Human Ecology

Taking the rebel out of the forest: Conservation as "green territoriality" in the service of
the state in southeastern Myanmar
--Manuscript Draft--

Manuscript Number: HUEC-D-18-00099

Full Title: Taking the rebel out of the forest: Conservation as "green territoriality" in the service of
the state in southeastern Myanmar

Article Type: Special Issue Manuscript

Keywords: territoriality; green grabs; climate change mitigation; violence; Burma

Abstract: This article demonstrates how climate change mitigation (CCM) efforts can be re-
tooled as state techniques of territorial control. Through a case study in a post-war,
global biodiversity hotspot in southeastern Myanmar, I advance the concept of "green
territoriality" as a way to conceptualize how conservation efforts in rebel-held forests
can act as a proxy for the continuation of counterinsurgent activities in a war by other
means. Emphasis is placed on the importance of grounding these "green grabs" in a
place's particular political context and the violent processes of historical exclusion.
Forced population movements and historical land claims by ethnic minority villagers
are analyzed alongside more recent CCM projects. Findings reveal how military
offensives, economic concessions, and CCM activities have brought state agencies,
administration, and management paradigms into the same forests where rebel activity
has taken place and rebel populations reside.

Powered by Editorial Manager® and ProduXion Manager® from Aries Systems Corporation
Abstract

Taking the rebel out of the forest: Conservation as “green territoriality” in the service of
the state in southeastern Myanmar

This article demonstrates how climate change mitigation (CCM) efforts can be re-
tooled as state techniques of territorial control. Through a case study in a post-war,
global biodiversity hotspot in southeastern Myanmar, I advance the concept of “green
territoriality” as a way to conceptualize how conservation efforts in rebel-held forests
can act as a proxy for the continuation of counterinsurgent activities in a war by other
means. Emphasis is placed on the importance of grounding these “green grabs” in a
place’s particular political context and the violent processes of historical exclusion.
Forced population movements and historical land claims by ethnic minority villagers
are analyzed alongside more recent CCM projects. Findings reveal how military
offensives, economic concessions, and CCM activities have brought state agencies,
administration, and management paradigms into the same forests where rebel
activity has taken place and rebel populations reside.

Key Words: territoriality, green grabs, climate change mitigation, violence, Burma
Manuscript Click here to download Manuscript HE_Green
territoriality_KW_no title page_FINAL.docx
Click here to view linked References

Introduction: Climate change mitigation in a post-war setting

Southeastern Myanmar is emerging from civil war since fighting began soon after the

country’s independence in 1948. Subsequently, the last intact forests and waterways in the

Mekong Region have opened to formal foreign investment to tap the region’s bountiful land

and natural resources. International climate governance has made its first imprint in

Myanmar too, with multi-million-dollar projects run by international conservation

organizations and the Forest Department, paid for by western governments and international

finance institutions (IFIs). It is a story of post-war development, conservation and peace-

building, at least on the surface. But looking deeper, these international greening efforts are

being used as a tool to assert the power of the military government over an area that it has

never controlled. These territories of Myanmar have long been subject to multiple “armed

sovereignties” (Woods, 2018).1 The main rebel group that represent the Karen (or Kayin)

national minority group, the Karen National Union (or KNU), have been at war with

Myanmar’s central state for over six decades (Smith, 1999). Even now the KNU controls large

stretches of territory in the southeast where they administer land, resources and Karen

populations, doing many of the things a state might do. Since KNU’s 2012 ceasefire agreement

with the government, the vast forested territory they continue to control even under the

ceasefire is now the site for global biodiversity conservation. But during the period of war,

Karen villagers fled military attacks and areas around resource extraction projects, many of

whom have since been living in refugee camps on the Thailand border. The creation of

protected areas in rebel forests where villagers fled from military attacks foreclose their

1
On the multiple competing authorities ruling over the frontier regions in Myanmar, see also Maclean (2008)
and Grundy-Warr and Dean (2011).

1
eventual return to settle in their original village sites. You could call this a “green grab” as

many have, but this in many ways is missing the point.

This paper explores the ways in which climate change mitigation (hereafter CCM)

efforts—broadly defined as “carbon conservation” guided by Reducing Emissions from

Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+)—get re-tooled as techniques of political and

territorial control. REDD+ has become the most internationally significant mechanism to

finance and govern forests and their carbon conservation in the developing world (Schalatek

et al., 2012). Carbon finance in Southeast Asia is booming, with more than US$1 billion

pledged for REDD+ in the region by the beginning of this decade (FIP, 2011). International

conservation initiatives framed as CCM has at times in different places exacerbated

compounding layers of violent conflict over land use and access (Borras, McMichael and

Scoones 2010; Phelps et al. 2010; Kosoy and Corbera 2010; Milne and Adams 2012). In many

of these geographies, the state is a key actor. Its motivations and mechanisms for action, and

thus the political implications of these resource-based conflicts, are not always captured by

focusing on just the resulting dispossession. I therefore advance the concept of “green

territoriality” as a way to explain the mix of motivation for protected areas, the mechanisms

for the green grab, and what it means on the ground politically.

Green territoriality, violent conflict and the state in nature conservation

This section conceptually walks through the various elements and mechanisms

involved in green territoriality and its political potency specific to an armed conflict setting.

State territorialization is the set of state practices that work to establish legal state claims

over a geographic space, whether to exclude some populations or to organize and control the

extraction of economic benefits from the area (Peluso and Vandergeest, 1995). State

territorialization, by virtue of being a spatial expression of state political and economic power

2
and working through state administrative institutions, officials and procedures, lays the

groundwork for practices of state-making (Brenner and Elden, 2009; Peluso and Lund, 2011).2

The political work that green territoriality accomplishes is placed within broader

debates on how international environmental governance regimes get translated into the

domestic state domain. Global biodiversity conservation institutions and mechanisms offer

states funds, expertise and legitimacy to control and administer frontier areas that would not

be possible by the state under normal circumstances. Once demarcated as state territory with

assistance to patrol and govern, states are oft to use protected areas—now without

community protection measures—for other uses, specifically resource extraction or further

military offensives.3

Territory, in the words of Michel Foucault, “is no doubt a geographical notion, but it’s

first of all a juridico-political one: the area controlled by a certain kind of power” (Foucault,

1980:68). State power directed through the production of territory act, according to Neil

Brenner and Stuart Elden, as simultaneously the “site, medium, and outcome of statecraft”

(2009:365). Nancy Peluso and Peter Vandergeest applied this analytic to their

conceptualization of the construction of colonial Southeast Asia “political forests” as a

mechanism of modern state formation.

Techniques of power and disciplining include territorial zoning and mapping, the
enactment of land and forest laws delimiting legal and illegal forest uses, the
constitution of state forestry institutions to implement these laws according to
specified procedures, [and] the constitution of forest police (2001:764-5).

This article responds to Brenner and Elden’s (2009) critique that studies of nation-states’

interactions with globalization and finance capital neglect the primary role of territoriality as

2
Territorialization is not always in the domain of the state and its authorities, however (Lund, 2006), with
Myanmar’s borderlands a case in point.
3
For the case of Myanmar, see KDNG (2007) and Noam (2007).

3
an effective governing strategy in the neoliberal era. The case study presented here explores

the ways in which state territorialization emerge through the attempts to further commodify

nature, the latest of which is carbon conservation during a ceasefire period in southeast

Myanmar.

