The Risks of Romanticizing Rebel Governance in Myanmar

New insurgent political orders are being established across Myanmar to challenge the centrality of the Myanmar military and its illegitimate rule. In international conflict studies, this phenomenon is known as “rebel governance,” defined by the scholar Ana Arjona as “the set of actions insurgents engage in to regulate the social, political, and economic life of noncombatants during civil war.” Arjona and her colleagues Nelson Kasfir and Zachariah Mampilly, in their classic collection of essays Rebel Governance in Civil War, created a new and unique body of work in conflict studies, and have since been joined by multiple scholars producing new and valuable studies about insurgent and civilian relationships in the midst of civil war.

Many armed groups reject the use of the term “rebel” as, in its Myanmar connotation, it suggests that armed resistance is illegitimate. Nothing could be further from the reality of the modern state in Myanmar, where it is the military that is indisputably illegitimate: to rebel against the army of Min Aung Hlaing is a just uprising, and so were similar struggles since 1949.