutes its perceived enemies as
'bare life,' and the practices of the humanitarian and refugee regimes
and host states to do this to these same people. It is not my
intention to conflate these two forms of the state of exception, but
to focus on the nature of both these spaces through which women
activist-refugees are subjected to sovereign regimes' attempts to
constitute them as 'bare life.' Thanks to Alison Vickery for
clarifying this point.
[7]
Thanks to Anne McNevin for clarifying this point.
[8]
Studies concerning the political agency of refugees mostly concern the
'politics of protection' in Western liberal democracies. See: Peter
Nyers, 'Abject cosmopolitanism: the politics of protection in the
anti-deportation movement,' in Third World Quarterly 24 (2003):
1069–093; Anne McNevin, 'Non-status migrants and the question of
political frame,' unpublished paper presented at the conference on
Politics of Recognition: Identity, Respect, Justice, Institute for
Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, 30–31 July 2005;
Peter Nyers and Michelle Lowry, Global Movements for Refugee and
Migrant Rights, Special Edition of Refuge: Canada's Periodical
on Refugees 21 (2003). Importantly, Nyers explores the refugee
political agency of 'refugee warriors' through the case of the Afghan muhajirin
in Nyers, Rethinking Refugees, especially Chapter 5.
[9]
Aili Mari Tripp, Changing the Rules: The Politics of Liberalization
and the Urban Informal Economy in Tanzania, Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1997, p. 15.
[10]
In all cases, the women interviewed were colleagues (and friends). I
worked with the WLB as a volunteer between May 1999 and February 2001
and again in 2006. Discussion of issues concerning the
research-subject relationship can be found in Mary O'Kane, Borderlands
and Women: Transversal Political Agency on the Burma-Thailand Border,
Monash Asia Institute Working Paper Series, Working Paper No. 126,
Melbourne: Monash Asia Institute, 2005.
[11]
I refer to 'Burman' as the (dominant) ethnic group of Burma and
'Burmese' as the political identity by which many people from Burma,
including Burmans and many whose ethnic heritage is mixed, choose to
identify themselves.
[12]
Some women had been on the border for most of their lives, displaced
by ethno-political conflict or conflict-related, life-threatening
poverty, arriving at refugee camps or border villages as young
children. Others arrived in the aftermath of the 1988 pro-democracy
civil uprisings.
[13]
Christina Fink, Living Silence: Burma Under Military Rule,
London and New York: Zed Books, 2001.
[14]
Interview with 'Lynn,' Chiang Mai, 26 June, 2001.
[15]
O'Kane, Borderlands and Women, p. 1.
[16]
'Women's League of Burma.'
[17]
Here I extend the use of the term 'ontology of anxiety' used by
Jasmina Husanovic. Jasmina Husanovic, 'In search of agency: beyond the
old/new' biopolitics of sovereignty in Bosnia,' in Sovereign Lives:
Power in Global Politics, ed. Jenny Edkins, Veronique Pin-Fat and
Michael Shapiro, New York and London: Routledge, 2004, pp. 211–38.
[18]
Agamben's theoretical insights are based on the distinction made in
classical Greece between and separation of zoe, or 'bare life'
common to beings, and bios, or politically qualified life.
Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 3–4.
[19]
Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 183–14.
[20]
Jenny Edkins, 'Sovereign power, zones of indistinction, and the camp,'
in Alternatives 25(1) (2000):3–25, p. 15.
[21]
Nyers, Rethinking Refugees, pp. 129–30.
[22]
Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 131.
[23]
As Thailand has not ratified the UN 1951 Convention on the Status of
Refugees or its 1967 Protocol, the Thai Government does not recognise
refugees on its territory. Instead, the UNHCR uses the term 'person of
concern' to refer to people displaced from Burma who qualify for
refugee status according to the Refugees Convention.
[24]
The Thai Government does not officially recognise armed conflict as
occurring in Burma's Shan State and does not permit Shan to establish
refugee camps. Shan Human Rights Foundation (SHRF), Charting
the Exodus from Shan State, SHRF, 2002,URL:
http://www.shanland.org/resources/bookspub/humanrights/, accessed 1
July 2006.
[25]
Anne NcNevin, 'Non-status migrants, neoliberal geographies and spatial
frontiers of "the political",' unpublished paper presented
at Oceanic Conference on International Studies, University of
Melbourne, July 5–7 2006.
[26]
An estimated 10,000 students and pro-democracy activists fled to Burma's
border areas after the Burmese military's crackdown on nation-wide
civil demonstration. Fink, Living Silence, pp. 50–60.