The rezoning of landscapes for the intended purpose of nature conservation is

analyzed as a particular kind of “green grab” (Fairhead, Leach and Scoones, 2012). The

appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends entails violent forces of

accumulation and dispossession, as it does for “land grabs” (Kelly, 2011). More recent

scholarship has further conceptualized the violence in green grabs as “green violence”

(Büscher and Ramutsindela, 2016), “green militarization” (Lunstrum, 2014; Duffy, 2014), and

“green wars” (Büscher and Fletcher, forthcoming). This literature mostly focuses on the

structural (and for some, symbolical) forms of violence associated with the appropriation of

nature.

However, the literature on green grabs and green violence neglects state

territorialization as the means to achieve these environmental ends and other state-building

objectives. That is to say, much of what appears as a grab for conservation may actually be

about building state power in areas where the state and its institutions are weak or

nonexistent. This process of organizing territory for the aims of strengthening state rule in

these green spaces has much to do with how the resource grab and the attendant forms and

mechanisms of violence play out.

To fill this territory ‘gap’ in green violence, this paper advances the concept of green

territoriality to stress the state-led spatialized processes involved in enacting green grabs and

associated violence. Green territoriality, or state-led territorial interventions under the guise

of environmental ends, better accounts for the state-building processes involved in the

4
making of state protected areas. Making state territory in practice involves bringing in state

officials, creating state maps and boundaries, building state infrastructure, taxing the

population, and enforcing state (and in some cases private) property and nature protection

laws, sometimes in the process displacing and resettling villagers. Landscapes under rebel

(and customary) authorities thereby get inserted into the state domain: village headmen

report to higher-level state officials, statutory laws come into effect, rebel authority is denied,

and land management practices align with state land policies. In weak state arenas, and

especially in rebel-held forests, achieving state territorialization is not always possible,

however. Weak states do not have the human resources, funds, technical capacity, or political

will, among other constraints, to express their full sovereign power. In rebel-controlled areas,

the guaranteed security of government staff and military personnel and the lack of political

support among the population oftentimes keep the state away.

But CCM opportunities provide states the funds, technical capacity and expertise, and

political and financial incentives to create state territory where previously it was not possible

to such an extent. While state-making through militarization and resource extraction can

achieve these aims to a certain extent, protected area management lends the state stronger

legalization powers and domestic and international justification and legitimization.

Green territoriality interventions are nestled within previous and concurrent acts of

political violence and resource extraction and production schemes, which individually and

collectively continue to shape the legacies of political violence.4 As a result of implementing

CCM, new violent conflicts may erupt or increased militarization may result, which can cause

further displacements and enclosures on the back of previous exclusions (Dunlap and

4
On how CCM acts as an intersectional project tied to past violence, accumulation and dispossession, see
Corbera, Hunsberger and Vaddhanaphuti (2017), and specific to Myanmar see Woods (2015a).

5
Fairhead, 2014). This is especially true if these land-based large-scale interventions do not

take into consideration, or improperly proceed without better adapting to, the particular

existing political and socio-cultural (and at times violent) contexts the landscape is nestled

within. For example, those villagers who initially fled from war have in many cases found their

previous settlements now occupied by national military personnel or artisanal migrant

workers, been converted into oil palm or rubber concessions, or demarcated as a national

forest protection zone. These depopulated landscapes as a result of decades of war and

resource extraction are the same places now targeted for climate change mitigation.

Green territoriality also helps to conceptualize how landscape-level greening efforts

can act as a proxy for the continuation of counterinsurgent activities, as a way of securing

majority control over minority populations, and other more general state claims over

historical or current resident populations. Territories are made legible through overt political

and military actions that then help render the landscapes amenable to state development

interventions—whether it be depopulated forest reserves and biofuel plantations or road-

side village development packages. According to Peluso and Vandergeest, insurgent use of

forests in Southeast Asia produced “a systematization of military counterinsurgency practices

aimed at controlling both forest territories and resident peoples” (2011:592). Local people in

the areas occupied by insurgents, according to the authors, “were also encouraged to become

more tied to central states through incorporation into agricultural development schemes or

programs and other development programs” (Peluso and Vandergeest, 2011:598).

When set upon the backdrop of war where the military has targeted rebel

organizations and those ethnic minority populations who support them, green grabs appear

6
similar in process and outcome as that of counterinsurgency.5 The making of state territory

by formalizing customary forests into state conservation zones often erase local land and

resource claims and livelihoods, and in more severe cases, result in the forced removal of

populations who were under customary (and rebel) authority.6 In some cases, a different set

of population (migrant artisanal workers, soldiers, foresters, etc.) move into these green

spaces, but who express their identity and power as closer to and more compatible with the

state and not with the rebels.

The last point on green territoriality is related to how carbon governance and

protected area management often approach the areas undergoing the territorial intervention

as beholden to a priori state-inscribed territorial authority (Boege et al, 2009). This article

highlights the importance of how local context, in this case a post-war but rebel-controlled

territorial arena, shapes perceptions and outcomes of resource governance reforms (see

Dressler and Roth, 2011; Dressler et al, 2014). REDD+ forest conservation projects, backed by

foreign donors and investors and carried out by international conservation organizations with

forest department officials, bring an “interplay of external influence on the host country’s

policies as well as reinforcement of the state’s own political economic interests” (Dressler et

al, 2014:2). Despite advances to put land and resource grabs “in their place,” scholarship on

CCM still overly privileges the seductive power of global governance in replacing local

governance regimes. For example, Vandergeest and Unno (2012) frame carbon conservation

as rewriting the rules of the game as a new type of “extraterritorial governance” that

inculcates a discursive playing field that define new parameters and actions of scaled

5
On the greening of counterinsurgency, see Ybarra (2012); Dunlap and Fairhead (2014); Verweijen and Marijnen
(2016).
6
A well-known case in Myanmar of the making of a protected area resulting in forced eviction and the
curtailment of traditional livelihood activities is the national tiger reserve (the world’s largest) in western
Kachin State in the north (KDNG, 2010).

7
interventions. But this foreign interventionist discourse assumes Weberian notions of an

“ideal state” and attendant notions of good governance that will enhance the efficiency and

effectiveness of carbon governance.

The notion of green territoriality tries to overcome these Weberian state sovereignty

assumptions by highlighting the interactive synergies among scales and across time between

the “global” and “local.” Rather than instigating an extraterritorial affair, I show how carbon

conservation produces state-inscribed territory and erases historical and present claims

under customary, rebel or overlapping forms of authority. CCM projects, much like the

economic concessions that preceded it, have provided technical smokescreens to hide a

battle over state versus rebel territory and expressions of contested rule.

I explore the green territoriality concept through an in-depth case study in Tanintharyi

Region in southeastern Myanmar that profiles how militarization, resource extraction and

production during the war period gets redeployed in nature protection during a ceasefire

period. This reveals how forest department officials and foreign and national conservationists

retool carbon conservation funds and global environmental discourses during the post-war

period as the spearhead of the state in rebel frontier forests. While for many their motivations

may very well be to achieve what they perceive as better environmental ends. But the fact

remains that the military and state gain greater territorial control and authority over rebel

territory and populations in the forest frontier. A reinforced state forest reserve or national

park backed by international conservation takes the rebel out of the forest. These

counterinsurgent activities are conducted under the guise of global carbon conservation and

protecting the nation’s forests from those who are deemed not to belong in the body politic.

These findings were extrapolated from my field site in southeastern Myanmar but are more

broadly applicable to post-war (and even post-conflict) violent settings in general, especially

8
in places where conflict was based on excluding certain populations from accessing and

utilizing rights, resources and territories.

