Laur Kiik

Laur Kiik is Junior Researcher of Southeast Asian Studies at Tallinn University, Estonia. He studies nature conservation, nationalism, and religion in Burma’s Kachin region. He completed an MA in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in 2012. Recently, he published the article ‘Nationalism and anti-ethno-politics: why “Chinese Development” failed at Myanmar’s Myitsone Dam’, Eurasian Geography and Economics (2016). 

Abstract: Conspiracy, God’s Plan and National Emergency: Kachin Popular Analyses of the Ceasefire Era and its Resource Grabs

This chapter draws from periods of ethnographic field research in the Kachin region from 2010 to 2015, covering the lead up to the breakdown of the ceasefire and the discourses that emerged in relation to it subsequently. It therefore discusses in critical terms how large parts of Kachin society understand the ceasefire era and the reasons for its collapse in 2011. It focuses particularly on popular understandings of the large-scale resource grabs that defined much of that era.  The chapter lays out a dominant Kachin nationalist-theoretical framework by discussing three core terms: Wunpawng Mungdan (territory/ ‘Kachin country’), Wunpawng myusha (people/ ‘Kachin nation’), and Karai Kasang (divinity/ Christian ‘God’). The chapter then tackles how Kachin nationalists deploy these terms in specific ways to understand their 1994-2011 ceasefire experiences; in doing so, they express ideas of ethno-national emergency, divine predestination, and ethnocidal conspiracy. These understandings guide many people in Kachin society to commit to resistance and the ethno-patriotic project of co-building a ‘land yet-to-be’, instead of engaging in a ceasefire based on compromise. Amid the current battles, anger and humanitarian crisis, the question of whether one wants ‘our Kachin nation’ to pursue full state independence or merely federal autonomy within Myanmar has become a sensitive and barely voiced debate inside Kachin society. While exploring these theories and popular analyses, this chapter steps into an open critical dialogue with Kachin nationalists themselves, suggesting ways in which these understandings are contradicted or complicated by other social realities. This is to draw a fuller, fairer, and more balanced picture of the complex social dynamics in this region. Simultaneously, the chapter cautions against the tendency to make homogenising claims about Burma’s minority ethnic nations, as if these were simple, monolithic entities rather than the internally diverse, class-stratified and complex societies that in fact they are. 

Areas of policy relevance in this chapter

  1. Social memories of collective emotional trauma and political transition;
  2. Understanding 'social worlds beyond' political discourse;
  3. Inter- and intra-group social conflict in war to peace transitions;
  4. Social reconciliation in divided societies.

​Questions for further work ...

  1. How and in what ways do Kachin political, religious and other elites help create popular understandings of ‘Burman conspiracy’? How much influence do they have and how is this influence mobilised?
  2. How does belief in Kachin nationalist theology and the idea of Wunpawng Hkanan vary across class, age, gender, region, and so forth?
  3. How can critically concerned academics discuss popular conspiracy theories both as parts of lived human worlds and as contradicted by other realities in ways that respect but also challenge these perspectives? Should they do so?
Comments

Focus - Analyses of the Contemporary Kachin Situation in Popular Culture

Although the KIO/KIA has never asserted that it is a Christian evangelical organisation, since the collapse of the ceasefire there has been a retrenchment in popular understandings of the significance of Christian faith in the popular analyses of the current situation. The battle slogan of the KIA expresses the need for a Christian victory, and this slogan has been converted into a highly popular song (left). This more assertive statement of Christian faith has been one of the outcomes of the experience of hostility and threat felt by many Kachin nationalists since the collapse of the ceasefire.
 Since the ceasefire, the development of new technologies in visual and audio production has seen the rapid expansion of a Kachin popular culture, especially youth culture. It has become an important vehicle for the development and expression of internal discourses and discussions about the present condition of Kachin people, as discussed in this chapter. Here, the popular singer Maran Seng Naw sings Sim Sa Mayu Ai Ndai Majan, expressing emotions about the present war. Images of the suffering of children are common motifs in these representations, especially as the recent conflict has seen so many displaced and without formal education. 

​This music video, produced by the Yangon Kachin Church youth group appropriates the term Majan (see Introduction) to convey the sense of loss and desperation about the effects of drug abuse and the war on drugs that is necessary.
More controversially, the Kachin tradition of communal action can, in the flourishing atmosphere of conspiracy, lead to activities that are seen by some as vigilantism. This has arisen especially because of the widely held belief that that the Myanmar government is not averse to seeing high rates of drug addiction in Kachin society as a means of undermining its capacity for reproducing ethno-nationalists across generations. The needs to take action into their own hands has led to the appearance of groups such as Pat Jasan, who take a hardline approach not only to the drug producers and dealers but, more controversially, to the addicts themselves. See here. Also, see the chapters by Hkanhpa Tu Sadan and Nhkum Bu Lu.