‘Nothing about us, without us’: reflections on the challenges of building Land in Our Hands, a national land network in Myanmar/Burma

Abstract

The transition from military dictatorship to an electoral regime has opened limited political spaces for social activism in Myanmar. Some have called the unfolding situation a 'transition to democracy'. But this is far from the reality for some, if not most, of Myanmar's 'rural working people'. This paper explores the trajectory of the national land network called Land in Our Hands (LIOH or Doe Myay), which came into formal existence in 2014. This paper attempts to lay out a more comprehensive account of the historical legacies and internal and external pressures that have been shaping LIOH as a movement building initiative, and in relation to three key dimensions: its identity politics; its ideology and class base; and its political work.

Scholar-Activism and Land Struggles

“…There are also countries in between these two categories, which have significant levels of participation by fledgling national land movements in political contestations around land, although not as organized and well-developed. This applies, for example, to Myanmar from 2010 until the military coup in February 2021 (Ra and Ju, 2021).…”

The global climate of land politics

“…(1) In societies marked by pre-existing land-based inequalities, formalizing land tenure without prior or accompanying redistributive or restitutive reforms is likely to result in the formalization of inequalities. Those who were previously differentiated out or expelled from their lands are excluded from even making claims for tenure security, because they do not have existing land tenure to secure, as in the cases of the related land policies carried out in Myanmar from 2012 to 2020 (Ra et al, 2021 ; Ra & Ju, 2021 ). (2) Formalization in the context of relatively mobile systems of production almost always means sedentarization: from shifting cultivation to sedentary farming, from mobile pastoralism to ranching, from artisanal fishing to industrial fishpond production.…”

“…Meanwhile, in settings with significant numbers of landless or land-poor, and thus in need of land redistribution and restitution but there are no existing appropriate policies or laws, the mainstream strategy deployed has been to block any land policy that is redistributive or restitutive in character. A classic example is Myanmar where the World Bank, USAID and other international agencies that were advising the government (before the February 2021 military coup) pushed for market-oriented land policies, essentially blocking the possibility of system-wide redistributive and restitutive land policies (Ra et al, 2021 ; Ra & Ju, 2021 ). The cases of Brazil, Philippines, South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Colombia, already mentioned, are among the few exceptions: no other national redistributive land policy has been passed or implemented during the neoliberal period, despite the unprecedented levels of land concentration established or maintained by neoliberalism.…”