Methods

The research data presented in this paper was collected over a two-year period from

2013 to 2015. Local field research teams visited tens of oil palm concessions and those villages

forcibly relocated by economic concessions in territories controlled by both the national

government as well as under KNU authority. Community-based organization (CBO) partners

conducted research in two proposed national parks. In addition, the author conducted

interviews with civil society leaders active in the region on these issues, KNU leaders

previously and presently in command of the region, Karen refugees in a camp on the Thailand

border, staff of international conservation organizations directing forest conservation

projects in the region, and managers of development agencies funding REDD+ projects in the

Tanintharyi Region. Humanitarian organizations working in the region provided archival data

and insight into the context of displacement and issues related to refugee return and

resettlement. Finally, I facilitated putting mapping data together on oil palm concessions,

protected areas, deforestation and displacements, shown in figures presented below. The

data have been generously shared by several different organizations and individuals as a

collective project to spatially map the dynamics of land use changes and drivers in the region

(see Saxon and Sheppard, 2015).7

War, political violence and conservation in Tanintharyi Region

7
Mathieu Pellerin created all maps illustrated here, using mapping data provided, in part, under the auspices of
the Fauna & Flora International (FFI) with funding from the Helmsley Charitable Trust. Other mapping data was
assembled by the author, with the help of field research teams for some of the oil palm concessions data, and
the Thailand-Burma Consortium (TBC) in Thailand for archival data on trends in displacement and
return/resettlement trends.

9
 This section introduces the case study material on the workings of green territoriality.

It presents a review of the interactive sequential waves of land and green grabs and

militarization in Tanintharyi Region from the 1990s to the late 2000s during the period of war.

This overview of economic concessions and militarization patters demonstrates the historical

state territorialization measures and methods already achieved. Second and relatedly, it

contextualizes the landscape of political violence within which CCM this decade during the

ceasefire period has been inserted into and built upon.

Socio-economic and political impacts from economic concessions and green grabs

often spatially overspill into other areas where the concession is not located. In other cases,

they can spatially overlap in real time, such as different deals made for the same parcel during

the same period. Or they can occupy the same area but during different temporal periods,

such as a carbon conservation project being carried out where logging and agribusiness

concessions had previously been granted. Armed conflict dynamics is added on top of these

interactive impacts among concessions. The resource deals have also individually and

cumulatively aggravated violent conflict. Latent and active violent conflict both guide

resource management regimes as well as compound their impacts.

Tanintharyi Region (previously known as Tenasserim) is located along the southern

coastal extension of southeastern Myanmar between the Andaman Sea and the border with

Thailand. See Figure 1 for a map of Myanmar and the case study region. One of the country’s

largest and best-known ethno-nationalist armed political opposition groups, the Karen

National Union (KNU), has territorial control and authority over much of the Myanmar-Thai

borderlands, including that of the Tanintharyi Region, since they took up arms in the early

1950s (Smith, 1999). The western range of Tanintharyi Region is marked as the junction of

the Indo-Burma and Sundaland biodiversity hotspots, containing the largest extent and last

10
remaining very rare lowland evergreen rainforests (Sundaic forests) in the whole Mekong

Region. The region has by far the highest concentration of agricultural concessions in the

country at over 2.3 million acres, predominately for private oil palm estates but also an

expanding rubber sector.

Figure 1. Map of Tanintharyi Region, Myanmar.

By the early 1990s, most of the ethno-nationalist rebel groups that split off from the

communist insurrection had signed ceasefires with the Myanmar’s Union Army (Tatmadaw).

The KNU and its armed wing the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), however, continued

their armed struggle, punctuated occasionally with discussions among its leaders to put down

their weapons in favor of political resolutions. With the overthrow of the communist threat

and an end to fighting in other parts of Myanmar, the Thai government changed their border

policies with its neighbor. Instead of using the rebel groups—mainly the KNU—to create a

buffer against Myanmar’s military-state, they promoted “turning battlefields into market

places.” Meanwhile, the western-led sanctions against Myanmar after the military’s violent

crackdown in August 1988 on pro-democracy protests in the capital nearly crippled the

already destitute military-state. As a result of this set of conditions, the Myanmar military

government selectively opened some sectors, especially those for natural resources, to

investment from the region.

A few years after the 1988 pro-democracy crackdown, the first foreign investment

deal was inked with a consortium of foreign oil and gas companies to run a pipeline overland

across the northern portion of Tanintharyi to Thailand. Constructing the Yetagon and Yadana

pipelines, as they are known, posed an immediate challenge: the KNU 4th Brigade claimed this

11
area as under their authority. The Myanmar government did not have control over the

territory that the pipeline would pass through on its way to Thailand. The New Mon State

Party (NMSP) were also setting up new bases in the area as they retreated from Myanmar

Army attacks further north across the Mon State border around the same period of time. In

order to carry out the highly lucrative oil and gas pipeline project—which would provide an

economic lifeline to the military regime—the military had to first secure the area. This

resulted in well-documented gross human rights violations against Karen and Mon villagers

living in the area who were forcibly displaced (ERI 2003, 2009).

Following in the wake of the construction of the pipelines, Myanmar military and

government officials facilitated the allocation of logging concessions to Thai companies in the

KNU’s 4th Brigade territory along the Thai border in the northern stretches of the Tanintharyi

Region. Thai companies were eager to log on the other side of their border following their

country’s national logging ban in 1989. Logging deals capitalized on Thailand’s new border

policy of battlefields to marketplaces. Incursions into forested KNU territory to allocate

logging concessions was in part facilitated by the previous state militarization outcomes from

the pipeline. The KNU’s 4th Brigade territory became bit by bit connected to national political

and military leaders, which subsequently enabled more concessions to be granted. For the

first time, the Myanmar military government gained incremental territorial access to

previously out-of-bounds KNU-held forested border areas.

Thai border logging aggrieved and displaced Karen villagers, and to some made a

mockery of the KNU’s armed political struggle. Meanwhile, the Myanmar military further

pressured the KNU to sign a ceasefire like most of the others had done. The ceasefire deals

that were signed with rebel groups earlier in the 1990s freed up Tatmadaw soldiers to take

up positions in areas where rebels continued to fight. In early 1997 this all came to a head.

12
The Tatmadaw carried out a large, well-orchestrated military offensive against the northern

reaches of KNU’s 4th Brigade. Tatmadaw soldiers spread south from their newly-established

bases in the area of the pipeline where they already had a stronghold on the ground, thanks

to the militarization around the pipeline.8 The Tatmadaw units pushed south and east into

Dawei township (previously called Tavoy), effectively clearly a swath in their path of forcibly

displaced Karen villagers and KNLA units. Those KNU officers interviewed assert that the

offensive in the Dawei area was to clear the KNLA out of a pathway within a few days walk to

the oil and gas pipeline as a further security measure against possible rebel attack.9

Tatmadaw soldiers ransacked Karen villages located within the path of the offensive

as a way to separate Karen rebels from their civilian base. Terrified villagers fled into forests,

and some eventually made it across the Thai border as refugees a few months later.10 Many

of the remaining Karen villagers in the Dawei district were forcibly resettled into “model

villages” along military-government controlled infrastructure routes. The government located

many of these hamlets along the newly renamed Union Road that runs north to south of the

region—the only part of the state firmly under government control since the 1970s, and

rather isolated from the KNU stronghold further east. This classic counterinsurgency strategy

mirrored previous forced human displacements into military-controlled concentrated

population units as part of the military regime’s “Four-Cuts” policy.11 In these roadside

resettlements villagers became easy targets for Tatmadaw soldiers. Forced portering and

8
Information on the military offensive against the KNU comes from several sources: BERG 1998, Peace Way
Foundation 2003, and interviews with KNU leaders, Karen CBO representatives, and Karen refugees from these
areas, Thailand, 2014 and 2015.
9
Interviews, KNU 4th Brigade Forest Department official, former head of 4th Brigade, and Karen CBO
representatives, Thailand, 2014 and 2015.
10
Exodus stories were told to me in 2015 by Karen refugees who had since been living in a camp on the Thai
border.
11
The military regime followed a particular type of scorched earth campaign that came to be known as the Four-
Cuts Policy: cutting links of food, funds, information and recruits between the insurgents and their families and
the local populace.

