Thesis advisor: Stephen Pfohl / This dissertation explores the intersection of gender, violence, and dispossession among Burmese migrants living in precarious circumstances in Thailand, close to the border with Myanmar. In this space, particularly in the town of Mae Sot and surrounding areas, migrants are targets of multiple overlapping technologies of governance, including the Thai state, multinational garment export processing facilities, plantation-style agricultural firms, international humanitarian NGOs, and transnational social and political networks. Through a multi-modal qualitative approach relying on collaborative action research and key informant interviews, I consider how this complex web of discursive and relational power simultaneously renders migrants invisible subjects of global supply chains and yet hyper-visible targets of humanitarian assistance and intervention. Invisible because actors associated with state or market forces performatively enforce upon migrant bodies the violent notion that they are deportable, reiterating the boundaries of sovereignty at each encounter. And visible because as migrants struggle to make ends meet working long hours for illegally low wages, NGOs spotlight their social problems and offer solutions that promote individual biowelfare but not wider transformative change. Despite what appear to be opposing forces, both forms of power contribute to the production of gendered border subjects that are healthy workers; ethical and self-reliant yet docile. Migrants interpret and negotiate these overlapping systems, exerting agency as they rely on their own social and political networks to establish mechanisms of order that are shaped by but not necessarily subordinate to the disciplinary regimes of factories and farms, the juridical frameworks of the state, or the biopolitical gaze of NGOs. This dissertation finds that within these mechanisms, gender becomes a key discursive metaphor both to make sense of the widespread violence of displacement and to maintain collective order. Migrants' own gendered performances of discipline are themselves a product of border precarity and forge pathways of limited agency through which migrants seek to navigate the everyday conditions of that precarity. Throughout, this dissertation reflexively examines its own collaborative action research approach as well as humanitarian intervention on the border to identify ways that both are complicit in gendered border subjectivation. Gender in this analysis manifests itself as a set of discursive resources that NGO staff and migrants make use of as they seek to effect change--albeit in ways that tend to leave unchallenged the larger structural conditions of violence and neoliberal sovereignty that undergird and require the formation of a docile and disposable border population. Thus, in one sense, this dissertation is about how migrants survive in a violent context of dispossession, but it is also just as much about the generative qualities of violent life, the spaces in which agency challenges precarity, and the ways in which performatively reproduced gendered hierarchies are at the center of both precarity and resistance. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

Thesis advisor: Sarah Babb / Thesis advisor: Lisa Dodson / Through a qualitative thematic analysis of sixty-four semi structured interviews, this thesis focuses on the situation facing Burmese forced migrants in Thailand. In particular, I look at the ways in which forced migrants, their host government, and humanitarian actors negotiate the meaning of refugee status and what it means to be in a protracted space of transition. Findings for this study point to the ways in which the policies and norms of the Royal Thai Government and the offices of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees inadvertently interconnect to complicate the space for refugee protection. The paper also finds that refugee status can be gained or lost through interactions between asylum seekers and various parties on the Thai Burma border. Certain actors within the refugee community and among local and humanitarian authorities play the role of gatekeepers, granting access to a variety of services and protection at a cost and excluding those who cannot pay the cost. Underlying this context of asylum are themes of extreme repression and resistance that have implications not only for the lives of those who seek refuge, but also for notions of sovereignty and citizenship. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

The archaeological landscape of Upper Burma from the middle of the first millennium BC to the Bagan period in the 13th-14th century AD is a landscape of continuity. Finds of polished stone and bronze artifacts suggest the existence of early metal-using cultures in the Chindwin and Samon River Valleys, and along parts of the Ayeyarwady plain. Increasing technological and settlement complexity in the Samon Valley suggests that a distinctive culture whose agricultural and trade success can be read in the archaeological record of the Late Prehistoric period developed there. The appearance of the early urban �Pyu� system of walled central places during the early first millennium AD seems to have involved a spread of agricultural and management skills and population from the Samon. The leaders of the urban centres adopted Indic symbols and Sanskrit modes of kingship to enhance and extend their authority. The early urban system was subject over time to a range of stresses including siltation of water systems, external disruption and social changes as Buddhist notions of leadership eclipsed Brahmanical ones. The archaeological evidence indicates that a settlement was forming at Bagan during the last centuries of the first millennium AD. By the mid 11th century Bagan began to dominate Upper Burma, and the region began a transition from a system of largely autonomous city states to a centralised kingdom. Inscriptions of the 11th to 13th centuries indicate that as the Bagan Empire expanded it subsumed the agricultural lands that had been developed by the Pyu.

