Email: mon@iss.nl

Affiliation: International Institute of Social Studies (ISS, The Hague)

Nationality: Myanmar

Persistence of the moral economy in an agrarian society: Everyday politics and armed revolution in the context of war in Myanmar

Abstract

The 2021 military coup in Myanmar has caused nationwide resistance and the subsequent violent repression. It resulted in unprecedented destruction of rural agrarian production and social reproduction cycles, loss of houses, farm tools, seeds, draught animals due to repeated arson attacks, indiscriminate airstrikes and security clearance campaigns. The impact is devastating albeit unevenly spread along geographical locations and ethnic regions. Conscription by the military junta caused panic among working-age men causing many to leave the villages as migrant workers to neighbouring countries or joining armed resistance, deteriorating the existing farm labour shortage problems. With the backdrop of this devastating chaos and emerging new liberated zones and local governance, many scholarly studies examine how people organised resistance and armed revolution, or the existing ethnic armed organisations organised public administration, or the bottom-up federalism, or how humanitarian aid is being organised by humanitarian actors. This paper attempts to understand the democratic resistance from the critical agrarian perspective, political economy and daily resistance of the majority rural agrarian communities in "Anyar" or the Dry Zone of central Myanmar. Prominent scholars such as James C. Scott, and many others, pointed out the phenomenon of erosion of patron-client relations/moral economy in general due to capital penetration and subsequent rural transformation. One of the implicit assumptions in these studies is that once the moral economy of peasant societies was eroded, it is gone forever. Building on classical and contemporary studies on capitalism and moral economy in the countryside, this paper argues that, specifically in central Myanmar, the moral economy in these rural agrarian communities might have been partially eroded through slow but steady capitalist penetration of the Dry Zone rural communities, but that after the 2021 military coup, The moral economy may persist in most places and has been revived and strengthened where it had been previously eroded. This has unfolded in the resistance in Anyar where there is organized resistance both in the forms of armed and non-armed actions. This paper explores how the dialectic of seemingly opposing everyday resistance and organised armed revolution has put the moral economy in a new light and front and center of peasant society at war. In part this is because the collective loss, trauma and struggle forced people to the subsistence-oriented moral roots as their last resort, embracing once again the notions of 'aggregate shift', 'solidarity economy', and even to some extent patron-client relations. Existential crises made the villagers realize that they need to survive together, or fail to survive amid the violent ruptures. The persistent and reviving moral economy helps them to reconfigure the cycles of production and social reproduction while enduring or even winning territories over a well-armed opponent in an asymmetrical and protracted civil war. Moreover, his paper argues that the unorganized or loosely organized and invisible forms of everyday resistance from ordinary peasants shaped, and being shaped by, the overall regional and national revolution dynamics and trajectories.

The empirical evidence for this paper was gathered through waves of fieldwork in the Dry Zone in Myanmar between 2021 and 2024, through qualitative methods: key informant interviews, FGDs, ethnographic methods, as well as archival work. I incorporated in this research my intimate knowledge and experience accumulated over the last three decades as a former part-time child farm-labour, youth activist, community organizer and humanitarian worker.

Bio

Phwe Yu Mon is a PhD student at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS, The Hague) as part of a special program, led by Jun Borras, the "Myanmar Initiative" in research and training with and of scholar-activists in collaboration with the Chiang Mai University in Thailand. Her PhD research, supervised by Jun, explores how the peasantry in the Dry Zone of Myanmar, a crucial food producing rural agrarian region in central Myanmar and the heartland of the dominating Bama ethnic group. Her research tries to dissect the current nation-wide democratic resistance against the 2021 military coup through the lens of political economy and critical agrarian studies, departing from the mainstream analytical lens dominant in contemporary studies of the Myanmar situation which is dominated by approaches that are overly focused on ethnic politics and geopolitical discourses. She earned her MA in International Relations from the Australian National University (ANU) in 2019. She grew up in the rural area of southern Myanmar, working as part time farm labour as a child, during her summer breaks. Phwe engaged with advocacy work for national youth policy in 2010, and later expanded her work and network throughout South East Asia. Her research interests include democratic struggles of working people, rural peasantry, youth and inter-religion/ inter-ethnic conflict transformation and social movements.