Research Themes
My research revolves around a number of questions that investigate the relations between weapons and human beings. In particular, I look into two primary issues. One, I look into the ways in which weapons – as technical objects that codify certain material and discursive modalities of violence – and the relations between weapons and humans are governed. Two, I look into the political geographies, the politics of contestation, and the (dis)orders that are produced through the governing of the means of violence.
Up to now I have been exploring these issues in borderlands and frontiers at the margins of state of state authority, focusing more specifically on the borderlands and frontiers in between Myanmar-China-Thailand-Laos.
In terms of methodology and methods, I have worked mostly through qualitative case study and fieldwork methods (such as e.g. ethnography, qualitative interviews, life history interviews), that I apply to extended processual analysis. In Myanmar I have researched the above-mentioned themes through an extended case study of Ta’ang areas of Shan State, Myanmar. In these highly contested geographies embedded in broader Asian borderlands I followed the processes of armament, ceasefire, disarmament, and re-armament of a politico-armed rebel movement to study how governing the means of violence re-produces political and spatial relations.
Research Projects/Threads
(Wanna-be-)Book Project I am working to transform my PhD dissertation into an academic book tentatively entitled “Becoming and Being a Weapon: Means of Violence and Geographies of Rule in the Borderlands of Myanmar”. A first draft is currently under revision with a university press house. The wanna-be-book analyses the processes and practices through which weapons as technical objects and armed collectives are governed in the societies and rebel movements living in Myanmar’s borderlands and frontiers. In particular, the project offers an (ethnographic) exploration of the production of political space in areas at the margins of state authority. It looks at how different places, scales, and territories are reproduced in the borderlands and frontier spaces at the margins of state authority through different practices of governing the means of violence and the active participation of various human and non-human entities (such as weapons in primis) and relations.
Blunt Biopolitical Rebel Rule A common thread running throughout my work concerns the linkages between the governing of violence, weapons, and the means of violence on the one hand and the shaping of populations with their political geographies on the other. In different research articles I try to foreground the modalities through which, by governing the means of violence, rebel movements in Myanmar’s borderlands shape the individual and collective bodies of those populations they aim to govern as subjects with a specific biologic and geo-graphic identity. For example, a recently published research article studies the political rationalities that have informed the rearmament process of the Palaung/Ta’ang state liberation front and how these rationalities have circulated throughout Ta’ang societies. Offering an analysis of (1) the uniform adopted after the re-armament in 2009, (2) the techniques that govern the act of wearing or not wearing the uniform, and (3) the disciplinary practices adopted to manage drug addicts pressganged into military service, the article shows how the political rationalities informing rearmament have been inflected in specific ways to shape the populations and political geography of vital space the rebel movements wishes to govern.
Weapon-scapes: Frontierisation and Territorialisation Processes in Myanmar In a set of papers I plan to investigate the processes of reconfiguration of frontier spaces through the prism of the manufacturing, circulation, and control of firearms and light weapons. Here I take into consideration both military-state technological networks and local in/formal manufacture. The objective would be to look at the ways in which Myanmar frontier’s political space is (re)articulated through the governing of the relations between the body and the weapon as a technological codification of political violence.