13
other forms of forced labor were commonplace. Women in particular feared the higher

presence of Myanmar soldiers in the area of their new village because of high incidences of

rape reported. For these reasons, as well as little to no fertile land to farm, some of the Karen

villagers that had been relocated secretly left, according to interviews with refugees who fled

from the counterinsurgency villages to refugee camps on the Thai border.

Guns to grabs, bullets to bulldozers

On the heels of the military offensive and related forced resettlements of Karen

villagers away from KNU strongholds into military-government ones, the oil palm industry

was born. The making of the country’s oil palm sector in the southern half of Tanintharyi

Region in the 2000s is set within the context of militarization from the oil and gas pipeline

and logging concessions and the 1997 military offensive described in the previous section.

The Myanmar military government began to promote an agribusiness development

model in the 1990s as generals experimented with their authoritarian state economy and

grew increasingly paranoid about sustaining the country under sanctions. Just two years after

the 1997 military offensive in Tanintharyi Region, the government launched its first seven-

year oil palm development program in 1999. The rulers proclaimed the Tanintharyi Region as

the future “edible oil palm big pot of the nation.” By the time the second seven-year oil palm

development program concluded in 2013, a total of nearly 360,000 acres had been planted

out of 1.90 million acres awarded to national “crony companies” who had close relations to

military generals and regional commanders (Woods, 2015b).12 These concessions were some

of the first economic handouts to cronies who were just emerging at this time as the new

private arm of the military. The concessions covered nearly a fifth of the total land area of the

12
What are known as “cronies” in Myanmar, these national companies are able to conduct high-level lucrative
business deals because of their good business connections to top-level military officials.

14
Tanintharyi Region, representing more than one-third of the whole country’s total acreage of

agribusiness estates and the highest concentration of land grabs in the country.13

The particular geography of the concessions in relation to the 1997 military offensive

highlight another aspect of the concessions’ political potency in state territorialization. The

military offensives in the north did not pave the way for concessions to then be demarcated

in those areas, as may be assumed. The area where the Tatmadaw’s main military offensives

happened in the northern two townships (Dawei and Yepyu) are nearly absent of any oil palm

concessions. The military generals instead allocated oil palm concessions in the southern half

of the region. This is the part of the region that had little Myanmar military state presence at

that time, and perhaps not incidentally, the most forested areas that also had remaining

Karen villages and territory under KNU authority manned by KNLA soldier posts. Figures 2 and

3 reveals the geography of oil palm concessions allocated in the region.

Figure 2. Oil palm concessions allocated in Tanintharyi Region.

Figure 3. Oil palm concessions allocated in Kawthaung District, southern Tanintharyi Region.

Many of the oil palm concession areas were allocated within forest reserves

demarcated by the state or the KNU (which has its own forest department), or at times both

in cases where they overlapped. In some cases, the oil palm concessionaires, especially those

crony companies that also operated logging company subsidiaries, cleared forests inside their

oil palm concessions but usually never substantially planted oil palm (Takarbaw, 2017). In

addition to “conversion timber” coming off oil palm estates, the military government also

13
Data for the Tanintharyi Region for 2013 is from the regional government with concession data to support the
figure, buy which is significantly higher than recorded by the central government. Data for the Tanintharyi
Region provided by the regional government before 2013 is not available, however, and therefore central
government data was used.

15
allocated numerous logging concessions in forest reserves to the same cronies who received

oil palm concessions (Woods, 2015b).

The spatial overlay of land categorized as state protected forests, allocated oil palm

concessions, and deforestation patterns in Tanintharyi Region is illustrated in Figures 4 and

5. A fairly strong correlation is shown between placement of oil palm concessions in forest

reserves and deforestation patterns. A degree of deforestation can be seen having occurred

outside oil palm concessions, and both inside and outside forest reserves, but this is the

exception. Deforestation patterns captured by this mapping data support Myanmar central

government’s data that recorded nearly 70,000 acres of lowland forest had been (legally)

cleared and/or burned in 2010-11 alone to make way for oil palm concessions in the

Tanintharyi Region (Woods, 2015b). Cronies cashed in on lucrative timber rents from the

forests in their oil palm estates as a way to capture timber rents. These are the same forested

lands that have provided cover to KNLA guerrilla operatives, Karen IDP hideouts, and in other

cases logging rents to KNU officials. Deforested and depopulated hills and valleys make tough

terrain for a rebel group reliant on guerrilla tactics in need of sympathetic Karen villagers and

forests to hide in and generate revenue.

Figure 4. Geography of deforestation and oil palm concessions in Tanintharyi Region.

Figure 5. Geography of deforestation and oil palm concessions in Kawthaung District,

southern Tanintharyi Region.

Blanketing the southern half of the region with large-scale agricultural concessions

carved out national territory and authority in the absence of a military offensive. According

to a KNU 4th Brigade department head, “the Myanmar Government is killing two birds with

16
one stone with granting oil palm concessions: the production of agricultural commodities as

part of their national agribusiness development plan, while also attacking and removing our

[Karen] villagers.”14 Villagers’ cultivation lands had been marked on government maps as

unoccupied and unused “wastelands” and “virgin lands” despite customary ownership and

use of the agricultural fields and upland agro-forests.15 Earlier in the decade that the oil palm

development program was initiated, the military government enacted the 1991 Wastelands

Act. This act, much like its updated version the 2012 Virgin, Fallow and Vacant (VFV) Land

Law, revoked any legal rights or recognition of upland farms customarily managed and owned

by ethnic minority communities. These shifting cultivation food production fields became

sites of forced dispossession, allocating them to private companies and marking them on

state land maps as now under the authority of the agricultural ministry.

Those villagers whose farm fields fell inside oil palm concession boundaries suddenly

found themselves without occupation or cultivation rights, as no laws or policies recognize

customary ownership or cultivation. In some cases, officials relocated evicted farmers into

new villages along government-controlled roads nearby to Tatmadaw battalions, just as had

been previously done with Karen villagers who were in the line of fire during the 1997

offensive further north. Concessions also occupied active KNLA posts as well as those

abandoned in 1997 when some KNLA soldiers and KNU officers fled to the Thai border for

fear of the offensive spreading further south. The KNU 4th Brigade head at that time

explained to me he believes the oil palm concessions were allocated in KNU-held territory in

the southern region as a way for the military to firm its control over their territory at a time

when KNU was still reeling from the 1997 military offensive. The KNU’s current head of the

14
Interview, Thailand border, December 2014.
15
On how the contemporary land laws and policies have been designed to dispossess ethnic minority upland
agriculturalists, see Oberndorf (2012).

17
4th Brigade Forest Department was quick to add that the concessions were also about the

military government capitalizing on land and resources that belong to the Karen people at a

time when the KNU is not strong enough to protect them and their heritage.16

For the larger concessions, companies built roads into these areas for the first time.

