Rebel Politics

A Political Sociology of Armed Struggle in Myanmar's Borderlands

David Brenner

• Publisher: Southeast Asia Program Publications
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781501740084
• eBook ISBN: 9781501740114
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Rebel Politics analyzes the changing dynamics of the civil war in Myanmar, one of the most entrenched armed conflicts in the world. Since 2011, a national peace process has gone hand-in-hand with escalating ethnic conflict. The Karen National Union (KNU), previously known for its uncompromising stance against the central government of Myanmar, became a leader in the peace process after it signed a ceasefire in 2012. Meanwhile, the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) returned to the trenches in 2011 after its own seventeen-year-long ceasefire broke down. To understand these puzzling changes, Brenner conducted ethnographic fieldwork among the KNU and KIO, analyzing the relations between rebel leaders, their rank-and-file, and local communities in the context of wider political and geopolitical transformations. Drawing on Political Sociology, Rebel Politics explains how revolutionary elites capture and lose legitimacy within their own movements and how these internal contestations drive the strategies of rebellion in unforeseen ways. Brenner presents a novel perspective that contributes to our understanding of contemporary politics in Southeast Asia, and to the study of conflict, peace and security, by highlighting the hidden social dynamics and everyday practices of political violence, ethnic conflict, rebel governance and borderland politics.

CHAPTER ONE

REBELLION AS A SOCIAL PROCESS

Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

Karl Marx

Rebellion can be understood as a social process between differently situated but interdependent elite and nonelite actors whose interactions drive the strategies of non-state armed groups. This book takes a relational approach to studying this process of rebellion as ontologically embedded in its social environment. From this perspective, the landscape of interdependent rebel actors is multifaceted and dynamic, as their mutual interactions and ties with their social surroundings suggest. Fragmentation and factional contention are important driving forces behind the collective conduct of armed groups. Rebel leaders rely on the grassroots of the movement to create stable support networks for their rebel social order—or at least willing compliance with their opposition to the incumbent state. As I argue here, the key to understanding these internal struggles within armed groups, therefore, lies in whether the grassroots of a movement perceives their rebel elites as having legitimate authority. Such legitimate authority depends on two interlaced processes: reciprocal exchange relations between rebel rulers and local communities; and elites’ display of respect for nonelites through interactions that satisfy nonelites’ need to derive a positive social identity from affiliation with the rebellion.

A RELATIONAL APPROACH

Rebel movements are embedded in particular socio-temporal spaces. The elite and nonelite actors of rebellion are differently situated within these contexts. Understanding the environment of rebellion is therefore important to understanding why and how political violence takes places. While these social structures and processes do not dictate behavior, they play a significant role in it, especially at the group level.

Relationalism is the analytical focus on relations between social entities. It constitutes an ontological handle for reconciling structure and agency. Charles Tilly summarizes this approach as “the doctrine that transactions, interactions, social ties, and conversations constitute the central stuff of social life” (2008b, 7). Relationalism contrasts with substantialism, which infers motivations and behavior from the properties of social entities, including individual or collective actors as well as social structures. Methodological individualism, for instance, is a prominent substantialist approach. It posits that self-contained individuals act independently of their environment, whether they seek rational gains, as rational-choice models suggest, or follow internalized norms, as more sociological-inspired theories would predict. In a similar vein, structural theories frequently locate the source of action within self-subsistent, coherent social structures, including organization, class, and nation. From the perspective of a relational approach, individual motivations, including that to take up arms, are not the product of presumably self-propelled individuals who intentionally and purposefully act on a set of clear preferences. Indeed, individual motivations do not stem from within social actors themselves but emerge from the interactions between them (for an extended discussion, see Emirbayer 1997).

Relationalism has hitherto had limited impact on the study of armed groups and political violence, much of which remains grounded in methodological individualism. However, the work of the political sociology scholars Klaus Schlichte (2009a) and Jutta Bakonyi and Berit Bliesemann de Guevara (2014b) has demonstrated its usefulness in the study of political violence and rebellion. This book follows in their footsteps by looking to the sociologies of Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu. The ontological embeddedness of actors in their transactional environment is central to the thinking of both of these scholars, whose work has created a complementary heuristic device that focuses its inquiry on the dialectic nature of social structures and individuals (Paulle, van Heerikhuizen, and Emirbayer 2012). While they worked separately, Elias and Bourdieu have a common understanding and deployment of a coconstructed and interdependent triad of core concepts: social space (which Elias terms figuration and Bourdieu terms fields), power, and habitus (Paulle, van Heerikhuizen, and Emirbayer 2012, 70).