[27]
Interview with Mi Sue Pwint, Chiang Mai,
[29] June, 2001.
[28] Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 174.
[29]
Interview with Myint Myint San, Bangkok, 20 June 2001.
[30]
Jenny Edkins and Veronique Pin-Fat, 'Introduction: life, power,
resistance,' in Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, ed.
Jenny Edkins, Veronique Pin-Fat & Michael Shapiro, New York and
London: Routledge, 2004, p. 8. This argument takes a relational
understanding of power as articulated by Michel Foucault where power
is dispersed and not possessed, and that where there is a relation of
power, there is also resistance or the possibility for resistance. See
Michel Foucault, 'Power and norms,' in Michel Foucault: Power,
Truth, Strategy, ed. Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton, Sydney: Feral
Productions, 1979, pp. 59–62.
[31]
Brenda Belak, Gathering Strength: Women from Burma on their Rights,
Chiang Mai: Images Asia, 2002, p. 58. For documentation reports
concerning systematic use of rape as a weapon of war in Burma see Shan
Women's Action Network (SWAN) and Shan Human Rights Foundation (SHRF),
License to Rape, Chiang Mai, SHRF and SWAN, 2002; Karen Women's
Organisation (KWO), Shattering
Silences, KWO, 2004, URL: www.womenofburma.org, accessed 4
April 2004.
[32]
Assistance Association from Political Prisoners (AAPP), The
Darkness We See: Torture in Burma's Interrogation Centers and Prisons,
Mae Sot: AAPP, 2005.
[33]
Nevzat Soguk, States and Strangers: Refugees and Displacements of
Statecraft, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999, pp. 4–9;
Nyers, Rethinking Refugees, especially Chapter 4.
[34]
Belak, Gathering Strength, pp. 57–71.
[35]
Interview with 'Moh Saw Meh,' Chiang Mai, 30 June, 2001.
[36]
Nyers, Rethinking Refugees, p. 121.
[37]
Edkins, 'Sovereign power, zones of indistinction, and the camp,' p. 3.
[38]
Interview, Chiang Mai, 1 July, 2001. Name and pseudonym not given.
[39]
Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 8–21.
[40]
Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a
Political Factor, London: Verso, 1991, p. 189.
[41]
Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, p. 189.
[42]
Edkins and Pin-Fat, 'Introduction,' p. 7.
[43]
Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, pp. 189–93.
[44]
Jenny Edkins, Poststructuralism and International Relations,
Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1999, p. 137.
[45]
Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, p. 189.
[46]
Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, p. 189.
[47]
Edkins, Poststructuralism and International Relations, p. 137.
[48]
Edkins, Poststructuralism and International Relations, p. 141.
[49]
Interview Chiang Mai, 1 July, 2001, name and pseudonym not given.
[50]
Anne McNevin, 'Political belonging: non-status migrants in a
globalised age,' Ph.D. thesis, Australian National University,
February 2006, p. 211. Thanks to Anne McNevin for raising this point.
[51]
NcNevin, 'Non-status migrants, neoliberal geographies and spatial
frontiers of "the political".'
[52]
Interview with Burma activist, Mae Sot, 20 January 2006.
[53]
Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, p. 192.
[54]
Interview with Mi Sue Pwint, Chiang Mai, 29 June, 2001.
[55]
Jean-Claude Milner, Les Noms Indistincts, Paris: Editions du
Seuil, 1990, p. 16, cited in Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do,
p. 192.
[56]
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, London: Continuum, 1987, pp. 3–25.
[57]
Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political, London and New York:
Routledge, 2000, p. 87.
[58]
Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, p. 8.
[59]
Interview with Mi Sue Pwint, Chiang Mai, 29 June, 2001.
[60]
Edkins and Pin-Fat, 'Introduction,' p. 3.
[61]
Bleiker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, p.
9.
[62]
Interview with Mi Sue Pwint, Chiang Mai, 29 June, 2001.
[63]
For discussion concerning health issues affecting people in the
Thai-Burma borderlands, refer to Mae
Tao Clinic, online: http://www.maetaoclinic.org/, assessed 10 May
2007.
[64]
Husanovic, 'In search of agency,' p. 225.
[65]
Edkins, Poststructuralism and International Relations, p. 137.
[66]
Thanks to Anne McNevin for helping me to sharpen this point.
[67]
All interviews with activist-refugees conducted between 12 November
2000 and 8 July 2001 in Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Mae Hong Son.
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