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.