FIGURATION

Societies are made up of intertwined structures and processes of interacting, interdependent actors whose identity, cognition, and behavior are mutually contingent (Elias 1978, 103). These interdependencies tend to stabilize social orders, including the range from family to the nation-state itself, in spite of the fact that some of their members might be treated unfairly and suffer. This, however, does not preclude change. In fact, the change of one actor entails changes in other parts of a figuration along chains of interdependencies, which ultimately changes the whole figuration (Elias 1978, 133–44). Hence social interactions unfold a multiplicity of simultaneous but interlaced processes without clear casual primacies, which create a momentum of their own that drives social processes. As Elias points out, this explains why an event can emerge from “the interweaving of countless individual interests and intentions” that none of the individuals intend, whether or not they were allied or opposed to one another in their actions. As he says, “really this is the whole secret of social figurations, their compelling dynamics, their structural regularities, their process character, and their development; this is the secret of sociogenesis and of relational dynamics” (Elias 1994, 389).

A relational perspective suggests that self-contained, nonsocial actors whose interests emerge from within themselves—the figures at the center of substantialist views—do not exist. Instead, Elias posits that “[because] people are more or less dependent on each other first by nature and then through social learning, through education, socialization, and socially generated reciprocal needs, they exist, one might venture to say, only as pluralities, only in figurations” (Elias 1994, 213–14). I argue that this understanding explains the actions of both elite and nonelite actors of rebellion: their embeddedness in different positions of the wider social environment plays a key role in their identities, interests, and behavior. This social environment—and with it the rebel figuration—is shaped by forces on various levels, including, for instance, external political and economic forces that transform the context within which rebellion is taking place.

POWER

Uneven but constantly shifting power relations between actors play a major role in determining societal figurations. Elias notes that dynamic power balances are indeed “at the very hub of the figuration process” (1978, 131). Using the term field instead of figuration to depict the social space under investigation, Bourdieu also highlights the role of “people who dominate and people who are dominated.” To him, power “defines [every actor’s] position in the field and, as a result, their strategies” (Bourdieu 1998, 40–41). In the thinking of Bourdieu and Elias, actors do not themselves have power; rather, their relationships confer power through their interactions. While power balances are skewed in most societal figurations, power does not flow only from above to below. Even where power differentials are at their greatest, the ruled fulfill certain needs and functions of the rulers. This exerts figurational pressures on the rulers. In fact, all parts within a figuration influence each other, and this includes the influence of the least powerful on the most powerful. This relational understanding of power sheds light on the reciprocity of power: the more powerful actor depends on the less powerful actor, in spite of the former’s dominance (Elias 1983).

Authority thus becomes an inherently relational concept. The behavior of any social actor is not the result of self-propelled agents purposefully acting on their transcendental individual interests and powers. It is the outcome of figurational pressures that result from fluctuating power constellations within a particular social figuration (Paulle, van Heerikhuizen, and Emirbayer 2012, 75–78). Rebel movements have strict military hierarchies that entail stark cases of domination and obedience. Yet foot soldiers and other low-ranking rebels possess their own motivations and agency, which can both make for an uneasy relationship with elites and shape the dynamics of the overall movement.

HABITUS

From a relational perspective, identity, interests, and behavior all flow from the individual’s internalization of the social. Bourdieu as well as Elias have conceptualized this phenomenon as habitus: evolving systems of dispositions that structure one’s ways of perceiving, feeling, thinking, and acting. This understanding conceptualizes human behavior not as the outcome of calculated response to the individual’s externalities but as the routinized practices of what he or she considers to be appropriate within a relational context. Past and present conditions, which occur within a certain social figuration, structure the habitus, ordering individuals’ perception and actions in routinized practices (Bourdieu 1990, 53). History thus produces the habitus, and individual perceptions then rely on it (Bourdieu 1990, 54). Social actors essentially become the “product of history” (Bourdieu, as cited in Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 136).

