Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines aid brokerage in Myanmar’s Spring Revolution. It focuses on how Western donors engage with resistance to the military-state through various intermediaries – among them aid actors, knowledge producers, and borderlands – and their ambivalent impacts on revolutionary politics.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines aid brokerage as a constitutive feature of how the international aid regime intersects with, and transforms, efforts to resist postcolonial statebuilding in so-called “failed” states. It focuses on the ongoing Spring Revolution in Myanmar. Since the 2021 military takeover, large parts of Myanmar’s borderlands have come under the control of revolutionary actors. Unable to work with the military regime yet concerned about state “failure,” Western governments and other development actors have begun to experiment with supporting good governance initiatives among selected armed groups, while contending with a shifting and crisis-ridden global aid regime.

Drawing on an early-stage, multi-sited project, this paper maps and analyses various forms of brokerage that make these interventions possible and their ambivalent impacts on revolutionary politics. First, it examines aid actors as playing both transformative and limiting roles. While revolutionary actors in Myanmar have long leveraged foreign aid to challenge the military-state, aid actors have also been criticised for depoliticising and undermining revolutionary goals. Next, the paper discusses the role of borderlands. Myanmar’s borderlands have been crucial meeting points for aid and revolutionary actors, yet they are also fraught spaces for the latter, subject to the hostile immigration policies of neighbouring states. Finally, the paper examines knowledge politics, asking whose voices matter in making resistance movements legible to the international aid regime. Brokerage plays a key role, with think tanks, advocacy networks, and the media shaping external perceptions of how aid can and should be used in relation to the Spring Revolution.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

We argue, based on Colombia and Myanmar, that a relational approach (state-actors) can help us understand the diversity and role of intra-systemic actors in conflict, their often shifting allegiances, their contradictions with various structures of the state and their relationships to elites.

Paper long abstract

Pro-state paramilitaries, pro-state militias or intra-systemic armed group occupy an ambiguous position in conflict studies. This is partly because the terms themselves to refer to various violent brokers in internal armed conflict are used in contradictory and inconsistent ways in different countries. But this seems to also be the case because of the dominant lenses used to understand the place of these actors in contemporary conflict. There is a tendency, in one scholarly tradition, to understand them as simple (rather unproblematic) extension of the counter-insurgent state, lacking their own agenda. This literature understands the state as a monolithic entity, glossing over the actual contradictions and conflicts between state apparatuses and these actors. Another scholarly tradition, tends to regard these intra-systemic actors as autonomous entities that can be investigated without a reference to the state and its apparatuses. In this tradition, the focus is the groups as such and the state remains under-theorised. In this paper we will argue that we need a relational approach to understand these actors and their relative autonomy vis-a-vis state apparatuses. By investigating the cases of Colombia and Myanmar, we argue that this relational approach can help us understand their diversity and to provide a much clearer picture of the role of these actors in conflict, their often shifting allegiances, their different contradictions with various structures of the state and their relationships to elites.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper argues scam compounds persist via brokerage: recruiters move labour into compounds through debt, logistics, and coercion; legal brokers in China manage return, detention, restitution, and reintegration. Coercive and legal brokerage co-produce survival under crackdowns.

Paper long abstract

Online scam compounds across the China–Myanmar–Thailand–Cambodia corridor are often explained as products of “weak governance” or purely criminal innovation. This paper instead foregrounds brokerage as the organisational infrastructure that enables scam economies to scale and persist amid intensifying border controls, armed fragmentation, and periodic crackdowns. It advances a two-stage argument about how brokerage distributes risk, produces differentiated (im)mobility, and mediates power across fragmented jurisdictions.

First, the paper examines recruitment and transfer brokers who translate dispersed labour pools into captive, work-disciplined populations inside compounds. These brokers operate through layered networks—kinship/provincial ties, debt and wage advances, logistical facilitation, and coercive protection—linking would-be workers to armed actors, transport routes, and compound managers. Brokerage here is not merely intermediation but a mode of governance that converts uncertainty into controllable mobility.

