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In a recent article in Geoforum, Shona Loong discusses civil society, and its relationships with donors and local armed actors, in war-affected areas. The article is written from the vantage point of Karen State, southeast Myanmar; the site of the longest civil war in the world. She draws from scholarship which understands the “post-war” as a condition in which the war appears to be over, but where the legacies of war remain contested in everyday spaces and social relations. At the time when the research was conducted, there had been a ceasefire in Karen State, although many people continued to feel that the war was not truly over.
This article draws from and seeks to make two interrelated contributions to the literature on post-war development and civil society. First, this article shows how post-war civil society is embedded in local and extra-local power relations created by conflict and violence. Civil society is not only a concept imposed by the “West” onto the “rest”. Second, this article proposes that warscape biographies – or how people narrate their lives as situated within specific times and places of war – can help scholars grasp subjects’ aspirations for redefining community through civil society. These biographies also shed light on the tensions between donors and civil society; the former of which had a decontextualised and aspatial conception of war that did not reflect the heterogeneous and localised ways in which war had been experienced on the ground.
The open access article can be read at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718523002178. The Political Geography Group at GIUZ provided helpful feedback for this article.
Picture: Community education in Karen State before the coup, source: Shona Loong