Despite its structural qualities, habitus is not a deterministic concept. Comparing life to sport, Bourdieu also calls habitus “the feel for the game” (as cited in Maton 2014, 54), stressing the inventive, active side of habitual practices. Actors, indeed, strategize in order to improve their position within the power balance that lies at the core of every relational figuration (Maton 2014, 54). This turns figurations into sites of ongoing renegotiation and contestation between differently situated and empowered actors. In contrast to rational-choice theory, however, Bourdieu describes actors as being limited by their current position in the figuration. This affords them only a particular set of abilities and limited paths in which to maneuver. As habitus is also the basis of the actors’ perception of themselves and their situation, not all of these options might be visible or seem to be feasible (Maton 2014, 52). Choices made will in turn impact future perceptions of their interests and options as the habitus evolves. This leads to the emergence of strategic schemes or repertoires which actors resort to in their everyday practices.1 Applying this understanding to rebel movements reveals that rebellion is a dynamic social process.

REBELLION AND SOCIETY

In contrast to approaches that analyze rebel movements as being separate from society, the conceptualizing of rebellion as a social process involves analyzing it as a movement that is ontologically embedded in its social environment. Change in the social environment entails change in the rebel figuration. While zooming in on the internal politics of rebellion, my relational approach remains attentive to the ways in which powerful external forces—including, for instance, wider transitions in the political and economic landscape—shape not only the social context within which political violence takes place but also rebellion itself. In fact, my framework allows for asking how external forces impact the social figurations of rebel movements. These are not only organizations or groups but figurations that entail rebel soldiers as well as more loosely affiliated members and supporters like students, activists, and community leaders. Differently situated actors in these networks can have distinct ideas and motivations, which complicates the dynamic and reciprocal power relations between them. These tensions are especially pronounced between rebel leaders and the grassroots, such as rank-and-file soldiers or local communities. The fundamental challenge rebel leaders need to overcome to build a cohesive, capable political and military counterproject to the incumbent state is that of ensuring compliance and support with their rebel social order among local communities as well as the rank and file of a movement. Since sheer force cannot ensure compliance, rebel leaders need to promote a perception of legitimacy among rebel grassroots. Similar processes of legitimacy are as much at stake when rebel leaders compete with rival factions within their own movement as when they struggle against the state. Understanding this social process of rebellion involves answering the key question of how a movement’s grassroots come to view differently situated elites as more or less legitimate in relation to one another.

Conventional theories of civil war have not been concerned with the internal politics of nonstate armed groups. This is also why they often failed to account for the empirically observed behavior of rebel movements, which often seem to employ violence in a suboptimal way when measured against their presumed strategic objectives vis-à-vis the state they are fighting against. Students of armed conflict have therefore started to question the assumption that rebel movements are unitary actors whose behavior is the result of purposive strategies in reaction to their external environment (Pearlman 2009; Cunningham, Bakke, and Seymour 2012; Staniland 2014). These scholars have generally explored the causes, dynamics, and effects of group fragmentation and factional contestation within rebellion. Wendy Pearlman’s (2009) work, for instance, shows that these processes can lead to negotiation or spoiling strategies that, while suboptimal from an external utility perspective, can be rational for forwarding internal power interests. Cunningham et al. (2012, 69) agree that individual rebel factions struggle for leadership against each other even as they vie with the state, in which they seek to gain benefits for the movement as a whole. Their findings support the argument that conflict behavior of individual rebel factions that seems at odds with their preferences in the wider opposition toward the state is often perfectly consistent with their internal struggle for power.

My book builds on this body of literature. It understands rebel groups as heterogeneous movements in which differently situated actors form malleable alliances, fragment into factions along various fault lines, and wield different sources of authority corresponding to their location within a fluid network of power embedded in wider society. These internal cleavages entail contention for leadership between rival factions, which in turn develops a momentum of its own in driving armed group behavior. The interactions between both elite and nonelite actors play a vital role in these dynamics. Rather than being the outcome of elite strategizing, armed group behavior reflects a multifaceted and evolving social process between differently situated actors. The bulk of recent analysis has focused on strategic decision making at the level of factional elites based on new understandings of the impact of the social process. In fact, it focuses on factional elite politics to the exclusion of paying attention to mass participation.

