David Brenner’s first book, Rebel Politics: A Political Sociology of Armed Struggle in Myanmar’s Borderlands, makes a timely and distinctive contribution to scholarly debates on rebel governance and armed conflict, as well as to the growing field of Myanmar studies. His argument—that rebellion is more than anything else a social process—posits that the internal politics of rebel movements is key for understanding conflict in Myanmar’s borderlands and beyond. Honing in on the experiences of “two of the oldest and most important rebel movements” in Myanmar (p. 3), the Karen National Union (KNU) and the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), Brenner challenges traditional analysis that centers elites and disregards the everyday, sometimes mundane, social environment in which rebellion takes shape. Brenner’s focus on the social practices of rebellion provides a fresh and much-needed analysis of why conflict has persisted in Myanmar, despite the rise to power of the former democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi and the commencement of political reforms, including a national-level ceasefire process.
Brenner’s book emerged from several months spent within Myanmar’s “rebel borderworlds” (p. 37), the liberated areas of Kawthoole and Kachinland. This rich ethnographic background enables Brenner to craft detailed insights into the inner workings of rebellions and, in particular, the relationship between elites and the communities through which these rebellions gain legitimacy. His “ethnographic bent” (p. 24) provides a much-needed antidote to the many past studies on conflict in Myanmar lacking in primary and firsthand content; as a result, Brenner is able to provide a novel perspective on rebel politics in the country. Rather than treating rebel groups as homogeneous, fixed entities, Brenner’s work instead draws attention to how struggles over authority within these groups both shape and are shaped by relationships with the grassroots. These relationships are embedded in a social contract through which the leaders vie for legitimacy and, thus, authority. This in turn affects the willingness and ability of rebel groups to wage war. Building on sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias, and connecting this work with the study of rebellions and resistance politics as advanced by theorists including James Scott, Charles Tilly, and Zacharia Mampilly, among others, Brenner proposes a relational approach for studying rebellions. Connecting these schools of thought allows Brenner to situate the KNU and the KIO as “ontologically embedded within a social environment” (p. 16).
Both of these rebel movements are exemplars of para-states controlling areas of territory in which they provide public goods, including limited social welfare and security, for the communities living under their control. Brenner maintains that these critical relations of care and power, enmeshed within everyday kinship relations and community practices, are the means through which rebel leaders attempt to create legitimacy and consolidate power. In other words, rebel leaders must build cohesion and support through the reciprocal provisioning of services and power relations with the grassroots. These relations are key, indeed foundational, to a movement’s success or otherwise: they can lead to a stronger rebel force able to resist the incumbent state or the reverse, a fractured rebellion incapable of waging a successful war. His primary argument, then, is that rebel leaders, unable to foster compliance through sheer force alone, attempt to build relations of legitimacy among and with the grassroots in order to “develop momentum of their own in driving collective conduct” (p. 27). Engagement with Alicia De La Cour-Venning’s study on Kachin rebel interaction with international humanitarian norms as a means to affect perceptions of legitimacy could add an interesting perspective to Brenner’s future research in this field (see Alicia De La Cour-Venning, “Revolutionary Law Abidance: Kachin Rebel Governance and the Adoption of IHL in Resistance to Myanmar State Violence,” International Criminal Law Review 19 [5], 2019). Similarly, Andrew Ong’s study on the internal dynamics of the political culture of the Wa rebellion could offer Brenner opportunities for thinking about whether, and under what circumstances, his focus on grassroots relations can be applied to other, perhaps more top-down, rebellions such as the Wa (see Andrew Ong, “Producing Intransigence: [Mis]Understanding the United Wa State Army in Myanmar,” Contemporary Southeast Asia 40 [3], 2018).
Seeing as much of Brenner’s argument developed from his “manifold everyday interactions” (p. 24), I wish we would have seen and heard more, both from the grassroots themselves and from his ethnographic journey. For example, the pronouncements on the opinions of the grassroots are often not underpinned with direct quotes, unwittingly tilting the favor and the focus on elites, whose voices seem to be included to a greater degree. This does not detract from Brenner’s argument but simply means that I would have liked to hear more from the grassroots, in their own words. In a similar vein, more detail from his ethnographic journey would have been welcome. How did his choice of methods and his own positionality as a male researcher affect the type of data he was able to collect? How did it shape where he went and to whom he spoke? Did he mostly speak to men? What did this mean for the type of knowledge produced in this book? Brenner suggests that his methods forced him to “unlearn and relearn as much as learn” (p. 25), but he leaves us curious as to what this learning process entailed. I would have loved to see a more reflexive discussion on learning processes such as these to illuminate how his choice of methods, and his very being, ultimately informed the type of knowledge produced.
I also think that Brenner misses a productive opportunity to engage with feminist and gender studies. In making the case that we need to analyze conflict in the borderlands with a relational ontology, we need to take seriously the workings of gender. Recent studies on rebel behavior complicate the dynamics of social order in South and Southeast Asia. My own work (Jenny Hedström, “The Political Economy of the Kachin Revolutionary Household,” Pacific Review 30 [4], 2016) has, for example, shown that the “rebel social contract” in Myanmar relies on a gendered division of labor in which women are pushed to provide the public goods that Brenner identifies as a critical element for maintaining grassroots support (p. 21). Moreover, Srila Roy’s important study into the Maoist revolution in India troubles the suggestion that legitimacy among the Maoist comrades was crafted through everyday social interactions between the leaders and the movement (Srila Roy, Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence and Subjectivity in India’s Naxalbari Movement, 2012); instead, Roy shows how the struggle was legitimated through everyday gendered violence that cemented social relations and provided a raison d'être for the conflict. In other words, it is not that Brenner is wrong to emphasize the relationship between the grassroots and the elites, but rather that the rebel social contract is infused with gendered relations of power and violence. Engagement with this body of literature would have strengthened Brenner’s overall argument and allowed him to uncover more of the internal politics of rebellion and conflict in Myanmar’s borderworlds.
These (small) critiques notwithstanding, Brenner has meticulously crafted an argument about rebel politics that is rich with ethnographic details and theoretical insights. In providing a view from within rebel politics, Brenner identifies the dynamic relations of social life as giving form and shape to political violence. Rather than seeing the sometimes “uneasy relations” (p. 15) between competing leadership factions and the grassroots as necessarily troubling rebel behavior, Brenner suggests that they lead to productive tensions, which are able either to hamper or propel rebellion forward. This insight adds critical knowledge to our understanding of how broader questions of peace and conflict in a country can be affected by the messy, everyday relations that communities and elites engaged in rebellions have, making Brenner’s book essential reading for any student or scholar interested in learning more about rebel politics in general or the Kachin or Karen rebellions in particular.