Oil palm companies even set up their own “model villages,” this time for concession migrant

laborers who were mostly Burman migrants from the Delta region and even as far as the

Central Dry Zone in the middle of the country. These company-run model villages housing

landless wage laborers are located on the very lands that were previously confiscated from

largely subsistence communities who were shuffled off to new roadside villages to make way

for the company estates. Both sets of new hamlet villages—along new roads, under

government control, far from KNU influence—resemble those villages established from

counterinsurgency raids. These are the new social and physical landscapes being remade in

the Tanintharyi Region through a mixture of using guns and grabs that conjointly make legible

state-controlled territory.

Compounding violence: Conservation in war

While the war continued in the southeast against the KNU, and a few years before oil

palm concessions arrived in Tanintharyi Region, a major international biodiversity

conservation project got underway in the early 1990s as part of a corporate social

responsibility (CSR) scheme for the oil and gas pipeline. Conservation became caught

between rebels and the state in the war to rule, and between global discourses and (sub-)

national state building goals. As the Tanintharyi Nature Reserve Project (TNRP) will

demonstrate, protected area management entered into the domain of state territorialization.

16
Interviews with respective heads, Thailand border, 2015.

18
 Over 30 percent of the Tanintharyi Region’s total land area has been officially

registered as state forest lands on government maps. Demarcated state forestlands

encompass more than half of the Tanintharyi Region’s 6 million acres (nearly 25,000 km2) of

forest cover. State managed forests have already been demarcated into 37 various sized state

forest reserves, altogether totaling 3.3 million acres. While this may give the impression of a

fine-tuned state forest management regime, the government is not able to exercise authority

over considerable areas of the region’s territory, especially forestlands. Most of the

demarcated state forest reserves and protected areas are in fact located in areas the KNU

considers under their territorial domain. The KNU’s own Forest Department, much like their

Myanmar counterparts, has also demarcated several KNU managed forest reserves and

wildlife sanctuaries. Many of the KNU’s protected forests overlap with state forest reserves

on government maps, underscoring the nature of armed sovereignties in relation to the

territorial politics of conservation.

In response to the growing international condemnation of human rights violations

committed by the Burmese military to clear the pipeline area of villagers and rebel posts, the

oil and gas consortium sought to off-set their environmental and social impacts from the

pipeline project and manage their “reputational risk.” Initially their CSR program was to

provide the funds to create and manage a very large protected area known as the

Myintmolekat Reserve. Initially designed as totaling over 2.7 million acres, the reserve would

run from near to the pipeline area to several hundred kilometers south along the border with

Thailand. However, as was the case for the pipeline area, the targeted protected area was

predominately still under the territorial control of the KNU, with little government authority

exercised in this densely forested landscape. This expansive area included KNU and NSMP

Army bases, Karen and Mon villages, and KNU managed forest reserves such as the Kaserdoh

19
Wildlife Sanctuary (Pollard, Hlaing and Pilgrim 2014).17 Those familiar with the project and

territorial politics in the area believed that the proposed reserve was advanced by the

consortium and accepted by the military government because it would secure the wider

pipeline area from rebels—not about biodiversity offsets.

Due to “security threats” posed by the presence of KNU and NMSP troops within the

initial proposed reserve, the scale of the protected area was ultimately reduced to 420,000

acres. The new Tanintharyi Nature Reserve was officially recognized in 1996 but remained a

“paper park” due to security concerns and lack of government presence in the area. Within a

few months of signing the MoU to establish the Tanintharyi Nature Reserve, the Tatmadaw—

before their major 1997 push—reportedly launched a military offensive in that area to secure

the territory away from the rebel groups.18 After these military incursions disguised as state-

led forest conservation, the central KNU leadership made a sharp rebuttal to any conservation

easements in their territory:

The KNU does not recognize the superimposition of biosphere reserves or wildlife
sanctuaries by the SPDC [the name of the former Myanmar military-government] or
foreign companies whose intentions are questionable, dishonest, and only face-saving,
and those actions and devious and oppressive toward the Karen people and the proper
aims and methods of ecosystem management (Brunner et al. 1998:15).

What was not politically tenable to enclose rebel territory as state forest reserve at

that time was achieved in part by direct military force in the 1997 military offensive previously

described. This military offensive engulfed the KNU’s Kaserdoh Wildlife Sanctuary, with KNU

Forest Department officials and some resident villagers fleeing from Tatmadaw troops.

Internally displaced villagers hid in the reserve to avoid the Tatmadaw while attacks in the

17
Personal communication, former KNU park warden in 4th Brigade in the targeted protected area, Thailand,
2014.
18
Interview with Karen CBO representatives, Thailand, 2014 and 2015.

20
area continued.19 After these forestlands had been better secured by Tatmadaw forces, the

Tanintharyi Nature Reserve was officially demarcated and rebranded as the Tanintharyi

Nature Reserve Project (TNRP). The TNRP continued to be financially supported by the oil/gas

consortium, with technical support provided by the US-based conservation organization the

Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). The KNU and NMSP contested the government’s

authority over parts of the TNRP and WCS’s work in the area. Thirty villages are located within

a few miles of the TNRP, with an additional 11 villages (labeled as “unregistered” since it is

illegal to reside within a nature reserve) located on the park boundary or wholly inside the

nature reserve, totaling some 3,200 households, of which 430 households are located fully

inside the reserve (TNRP, 2013). According to an international consultancy report that

reviewed the TNRP, “The major impediment to conservation activities is the security

situation; Karen National Union control some areas and greatly limit access to significant

portions of the TNR” (Pollard, Hlaing and Pilgrim 2014:10). The CSR program itself became a

private-public partnership green grab with similar implications as the initial offense back in

1996 and again in 1997. Rebel forests turned into state conservation parks, with Myanmar

foresters and soldiers armed this time with oil executives touting biodiversity management

plans.

Conservation as post-war counterinsurgency

These battles over rebel forestlands and the methods that green territoriality provide

to the military state have taken new political meaning under REDD+ in Myanmar during the

post-war period in the southeast. In 2011 the KNU signed the country’s National Ceasefire

Accord (NCA), ending nearly seven decades of civil war in the southeast. During the same year

19
Personal communication with former Kaserdoh Reserve Warden, Thailand, 2014 and 2015.

21
as the new Burmese government stepped into office in 2011, the government of Norway—

the same government that financed much of Myanmar’s peace process—announced funding

available to prepare Myanmar for REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest

Degradation). The process got started with the United Nation’s REDD-Readiness program. The

Myanmar government, with assistance from UN agencies, developed a REDD+ Readiness-

Preparation Proposal (R-PP), which identified the Tanintharyi Region as the main targeted

area for REDD+ project activities. Through Myanmar’s REDD+ Readiness program, several

international conservation organizations have secured conservation funds (through REDD+ or

sustainable forest management (SFM) grant programs), such as the Global Environmental

Facility (GEF) in Washington D.C. as well as from private donors. The funds have been used to

implement large-scale forest conservation projects in the country, almost exclusively in the

Tanintharyi Region.20 One of the main projects from GEF for Myanmar is the Ridge to Reef

project, which aims to add more than 800,000 acres of protected state forests in Tanintharyi

Region.21 In addition, other international agencies, such as the International Tropical Timber

Organization (ITTO) and foreign governments (Korea, Japan, and Norway in particular), have

also begun to promote and facilitate processes and projects linked to REDD+. The government

of Norway has been at the forefront of funding and facilitating project activities in Myanmar

related to REDD+, including negotiating a bilateral REDD+ agreement with the central

Myanmar government.