Second, the paper analyses “legal resettlement brokers” in China—lawyers and quasi-legal fixers who manage return, detention outcomes, plea negotiations, restitution arrangements, and re-entry into everyday life for repatriated scam workers. Rather than existing outside the state, this legal brokerage is shaped by securitised campaigns and uneven enforcement, turning anti-scam governance into a new field of intermediated access and bargaining.

Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork and interviews conducted between 2018 and 2025, the paper contributes to brokerage debates by showing how illicit digital markets are sustained through the co-constitution of coercive and legal brokerage across a fragmenting political order.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Colombian ranchers became key state intermediaries by positioning themselves as operational and political allies of the armed forces. Through counterinsurgency collaboration, they secured delegated authority over coercion and land control, transforming brokerage into a development strategy

Paper long abstract

In Colombia's agrarian frontiers, cattle ranchers emerged as pivotal "coercive brokers" operating at the interstices of state formation and capitalist development. Confronted with peasant mobilization and guerrilla insurgency, the Colombian state strategically outsourced violence and territorial governance to landed elites through frontier governance via indirect rule, delegating coercion, surveillance, and land adjudication to ranchers rather than governing through centralized bureaucracy.

Drawing on archival materials including ranchers' periodicals and organizational records, this paper demonstrates how ranchers positioned themselves as indispensable operational and socio-political allies of the armed forces. They actively promoted security privatization, lobbied for counterinsurgency legislation empowering civilian participation in anti-subversive efforts, and consistently defended military autonomy against judicial oversight. National Security Doctrine frameworks provided the institutional architecture enabling this alliance, transforming ranchers from traditional patrons into fully articulated counterinsurgency actors wielding both delegated state authority and independent territorial resources—land, private militias, and patronage networks.

This brokerage operated across multiple registers: politically (mediating state authority in contested peripheries), coercively (deploying paramilitaries to suppress dissent), and infrastructurally (controlling land adjudication to block agrarian reform). Crucially, ranchers' power derived from their structural position as indispensable intermediaries, not merely from state delegation.

The analysis reframes brokers as pivotal agents actively shaping development trajectories rather than liminal byproducts of state weakness. Ranchers' alliance with security forces incentivized territorial control over productivity, systematically blocking agrarian change that threatened their dominance.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper focuses on the everyday networks, local knowledge, quotidian practices and expertise of a set of intermediaries ( land brokers and map leakers )that help negotiate large scale projects of development and infrastructure in a rapidly changing urban periphery.

Paper long abstract

This paper is an ethnographic study of socio-spatial practices that constitute large scale urban transformation in contemporary India. Drawing from empirical data, secondary sources and a methodological focus on tracing biographies of disputed land plots in NCR , India, the paper maps how macro projects of urban planning, highways, roads or smart cities are contingent on micro histories and relations of caste, kinship, ownership and conflict over land. To do so, the paper focuses on the quotidian practices and informal networks of local residents working as intermediaries, land Brokers and map leakers that help negotiate these land based urban changes. For instance- many small-scale land dealers or contractors talk up and speculate about the emerging high rises, help book flats in emerging residential projects, help win public bids or help hike housing prices. Actors I call map leakers circulate knowledge through kin-caste networks and through information leaking that then determine the nature of state led urban planning initiatives. In doing so these actors form an ‘ecology’ or a network of intermediaries that rely on each other, travel between multiple worlds ( of the state, village council, kinship or caste), hustle, sell, leak and help ‘get things done’ around land. How this ecology of intermediaries operate, what constitutes their everyday practice and how their local knowledge, forms of capital, expertise, and connections assemble and curate land into urban infrastructure will be the subject of this paper.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Formalised employment brokers in Johannesburg mediate access to scarce formal jobs. As employment remains inaccessible to the majority, however, these intermediary institutions come to mainly mediate access to valued work-identities, communities, and masculinities, rather than concrete employment.

