Beyond the ‘Rebel’ Territorial Trap: Checkpoints in Myanmar

Tony Neil & Saw Day Chit

Roadblocks & Revenues Working Paper Series #08

‘Territorial control’ has emerged as a central concept in the study of civil wars and rebel governance. However, armed groups are driven by different aims and logics and as a consequence arrive at different sovereign formations. This working paper asks: what are the governance strategies and technologies that armed groups use to project authority? Comparing the use of checkpoints by two armed groups that operate in overlapping areas in Myanmar’s borderlands, Tony Neil and Saw Day Chit find that armed groups use checkpoints differently to achieve different outcomes that are shaped by underlying ideological and cosmological foundations. They also find that sovereignty is relational to the state and other neighbouring armed actors. These findings suggest that research agendas on order in conflict sidestep the structural determinism of the ‘territorial trap’ and instead further investigate agency-based explanations for how and why armed groups seek to project or expand their authority.

This paper is the eigth in a new working paper series on Roadblocks and Revenues, a collaboration between the Danish Institute for International Studies, the International Centre for Tax and Development and the Centre on Armed Groups.