Emerging ‘agrarian climate justice’ struggles in Myanmar

Abstract

The intersection between land grabs and climate change mitigation politics in Myanmar has created new political opportunities for scaling up, expanding and deepening struggles toward 'agrarian climate justice'. Building on the concepts of 'political opportunities' and 'rural democratization' to understand how rural politics is relevant to national regime changes in the process of deepening democracy, this paper argues that scaling up beyond the local level becomes necessary to counter the concentration of power at higher levels. At the same time, this vertical process is inextricable from building horizontal networks and rooting struggles in communities. By looking at national-level land policy advocacy for more just land laws, accountability politics in mining at a regional level in the southern Tanintharyi region, and the bottom-up establishment of local indigenous territories, this paper illustrates how expanding these struggles becomes necessary, but is also accompanied by potential faultlines. These fault-lines include divergent political tendencies within the network and challenges to working in areas contested by the Burmese state and ethnic armed organizations.

Rurally rooted cross-border migrant workers from Myanmar, Covid-19, and agrarian movements

“…It is also compelling to have a careful empirical investigation regarding actual demand and political struggles for land—as broadly framed in our study within the unitary sphere of production and social reproduction—whether these are captured by agrarian and food movement narratives, and if so, to what extent. Our guess is that the former is not fully captured by and represented in movements’ masterframes—at least not in the emerging agrarian social movements and networks in Myanmar, as can be deduced, for example, from Ra and Ju ( 2021 ) and Sekine ( 2021 ). It is necessary and possible to reframe political struggles for land from the perspective of working people or classes of labour, which requires struggles to be detached from a ‘small family farm-centric’ and/or from an ‘economic production-centric’ masterframe, to a ‘working people-centered’ and ‘production/social reproduction-centric’ perspective.…”

Scholar-Activism and Land Struggles

“…It has spilled over into the simultaneous processes of land struggles for agrarian justice and for environmental and climate justice. 'Agrarian climate justice' is the shorthand we use for this hybrid type, which may well be what defines twenty-first-century land struggles (Borras and Franco, 2018;Calmon et al, 2021;Sekine, 2021;Shah, 2022;Yaşın, 2022). 11 Activists have struggled to find ideological and political routes to navigate changes that pose existential threats to the lives and livelihoods of working people, rural and urban, worldwide.…”

Rethinking ‘just transitions’ from coal: the dynamics of land and labour in anti-coal struggles

“…Finally, such an expanded understanding of the motivations and composition of climate-related movements calls attention to the enabling conditions for broader coalition building. Reflecting on the emergence of struggles for 'agrarian climate justice' that combine demands for agrarian and climate justice (Franco and Borras 2019) in Myanmar, Sekine (2021) argues that a changing political context of rural democratization and expanding political opportunity structures, especially at the national level, have played an important role in complementing and supporting the efforts of diverse local struggles. Calmon, Jacovetti, and Koné (2021) similarly explore the possibilities for building alliances between peasant and environmental movements in Mali.…”