Successful popular rebellion, unlike forms of nonstate political violence such as small-cell urban terrorism, is primarily sustained by mass participation. Leaders of popular rebellion rely on the grassroots of a movement for the intelligence, recruits, food, taxes, and shelter they need to challenge a militarily superior state army (Staniland 2014, 1–24). Generations of political theorists—from Machiavelli to Max Weber—have agreed that pure coercion is unstable and ultimately impotent for creating sustainable systems of compliance, obedience, and support (Zelditch 2001). Popular rebellion, therefore, depends on nonelites’ granting of legitimacy to rebel elites in their authority over them and their struggle against the state (Wickham-Crowley 1987; Mampilly 2011; Staniland 2014). Rival rebel elites therefore must seek such legitimacy in their internal factional contestation with each other. A gap between the motivating ideas at the elite and nonelite levels of mass movements often makes their relationship an uneasy one. Thus, as James Scott wrote in his studies on communist and nationalist insurrections, “Doing justice to radical movements requires not only the analysis of the ideas and activities of radical elites but also the recovery of the popular aspirations which made them possible” (1979, 98). This book will seek to do justice to the rebel movements I study in this way.

I characterize the actors within rebel social networks as incumbent leaders, aspirant elites, and a movement’s grassroots. The first two categories align with what Pearlman (2010) calls rebel leaders and aspirants. Incumbent leaders are the official political and military leaders of rebel groups. They wield the most power and have the greatest say in decision making. They might be fighting against the state, but they are also interested in maintaining the status quo within their movement. Aspirant elites are also elite actors. In contrast to incumbent leaders they are not in direct control and lack access to institutional resources. Yet they have political skills and ambition. They also command some power and authority within the movement, for instance, as junior leaders or commanders of regional units. Some aspirant elites wish to gain a leadership position for personal gain. Others vie for leadership because their aims for the collective or their preferred means to achieve shared aims differ from those of incumbent leaders. Incumbent and aspiring leaders conflict with each other in ways that can cause group fragmentation and power struggles within a movement.

Rebellion is a network that spans different nodes within wider society and can include such social elites as community leaders, activists, religious authorities, and businesspeople. Literature on rebellion has generally overlooked these actors, as they often have not taken up arms as part of the rebellion. Yet they may have close working relations with rebel leaders for whom they fulfill crucial functions, including mobilization, funding, and intelligence. They can legitimize or delegitimize incumbent rebel leaders by endorsing or opposing their cause among local communities. In fact, their loyalty to rebel leaders may be easily disrupted. Further, they can become rebel leaders or aspire to such positions. As they wield power with the rebel grassroots, they are an integral part of the rebel landscape.

Rebel grassroots are crucial to understanding rebel groups. They can, for instance, be the foot soldiers of guerrilla armies or administrators of a rebellion’s political wing. They can include supporters from local communities who have no official role in the rebel movement but support it. As Schlichte (2009a, 19) pointed out, these multiple forms of participation create fuzzy in-group and out-group boundaries. Fluid overlapping between combatants and civilians is, in fact, a defining criterion of most nonstate armed groups. There are various reasons for this. It provides an essential advantage in fighting asymmetric warfare against a militarily superior state (Schlichte 2012, 722). In addition to complicating the state’s task of combating actors of unclear status, blurriness arises from the creation of parallel governance structures and the provision of services, a key mechanism whereby rebel groups mobilize and build legitimacy (Mampilly 2011, 12). Moreover, popular rebellion is often embedded in the everyday meshing of society through kinship and other social ties between civilians and rebels (Shah 2013, 494). This can generate strong networks of support and loyalty in families of fighters (Kalyvas 2006, 125). In places of protracted social conflict rebel social networks can be widespread in society, comprising civil society actors like agricultural cooperatives, churches, student associations, social activist groups, and other community-based organizations and institutions, all of whose members may join without being active supporters of a particular rebel movement (Wood 2003, 190).

A researcher finds that active membership in and passive support of rebellion are difficult to distinguish. Civilians might support the rebel cause not by joining ranks on the front line but by providing intelligence or...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Rebellion as a Social Process
• Chapter 2 Nonstate Borderworlds
• Chapter 3 Karen Rebellion: Ceasing Fire
• Chapter 4 Kachin Rebellion: Ceasing Cease-Fire
• Chapter 5 The Social Foundations of War and Peace
• Interviews
• Notes
• References
• Index