The draft National REDD+ Strategy for Myanmar report identifies smallholder (and less

so, industrial) agriculture and biomass energy production as the main drivers of deforestation,

20
Interview, GEF Southeast Asia REDD+/SFM grants officer, Washington DC, September 2014; Interview, UN
REDD+ Readiness regional officers, Bangkok, Thailand, 01 December 2014.
21
The US$22 million project is being implemented by United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Fauna
and Flora International (FFI), Smithsonian Institute, and Myanmar’s Ministry of Natural Resources and
Environmental Conservation (MONREC).

22
completely neglecting the industrial logging sector as driving deforestation.22 The analysis

therefore puts most blame on rural villagers for the country’s deforestation crisis–the second

highest in the world after Brazil—despite evidence to the contrary of rampant state logging

operations throughout the country. The National REDD+ Strategy draft report’s two primary

policy objectives to achieve carbon targets are to increase the country’s forest protected area

management system and prevent future forest degradation due to rural forest-based

livelihood activities (MONREC, 2018:25). These policy objectives go hand-in-hand since

Myanmar’s existing Forest Law (1992) and Forest Policy (1995) prohibit forest access or use

rights claims by villagers inside state forests, including agricultural and grazing practices. The

Myanmar government is appropriating the REDD+ platform to help fund and legitimize the

increase of its forestlands demarcated as state territory, as well as to further deny and clamp

down on villagers’ forest access, use and occupation claims to forest areas. Those squeezed

out of occupying, using and managing forests have been and will predominately continue to

be ethnic minority populations who rely on customary forest laws, management and

practices, and rebel organizations with their own forest departments and policies.

Global conservation funds earmarked for SFM and REDD+ projects in Myanmar have

begun to be translated into the country’s reforming political economy and national peace

process. Current REDD+ efforts in Myanmar build off previous territorial interventions against

rebel groups during the war period. The current forest conservation dynamics are couched

within the armed political context these territories are located in. Carbon governance may be

a new phenomenon for Myanmar, but green territoriality is not, as the cases above clearly

demonstrate. The difference is that under REDD+, the state is afforded much more funds,

22
The draft report (MONREC, 2018) was released in March, 2018 for public comment.

23
technical expertise and international legitimacy to continue designing and implementing

green territoriality schemes in rebel forests.

Since 2002 the Tanintharyi National Park in Tanintharyi Township, Myeik District has

been proposed by the central Forest Department, which would total 640,000 acres.23 The

proposed park includes contiguous lowland dipterocarp forest, and which borders Thailand’s

Kaeng Krachan National Park. Since REDD+ / SFM projects have been available to international

conservation organizations working in Myanmar, they have been pushing with Forest

Department support to officially establish the national park. According to research by

community-based organizations (CBOs) in Tanintharyi Region, 42 villages totaling over 14,000

people are located inside and adjacent to the proposed boundaries of the national park.

During the decades of war and counterinsurgency, 33 villages located in and along the park

boundaries had been abandoned, with 26 villages completely destroyed at least once. Since

2014, some IDPs have started to return to their former village lands, with 5 new villages

already established. Many more IDPs plan to return in the near future as well if conditions

allow for their safety. Yet 33 out of the total 42 villages located in and along the proposed

park boundary have never been informed about the plans for the national park (CAT,

2018:22). Much like for the area around the pipeline and the TNRP conservation area in Dawei

District further north, the KNU also claims territorial authority over the area and the villages

included in the proposed national park. The government’s complete lack of political and

administrative control over the territory that is included in the proposed national park has

kept the plan from further advancing so far at the time of writing.

23
The proposed Tanintharyi National Park is not to be confused with the Tanintharyi Nature Reserve Project
(TNRP) previously described, which is further north around the pipelines.

24
 In another case, the Lenya Forest Reserve located in Bokpyin Township in Kawthaung

District further south in the Tanintharyi Region has also been proposed as a national park in

2002. International conservation organizations promoted the proposed national park status

to the central Forest Department once it was confirmed that the critically endangered

Gurney’s Pitta bird was endemic to the area with a potentially viable population remaining.

In 2004 the proposed boundary to Lenya National Park was expanded to over 700,000 acres

by including the Nga Wun reserved forest border the north of Lenya Forest Reserve. The

Lenya Forest Reserve reportedly held a KNLA battalion within its boundaries, but which the

Tatmadaw attacked in 1997 and subsequently since occupied.24 According to local CBOs, at

least 13 villages are located inside and on the border of the proposed Lenya National Park,

home to nearly 2,500 people; an additional 25 villages on the periphery of the proposed

boundary rely on the forest inside the park boundary for their livelihoods. Villagers have lived

in the proposed park area for several generations, some of the villages being established

about two centuries ago. During the war period 12 villages had been seriously impacted, with

human rights violations committed during fighting in this area in 1985 and again in 1996-97.

A total of five villages were totally destroyed at one point, while four villages were destroyed

twice (CAT, 2018:19).

Since KNU signed the ceasefire agreement, Karen IDPs have been checking on their

original village areas inside the proposed park boundary to check about the possibility to

return. None of the villagers living in the proposed park boundary or in refugee camps have

claimed to know about this park, however (CAT, 2018:19-21). When local CBOs started

reaching out to potentially affected villagers inside the proposed park boundaries, villagers

24
Interview with former head of the KNU’s 4th Brigade, Thailand, 2015.

25
grew worrisome: “If they really establish a national park here, then we cannot live here. We

will have to move. But there is no place for us to move” (CAT, 2018:19). Much like for the case

of the proposed Tanintharyi National Park, the KNU also claims the territory that the proposed

Lenya National Park encompasses. National cronies, on the other hand, already hold on to

logging and oil palm concessions inside the park boundaries since the war period. Due to

these political and logistical problems and pressure from cronies who want to secure their

land grabs, formal establishment of the park has been temporarily further delayed.

The workings of green territoriality during the post-war period has been shown to

impede peace building objectives in the southeast. Since the KNU signed their ceasefire

agreement, the KNU’s 4th Brigade in the Tanintharyi Region has felt “attacked” this time by

international conservationists. According to the head of the Brigade’s Forest Department,

international conservation organizations demand meetings, MoU’s with the KNU to operate

in their territory, and bring Myanmar forestry personnel (sometimes unannounced) into KNU

territory.

Since our ceasefire, we need to focus on peace building efforts for our people; instead,
we spend all our time dealing with the conservationists. They are not like the
businessmen previously who would come to try to do business deals with us — when
we refuse them, they left. But with the foreign conservationists, they come even when
we refuse them entry [into the forest area], and then they complain to the central
government that we are being difficult. They are very stubborn and do not respect our
policies or sovereignty.25

The KNU’s 4th Brigade Forestry Department got so irritated by the conservation

organizations’ activities in the Tanintharyi Region that they subsequently passed an official

declaration of principles of international conservation engagement in KNU-held territory.26

KNU’s general secretary Padoh Saw Tadoh Moo criticized conservation for impeding his peace

25
Interview, Thailand border, November 2014.
26
On file with author.

26
building objectives: “Government efforts to set national parks and forest reserves in KNU

Brigade number 4 has caused obstacles for the current peace building process” (Nyein Nyein,

2017). Advancing mechanisms for green territoriality before territorial disputes and political

governance arrangements are resolved, the government and international conservation

organizations risk amplifying conflict with the KNU, undermining trust in the peace process,

and ultimately a return to war.

