Three new publications are available now from RCSD focused on issues of land, power, violence, investment, culture, identity and pedagogy in Mon State, Karen State, and throughout all of Myanmar.
Consisting of extensive testimony from informants throughout Myanmar, this book helps clarify the situation in the ground through individual stories of disposession, vulnerability and brutalization with a concise analysis of the greater narrative of how violent land-grabbing and military power is exercised throughout Myanmar, and what new modes of society, culture and identity are resulting from it.
This book is a grounded analysis of how investment, “ceasefire capitalism” and military power have come together to dispossess local people in a remote corner of Mon State who had previously lived under customary regimes of land use. Covid, community resistance, the 2021 coup, and an outbreak (again) of local violence have provided an unexpected twist in what had previously seemed a trajectory of tourism-focused development and disposession.
This monograph is based on a close ethnographic study of education in a high school and junior college run by the Karen Education and Culture Department of the Karen National Union to analyze how Karen language, culture, history and identity are utilized and included in a framework of critical pedagogy in a larger effort of emancipation and resistance to Burmanization.