"We have hands the same as them": Struggles for local sovereignty and livelihoods by internally displaced Karen villagers in Burma

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Author: Kevin Heppner

For the past thirty years hundreds of thousands of Karen villagers in Burma have been living a precarious existence, regularly moving between their villages and displacement in the forests or state-controlled relocation sites, struggling to retain access to their land and livelihoods against a military-run state determined to exert absolute control over their movements, their land, their cropping methods, their produce, and all other aspects of their lives. Outside attention on this situation tends to focus on the armed conflict between the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) and the state military junta, and concludes that this is a simple case of 'conflict-induced displacement' which requires a peace agreement between combatants and 'return' of displaced villagers with help from the state. This paper challenges this analysis. It examines the nature and dynamics of Karen internal displacement through perspectives expressed by villagers themselves, and finds it to be an ongoing and fluid process of villagers evading state control while attempting to retain access to their land and livelihoods, rather than a spatial displacement from zones of armed conflict. The primary cause of displacement is not armed conflict, but state efforts to consolidate territorial sovereignty over civilians who are used to local-level sovereignty and 'non-state' identities. Villagers respond with survival strategies which in themselves constitute resistance to state control of their land, livelihoods, and lives. These 'weapons of the weak' used by Karen villagers have arguably weakened the state more than all the battles fought by the armed resistance, and the state has responded with brutal campaigns against their villages. The 2004 ceasefire between the state and Karen armed forces, which the state has used to further penetrate and militarise Karen areas, has only created further displacement and has made this conflict more open and urgent. The paper argues that the solution to Karen internal displacement is not the 'return', 'reintegration' and state-directed aid espoused by the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and by some international actors, which would only represent victory for the state in this conflict; instead, it advocates recognising and supporting villagers' efforts to resist state control and retain local sovereignty over their lands and livelihoods. (This paper was presented at the Land, Poverty, Social Justice and Development conference in The Hague, The Netherlands in January 2006. It updates and refines the ideas presented in the earlier paper Sovereignty, Survival and Resistance: Contending Perspectives on Karen internal displacement in Burma [KHRG Working Paper #2005-W1])