The spatial and temporal convergence of land grabs and green grabs, militarization

and population displacements are represented in Figure 6. The map is meant to visually

display these convergent spatial and historical dynamics within the war-torn landscape of the

Tanintharyi Region. The map is admittedly a messy collage of colors, dots and lines

representing oil palm concessions, government and KNU protected forests, deforestation,

historical villages, government registered villages, and IDP and refugee returnee areas—all of

which overlap and bleed into each other. While the map is hard to read and navigate as a

result, that is precisely the point. The multiple land uses and claims by the government, rebel

groups, villagers, cronies and conservation organizations overlap and spill over into each

other, geographically and temporally. During the war period, the military gained control over

parts of the region using armed force, while their cronies did much the same through land

grabs. But during the ceasefire period, green grabs are set to achieve similar aims through

CCM projects and international conservation organizations.

FIGURE 6. Compounding violence in a mosaic landscape.

Carbon conservation targeting the depopulated forested regions where villagers had

been forcibly displaced out of rebel territories and into “carbon-poor,” state-controlled

villages lends towards legitimizing past war crimes. Erasing rebellion and anti-state

27
populations from the body politic is part of the story in creating state green territory through

resource-based governance projects. Conservation efforts in these cases act as a territorial

tool for the central government’s continued counterinsurgency efforts against local minority

peoples who espouse greater support for rebel governance rather than for the state. This is

conservation as counterinsurgency.

Concluding Remarks: The means to making state landscapes

The sequential and spatial placement of economic and conservation concessions hold

individual and cumulative effects on political violence by territorial means. It is helpful,

therefore, to examine these acts of violence together within a single analytic frame. The glue

that helps to hold this frame together is the making of state territory and the subsequent

erasure of rebel territory and populations by a means other than war.

Military offensives in the Tanintharyi Region, which intensified in the 1990s and 2000s,

destroyed many Karen villages and forced many villagers to flee further into the forests or

escape across the border into Thailand as refugees. The allocation of oil palm concessions in

the 2000s led to another wave of forced displacements. The military resettled villagers that

did not flee from war, some forced while others voluntarily under coercive arrangements.

These new model villages were located along strategic military-government infrastructure

routes and not far from Tatmadaw bases. This classic counterinsurgency strategy physically

separated civilians from rebel groups by placing villagers into state-monitored settlements

beyond the reach of rebels who rely on civilians for support.

Since the KNU signed the NCA and became the leading rebel group in the

government’s national peace process, there has been increased pressure by donors and

development agencies for Karen IDPs and refugees to return. However, those Karen IDPs and

refugees who have had the opportunity to go back to their original villages to check the local

28
security and livelihood situation have been confronted with an unexpected obstacle. For

many of the displaced villagers, their original settlements are now located in oil palm

concessions, in heavily militarized areas, in proposed national parks, and/or their cultivation

fields have been confiscated by soldiers or migrants. For example, one of the chief threats to

obtaining the conservation targets for the Tanintharyi Nature Reserve Project (TNRP) is that

of “unregulated resettlement of refugees…returning from Thailand” (Pollard, Hlaing and

Pilgrim 2013:20). Conservationists and other land management planners have so far not taken

into consideration returnees’ historical land claims and the future of IDPs and refugees return

and resettlement, which is presenting new challenges to an old problem.

Green territoriality provides a way to conceptualize how landscape-level conservation

efforts can act as a proxy for the continuation of counterinsurgent activities. Carbon

conservation and REDD+ strategies in Myanmar is therefore not nearly as simple as conceived

and presented, as evidenced from the case study. Despite being in the post-war arena, armed

political struggles, past grievances, and historical land and resource claims remain unresolved.

Without first dealing with the historical land and resource conflicts and political rights of

minority populations, REDD+ is going to at best fail. At worst it will further contribute to the

marginalization, landlessness, and impoverishment of indigenous communities. International

NGOs must practice the bare minimum of “do no harm” in implementing their projects in

order to minimize how their work could get translated into advances of green territoriality. A

more careful process that puts conservation into the hands of communities rather than solely

the state is one partial remedy, including committing to Community Conserved Areas (CCAs)

as a viable alternative.

The region’s post-war setting—emerging from over six decades of civil war without

political resolve—demands being sensitive to state-society dynamics that play out over

29
contested territory and resources. People in forest areas are still dealing with the violet past

and its aftermath. New efforts by the state to re-zone forest lands can mask that conflict—or

worse yet, contribute to it. Scholars and practitioners therefore need to pay attention to how

international conservation efforts can inadvertently be put to work in the service of political

violence, all the more so in conflict sensitive arenas.

The author declares that they have no conflict of interest.

Works Cited

Boege, V., Brown, A., Clements, K., and A. Nolan. 2009, “Building peace and political

community in hybrid political orders.” International Peacekeeping, 16: 599-615.

Borras, SM., McMichael, P., and I. Scoones. 2010. “The politics of biofuels, land and agrarian

change: Editors’ introduction.” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 37(4): 575–592.

Brenner, N. and S. Elden. 2009. “Henri Lefebvre on state, space and territory.” International

Political Sociology, 3: 353-77.

Brunner, J., Talbott, K. and C. Elkin. 1998. Logging Burma’s Frontier Forests: Resources and

the regime. Washington DC: World Resources Institute (WRI).

Büscher, B. and R. Fletcher. Forthcoming. “Under pressure: Conceptualising political

ecologies of green wars.” Conservation and Society, 1-9.

Büscher, B. and M. Ramutsindela. 2016. “Green violence: Rhino poaching and the war to

save Southern Africa’s peace parks.” African Affairs, 115(458): 1-22.

Conservation Alliance of Tanawthari (CAT). 2018. Our Forest, our Life: Protected areas in

Tanintharyi Region must respect the rights of indigenous peoples. Dawei, Myanmar.

Corbera, E., Hunsberger, C. and C. Vaddhanaphutil. 2017. “Climate change policies, land

30
 grabbing and conflict: Perspectives from Southeast Asia.” Canadian Journal of

Development Studies, 38(3): 297-304.

Duffy, R. 2016. “War, by conservation.” Geoforum, 69: 238-48.

Dunlap, A., and J. Fairhead. 2014. “The militarisation and marketisation of nature: An

alternative lens to ‘climate-conflict.’ Geopolitics, 19(4): 937–961.

Dressler, W., Mahanty, S., Clendenning, J. and PX To. 2014. “Rearticulating governance

through carbon in the Lao PDR?” Environment and Planning C: Government and

Policy, vol. 32.

Dressler, W. and R. Roth. 2010. “The good, the bad, and the contradictory: Neoliberal

conservation governance in rural Southeast Asia.” World Development, 39(5): 851-

62.

EarthRights International (ERI). 2003. Total Denial Continues: Earth rights abuses along the

Yadana and Yetagun Pipelines in Burma. Second Edition. Chiangmai, Thailand.

ERI. 2009. Total Impact: The human rights, environmental, and financial impacts of Total

and Chevron’s Yadana gas project in military-ruled Burma (Myanmar). Chiangmai,

Thailand.

Fairhead, J., Leach, M. and I. Scoones. 2012. “Green grabbing: A new appropriation of

nature?” Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(2): 237-261.

Forest Investment Program (FIP). 2011. Investment Plan of Lao People’s Democratic

Republic. Climate investment funds: meeting of the FIP sub-committee. Forest

Investment Program, World Bank, Washington, DC.

Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977.

Gordon, C. (Ed.). New York: Pantheon Books.

Grundy-Warr, C. and K. Dean. 2011. “Not peace, not war: The myriad spaces of sovereignty,

31
 peace and conflict in Myanmar/Burma.” In: Kirsch, S. and C. Flint (Eds.),

Reconstructing Conflict: Integrating war and post-war geographies. Pp. 91-114.

