Full Description
Rebel Politics analyzes the changing dynamics of the civil war in Myanmar, one of the most entrenched armed conflicts in the world. Since 2011, a national peace process has gone hand-in-hand with escalating ethnic conflict. The Karen National Union (KNU), previously known for its uncompromising stance against the central government of Myanmar, became a leader in the peace process after it signed a ceasefire in 2012. Meanwhile, the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) returned to the trenches in 2011 after its own seventeen-year-long ceasefire broke down. To understand these puzzling changes, Brenner conducted ethnographic fieldwork among the KNU and KIO, analyzing the relations between rebel leaders, their rank-and-file, and local communities in the context of wider political and geopolitical transformations. Drawing on Political Sociology, Rebel Politics explains how revolutionary elites capture and lose legitimacy within their own movements and how these internal contestations drive the strategies of rebellion in unforeseen ways. Brenner presents a novel perspective that contributes to our understanding of contemporary politics in Southeast Asia, and to the study of conflict, peace and security, by highlighting the hidden social dynamics and everyday practices of political violence, ethnic conflict, rebel governance and borderland politics.
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Note on Citation
Introduction: Playing the Long Game
1. Teaching Revenge: Social Aspirations and the Fragmented Subject of Early Modern Conduct Books
2. Feeling Revenge: Emotional Transmission and Contagious Vengeance in Donne's Deaths Duell
3. Fantasizing about Revenge: Vagrancy and the Formation of the Social Body in Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI and Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller
4. Commemorating Revenge: Mourning, Memory, and Retributive Alternatives in the English Interregnum
Afterword: What Remains of Civil Vengeance?
Bibliography
Index
