Publication Date

2025

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

First Advisor

Thurber, Ches

Degree Name

Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy)

Legacy Department

Department of Political Science

Abstract

This research studies insurgent resilience in the context of Myanmar’s civil conflicts. In the face of repression, some ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) continued to mount significant resistance to the state and even grew their territorial control and capacities. Others merely survived, but lost their operational functionality, while others still were forcibly disarmed and disbanded. What explains this variation in the resilience of Myanmar’s EAOs? To answer this question, I build on conflict scholarship that highlights the importance of lootable resources to armed insurgent organizations. However, I extend this work by showing that access to resources alone is insufficient. To maintain resilience against state repression, EAOs also need access to underground economies through which they can convert those resources into cash and warmaking materials. Together, this combination of access to resources and access to markets substantially improved our ability to understand variation in insurgent resilience. I explore the processes in which these factors shaped ethnic resistance groups’ levels of resilience in a set of selected comparative cases: the Mong Tai Army and the Kachin Independence Army. I then offer a preliminary assessment of the generalizability of the argument through less detailed comparisons of the Chin National Front/Army, the Arakan Army, and the Karen National Union. I draw mainly from secondary sources, complemented by analyses of primary documents and original online interviews, to offer a detailed and theoretically informed analysis of the underground political economy of insurgency in Myanmar.

Extent

265 pages

Language

en

Publisher

Northern Illinois University

Rights Statement

In Copyright

Rights Statement 2

NIU theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from Huskie Commons for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without the written permission of the authors.

Media Type

Text

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