Ashgate Publishing.

Lunstrum, E., 2014. “Green militarization: Anti-poaching efforts and the spatial contours of

Kruger National Park. Annals of the Association of American Geography, 104: 816-

832.

Kachin Development Networking Group (KDNG). 2007a. Valley of Darkness: Gold mining and

militarization in Burma’s Hugawng Valley. Chiang Mai, Thailand.

KDNG. 2010. Tyrants, Tycoons and Tigers: Yuzana company ravages Burma’s Hugawng

Valley. Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Kelly, A. 2011. “Conservation practice as primitive accumulation.” Journal of Peasant

Studies, 38(4): 683–701.

Kosoy, N. and E. Corbera. 2010. “Payments for ecosystem services as commodity fetishism.”

Ecological Economics, 69(6): 1228-1236.

Maclean, K. 2008. “Sovereignty after the entrepreneurial turn: Mosaics of control,

commodified spaces, and regulated violence in contemporary Burma.” In: Peluso, N.

and Nevins, J. (eds.), Taking Southeast Asia to Market: Commodities, nature, and

people in a neoliberal age. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Marijnen, E. and Verweijen, J. 2016. “Selling green militarization: The discursive

(re)production of militarized conservation in the Virunga National Park, Democratic

Republic of the Congo.” Geoforum, 75: 274-285.

Milne, S., and B. Adams. 2012. “Market masquerades: Uncovering the politics of

community-level payments for environmental services in Cambodia.” Development

and Change, 43(1): 133–158.

32
Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation (MONREC). 2018. National

REDD+ Strategy Myanmar. Unpublished draft report. Yangon.

Noam, Z. 2007. “Eco-authoritarian conservation and ethnic conflict in Burma.” Policy

Matters: Conservation and Human Rights, (15): 272-287.

Nyein Nyein. 2017. “Central govt infringing administration of KNU regions, say leaders.” The

Irrawaddy, 10 October.

Oberndorf, R. 2012. Legal Review of Recently Enacted Farmland Law and Vacant, Fallow and

Virgin Lands Management Law: Improving the legal & policy frameworks relating to

land management in Myanmar. Land Core Group (LCG), Yangon, Myanmar.

Peluso, N. and C. Lund. 2011. “New frontiers of land control: Introduction.” Journal of

Peasant Studies, 38(4): 667–681.

Peluso, N. and P. Vandergeest. 1995. “Territorialization and state power in Thailand.”

Theory and Society, 24(3): 385-426.

Peluso, N. and P. Vandergeest. 2001. “Genealogies of the political forest and customary

rights in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.” The Journal of Asian Studies, 60(3): 761-

812.

Peluso, N. and P. Vandergeest. 2011. “Political ecologies of war and forests:

Counterinsurgency and the making of national natures.” Annals of the Association

of American Geographers, 101(3): 587-608.


Phelps, J., Webb, E., and A. Agrawal. 2010. “Does REDD+ threaten to recentralize forest

governance?” Science, 328: 312–313.

Pollard, E., Soe Win Hlaing, and J. Pilgrim. 2014. Review of the Tanintharyi Nature Reserve

Project as a Conservation Model in Myanmar. The Biodiversity Consultancy, Ltd,

Cambridge, UK.

33
Saxon, E., and S. Sheppard. 2015. Tanintharyi Myanmar Forest Conservation and

Management Atlas. MS: Forest Inform Pty. Ltd.

Schalatek, L., Caravani, A., Nakhooda, S. and C. Watson. 2012. “Climate finance thematic

briefing: REDD+ finance.” Climate Funds Update, Heinrich Böll Stiftung, Overseas

Development Institute (ODI), London.

Smith, M. 1999. Burma: Insurgency and the politics of ethnicity. London: Zed Books.

Tanintharyi Nature Reserve Project (TNRP). 2013. Tanintharyi Nature Reserve Operational

Management Plan. Yangon, Myanmar.

Takarbaw. 2017. Green Desert: Communities in Tanintharyi renounce the MSPP oil palm

concession. Yangon, Myanmar.

Vandergeest, P. and A. Unno. 2012. “A new extraterritorality? Aquaculture certification,

sovereignty, and empire.” Political Geography, 31: 358-67.

Woods, K. 2015(a). “Intersections of land grabs and climate change mitigation strategies in

Myanmar as a (post‐) war state of conflict.” Working Paper Series no. 3. The Hague,

Netherlands: International Institute of Social Studies (ISS).

Woods, K. 2015(b). Commercial Agricultural Expansion in Myanmar: Links to deforestation,

conversion timber and land conflicts. Forest Trends, Washington, D.C.

Woods, K. 2018. “Rubber out of the ashes: Locating Chinese agribusiness investments in

‘armed sovereignties’ in the Myanmar-China borderlands.” Territory, Politics,

Governance.

Ybarra, M. 2012. “Taming the jungle, saving the Maya forest: Sedimented

counterinsurgency practices in contemporary Guatemalan conservation.” Journal of

Peasant Studies, 39(2): 479-502.

34
35
Colour Figure Click here to download Colour Figure Figure 1. Map of Tanintharyi Region.pdf
Myanmar Information Management Unit

Tanintharyi
(
!
Region
!
(

Khawzar
Mon
(
!

Ü
BHUTAN
NEPAL Khao
INDIA CHINA
Yebyu BANGLADESH
!
(
Pawai

VIETNAM
Kaleinaung
(
!
Yebyu LAOS

THAILAND

CAMBODIA

THAILAND
Myitta
(
! Kanchanaburi
Dawei Kamphaeng Saen

!
.
Launglon
!
(
Launglon Dawei Tha Aka
Thayetchaung
Y

!
(
V O
T A

Thayetchaung

Rat Buri

Palauk
(
!

Palaw
Palaw
Phet Buri
!
(

Maruk

Hua Hin

Tanintharyi
Myeik Myeik
!
( Pran Buri
IM
S SER
E AT

GR A
EN
T

ANDAMAN SEA
Tanintharyi
!
(
Tanintharyi

Kyunsu
Kyunsu Prachuap Khiri Khan
!
(
L E
N

Y
A
Y A
L EN

( Pyigyimandaing
!

Bokpyin
!
(
Bokpyin

Karathuri
(
!

Legend
!
. State Capital
!
( Town
(
! Other Town
Kawthoung
Main Roads Map ID: MIMU696v01
Khamaukgyi
Creation Date: 7 July 2011.A3.
Other Roads (
!
Projection/Datum: Geographic/WGS84
Township Boundary
Data Sources :MIMU
State & Region Boundary
Base Map : MIMU
International Boundary Boundaries : MIMU/WFP
Kawthoung
Stream Place Name : Ministry of Home Affairs (GAD)
!
(
translated by MIMU
Non-Perennial/Intermittent/Fluctuating Kilometers
Map produced by the MIMU - info.mimu@undp.org
Perennial/Permanent 0 20 40 80 www.themimu.info

Disclaimer: The names shown and the boundaries used on this map do not imply official endorsement or acceptance by the United Nations.
Colour Figure Click here to download Colour Figure fig 2. Oil palm concessions
TN Region.png
Colour Figure Click here to download Colour Figure fig 3. Oil palm concessions
KT district.png
Colour Figure Click here to download Colour Figure Fig. 4. Oil palm
concessions and forests TN Region.png
Colour Figure Click here to download Colour Figure fig 5. Oil palm concessions
and forests_KT District.png
Colour Figure Click here to download Colour Figure figure 6. mosaic
landscape.png