The archaeological landscape of Upper Burma from the middle of the first millennium BC to the Bagan period in the 13th-14th century AD is a landscape of continuity. Finds of polished stone and bronze artifacts suggest the existence of early metal-using cultures in the Chindwin and Samon River Valleys, and along parts of the Ayeyarwady plain. Increasing technological and settlement complexity in the Samon Valley suggests that a distinctive culture whose agricultural and trade success can be read in the archaeological record of the Late Prehistoric period developed there. The appearance of the early urban �Pyu� system of walled central places during the early first millennium AD seems to have involved a spread of agricultural and management skills and population from the Samon. The leaders of the urban centres adopted Indic symbols and Sanskrit modes of kingship to enhance and extend their authority. The early urban system was subject over time to a range of stresses including siltation of water systems, external disruption and social changes as Buddhist notions of leadership eclipsed Brahmanical ones. The archaeological evidence indicates that a settlement was forming at Bagan during the last centuries of the first millennium AD. By the mid 11th century Bagan began to dominate Upper Burma, and the region began a transition from a system of largely autonomous city states to a centralised kingdom. Inscriptions of the 11th to 13th centuries indicate that as the Bagan Empire expanded it subsumed the agricultural lands that had been developed by the Pyu.

For much of its recent history, the Kachin State of northern Myanmar has been wrought with civil warfare that has come to define its image from the outside, as well as being a key signifier in the conceptual life worlds of many of its ethnic nationalities. While Myanmar is currently witnessing significant – if still uncertain – political and economic transitions, the Kachin State remains largely marginalized from these processes. Rather than an absence of state power, however, this marginalization had led to competing projects of statecraft vying over resources, military control and popular legitimacy in the highly fragmented territorialities. In this thesis I engage this complex landscape through the nexus of formal schooling, organized religion, and ethno nationalist politics. My primary ethnographic focus is on the emergence ‐ of several private schools led by a younger generation of Kachin educators. I am asking why these schools arose at this point in time and what has motivated their leaders to strive for institutional autonomy in settings long characterised by a scarcity of human and material resources. I argue that, in addition to their explicitly stated pedagogical aims, these initiatives are serving particular visions of social and political development, defined by Christian moralities and ethno‐nationalist ideologies. As such, their practice can be read as a form of critique towards the established systems of schooling and governance led by the central state of Myanmar, as well as that of the Kachin Independence Organization, the main contender for political self‐determination in the area. Decades of perceived marginalization of the Kachin populace of northern Myanmar are the principal motivator for the leaders of these educational projects. However, important points of tension also exist within the Kachin society itself, both in the fields of schooling and religion. A focus on the institutions of private education thus enables me to ask questions about the nature of local political authority, ethnic identification, and the influence of organized religion more generally. By employing a historical perspective to complement my ethnographic material, I am tracing the emergence of ideas, practices, and institutions of schooling that were born from the missionary encounter and decades of military conflicts. These, together with the more recent cosmopolitan ideas of modernity, lie at the heart of contemporary efforts to provide alternative paths to schooling, and to attain the dreams of social development for the Kachin society that the educators seek.

