Paper short abstract

How does the seeming “crisis” in the international liberal order shape historic movements to resist military rule? This project examines global politics from the standpoint of Myanmar’s Spring Revolution, foregrounding the role of brokers who mediate liberalism’s internal contradictions.

Paper long abstract

This paper introduces Governing the Revolution, a four-year project that explores the “crisis” of the liberal international order from the standpoint of the post-2021 movement against military rule in Myanmar, known as the Spring Revolution. It develops a conjunctural approach to this topic, asking: (1) How do shifts in the international order reverberate across center-periphery relations at multiple scales? (2) How do revolutionary actors in Myanmar, who have long had an ambivalent relationship with internationalism, navigate these shifts in relation to the uneven and localized geographies of the ongoing conflict?

Based on early-stage interviews and participant observation, this paper foregrounds the purchase of approaching these questions through brokers who respond to and mediate the contradictions of the liberal international order – as well as their localized manifestations – in day-to-day life. Brokerage is central to a critical, multi-sited ethnographic approach to crises and contradictions.

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.

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.

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.

Paper short abstract

This paper applies theories of bureaucratic agency to consider the embodied knowledge - the mētis - that local officials brought to their work implementing Vietnam’s Zero-COVID policy.

Paper long abstract

Despite local officials fulfilling a crucial mediatory role between socialist state and citizenry in Vietnam, the socially-embedded practical knowledge of these low-level bureaucrats remains understudied. Informed by ethnographic data collected in pandemic-afflicted Ho Chi Minh City across 18 months between 2021 and 2023, this paper elucidates the informal know-how, skills, and values that Vietnamese officials relied on to implement the government’s strict Zero-COVID policy in local communities.

The paper responds to appeals for ethnographic enquiries focused on the embodied knowledge relied upon by local officials to implement top-down plans. By revealing how these low-level officials - or bureaucratic brokers as I term them - improvise workable compromises in day-to-day regulation situations, the paper problematises theorisations of top-down planning that dichotomise officials and subalterns. The ethnography reveals how, in practice, collusion between officials and local populations can lead to bureaucratic schemes being adapted, thereby increasing their acceptability and, at times, their longevity.

Adapting the concept of mētis popularised by James Scott (1998) to differentiate between embodied knowledge and formal knowledge, the paper introduces the concept of có lý có tình (being right but reasonable) to express what the ethnographic evidence suggests are important qualities of effective Vietnamese officials. In developing this concept, the paper shows how these officials not only seek to prosecute the state’s agenda in a manner acceptable to both citizens and their bureaucratic masters but are also able to shape that agenda in ways thus far underacknowledged in the literature on bureaucratic planning and state simplification.

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.

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.