Paper long abstract

Representing official points of connection between the underemployed urban poor and the formal labour market, formalised labour brokers in inner-city Johannesburg mediate access to the minuscule pool of ‘proper’, stable employment in South Africa’s acutely segmented and exclusionary formal economy. As the number of ‘discouraged work seekers’ - those who desire work but have ceased actively searching - continues to grow, an expanding web of institutional intermediaries has emerged to address the intertwined economic, political, and developmental 'crises' of structural joblessness. Because many services primarily serve a never-employed and formally unqualified userbase, work seekers often spend years frequenting the same intermediaries in a futile pursuit of favourable, 'proper' jobs. Keenly aware that never-employed work seekers are unlikely to become work-takers, institutional representatives and work seekers alike rearticulate the value and meaning of labour intermediation. Labour agencies come to be understood as sustained ‘workplaces’ in their own right, where distinctly professional and ‘proper’ work seekers perform socially valuable work-seeking work despite knowing it is unlikely to yield concrete employment. Rather than channels into the market, intermediary institutions become sites in which the permanently unemployed forge meaningful work(-seeking) lives, professional communities, and work-related forms of adult masculinity. Even discouraging ‘decent work seekers’ from accepting ‘indecent work’, brokers do not uncritically channel the unemployed into employment. Still shaped by apartheid’s long legacy of racialised labour governance, formalised work-seeking nevertheless organise and govern the urban poor in ways that entrench gendered, racist, and heterosexist understandings of what constitutes ‘proper work’ and ‘proper working men’.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper studies how land brokers, construction syndicates, and other middlemen produce a speculative market in land and become actors in a regime of localised land governance aimed at managing dispossession and based on political patronage.

Paper long abstract

Real estate booms have dominated neoliberal South Asia’s development trajectory. In India, the land market underlying real estate growth has placed middlemen as unique development actors. The politics of development—the distribution of its damages and benefits—are controlled by these informal land brokers and suppliers of materials and labour, often organised through localised political patronage. Through fieldwork in peri-urban villages in West Bengal, India, this paper studies land brokers and syndicates as agents facilitating a speculative land market and enabling real estate development in an environment of opaque, chaotic, and unlawful transactions. It asks what political forces organise these intermediaries and why. By studying a market requiring several extra-economic interventions and comparing findings to similar studies across South Asia, this paper highlights how the politics and trajectories of neoliberal development involve informal actors organised through the local party society. Real estate remains attractive for private capital because organised intermediaries allow it to bypass regulations and control uncertainties to successfully commodify otherwise volatile land. Rather than retreating from the market, the state devolves into a localised governance of development when political parties capture informal actors and bureaucratic channels of the land market. Thus, capital taps into possible windfalls of uncertain markets and the party benefits from controlling the few profitable livelihoods arising from such development. Such an inquiry can produce new understandings of the politics of neoliberal development in South Asia, the changing nature of the state in the developing world, and the internal dynamics of land markets.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper analyses the work and perspectives of volunteers in the daily implementation of a cash transfer programme in the Colombian Putumayo. It focuses on their role as organisers of programme meetings. It argues that, by performing this role, they engage in logistical and political brokerage.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyses the work and perspectives of volunteers who were critical to implement Familias en Acción (Families in Action), Colombia's primary conditional cash transfer (CCT) programme, in the town of Mocoa in the Colombian Putumayo. These volunteers were female leaders of CCT recipients known as 'madres líderes' (leader mothers). Leaders were simultaneously active or former CCT recipients and unpaid frontline workers of this state programme for poverty reduction. Based on ethnographic research conducted over one year in Mocoa from 2022 to 2023, the paper focuses on the role of leaders as organisers of 'encuentros' (encounters), namely periodic meetings between recipients and local government officials. It argues that, by organising encounters, leaders engaged in forms of logistical and political brokerage. Through the logistics of bringing together various actors, infrastructures, and activities needed for these events, they aimed at fostering emotional bonds and personalising relationships with groups of recipients. This relational work also had a political aspect. Leaders faced difficulties in gaining recognition, compensation, and financial support for their voluntary labour. To address their precarious positions, they enabled and navigated the interaction between the programme and electoral politics—prohibited by the national government. By doing so, they secured desired resources to include in encounters, received gestures of compensation for their labour, and accessed spaces to build relationships with potential powerholders within the town government—creating bonds they expected to rely on to cope with their lack of recognition in the programme. Both types of brokerage constituted leaders' lived experience of grassroots policy implementation.