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This thesis explores the gendered dynamics of everyday peace through analysing women’s experience of peace and peacebuilding in Kayah (Karenni) state in Myanmar. I argue that everyday peace cannot be detached from rigid gender hierarchies and persistent power dynamics and that analytic attention needs to be paid to women’s, often neglected, contribution to everyday peacebuilding. Drawing on a theoretical framework of everyday peace and its feminist critique and by using Björkdahl’s concept of gendered peace gaps I illustrate how women’s experience of peace and peacebuilding in Kayah state are shaped by dynamics of care and silence. Both are used as arenas for women’s peacebuilding agencies but simultaneously contributes to, are coupled with or amplify gendered peace gaps. Hence, the results unveil an interesting tension between women’s peacebuilding agency and the peace being built as the peacebuilding limits the grounds in which women can operate consequently contributing to a future gender-discriminatory peace in Myanmar. Through this focus, this thesis adds to the rich and longstanding feminist literature exploring the everyday by illustrating the importance of understanding peace based on everyday experiences shaped by gendered power relations. By exposing the relationship between power and agency I illustrate how women’s ambiguous peace agencies are incused by gendered power relations and might run the risk of reproducing or maintaining existing structures of power.

No description available.

This thesis explores whether dialogue between a company and a non-profit organisation (NPO) can influence a company’s way of working towards being more conflict sensitive. As a case-study I analysed the dialogue between the French oil and gas company, Total S.A. (Total), and the US based NPO, CDA Collaborative Learning Projects (CDA) relating to the company’s operations in Myanmar/Burma. The objectives of the research were to ascertain if dialogue had a positive impact, and if so, what it was about the dialogue that enabled change, what was the process of change that could be observed and how embedded such change was. Drawing on post-modernism, systems thinking and complexity thinking, I have built on organisational change, conflict transformation, dialogue and cross-sector partnership literature to examine the role of dialogue as an enabler of change. While highlighting parallels in the discourses, I analyse the process and degree of change within the company through two conflict transformation models, one by Lederach (1997) and the other by Lederach, Neufeld and Culbertson (2007), which I feel best synthesise these parallels. The research is a longitudinal case-study (2002-2012), based on semi-structured interviews and document analysis. The study adds to the limited academic research on conflict sensitivity in general, and on the implications for a company’s way of working in particular. Although I find that within the business sector, the notion of conflict sensitivity is assumed in the wider concept of corporate social responsibility, noteworthy is the relevance of dialogue in change processes. Dialogue is an essential enabler as it sparks transformational levers also recognised in the literature reviewed. However it is not sufficient. The research illustrates that the dialogue between CDA and Total has played a critical role in facilitating a shift in the company’s way of working, with the contribution of other influences at play. As such, I draw attention to the complexity of the change process and discuss the current nature of the drivers of change within Total.

This thesis challenges the prevailing academic and journalistic consensus that ASEAN states, bound by a cast-iron norm of non-interference, do not intervene in other states’ internal affairs. It argues that ASEAN states have frequently engaged in acts of intervention, often with very serious, negative consequences. Using methods of critical historical sociology, the thesis reconstructs the history of ASEAN’s non-interference principle and interventions from ASEAN’s inception onwards, drawing on sources including ASEAN and UN documents, US and UK archives, and policymaker interviews. It focuses especially on three case studies: East Timor, Cambodia, and Myanmar. The thesis argues that both the emergence of ideologies of non-intervention and their violation can be explained by the social conflicts animating state policies. Non-interference was developed by embattled, authoritarian, capitalist elites in an attempt to bolster their defence of capitalist social order from radical challenges. Where adherence to non-intervention failed to serve this purpose, it was discarded or manipulated to permit cross-border ‘containment’ operations. After communism was defeated in the ASEAN states, foreign policy continued to promote the interests of dominant, state-linked business groups and oligarchic factions. Non-interference shifted to defend domestic power structures from the West’s liberalising agenda. However, ASEAN elites continued meddling in neighbouring states even as containment operations were discarded. This contributed to the collapse of Cambodia’s ruling coalition in 1997, and ASEAN subsequently intervened to restore it. The 1997 Asian financial crisis dealt a crippling blow to ASEAN. To contain domestic unrest in Indonesia, core ASEAN states joined a humanitarian intervention in East Timor in 1999. In the decade since, non-interference has been progressively weakened as the core members struggle to regain domestic legitimacy and lost international political and economic space. This is expressed most clearly in ASEAN’s attempts to insert itself into Myanmar’s democratisation process after decades of failed ‘constructive engagement’.