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What would we learn about rebel governance and civil wars if we includedwomen and took their labour, participation and experience of wars seriously?Much literature in this field is implicitly as well as explicitly gendered, privilegingmale experiences and knowledge. This Special Issue therefore aims to broadenour theoretical, conceptual and empirical discussion by exploring the role ofwomen’s labour and participation in underwriting, restricting or legitimisingrebel governance and civil wars. It will do so by tracing women’s gendered workin and experience of rebel groups across different civil war settings, and in post-war settlements and processes.

Women’s everyday work is critical to revolutionary projects yet is often written out of war stories. This article draws on a participatory photography project with rural women in Myanmar to show how, in the face of extensive violence, women’s productive and social reproductive labour sustains both individual households and revolutionary projects writ-large. We highlight the everyday acts of love and labour that generate affective and productive ties to rural landscapes, enabling people to endure violence and imagine a better future. Our work shows how making meaningful life has become both more difficult and more urgent during the Myanmar Spring Revolution.

In the image below, Mi Mi ties together her experiences of seeing the Myanmar military burn homes, cooking by candlelight, and struggling to grow crops and make ends meet during a period of climate and economic crisis, all with her baby on her back. Her story raises broader questions about how we understand the intersections of gender, land and revolution in Myanmar and other militarized landscapes. In this paper, we employ collaborative and mixed methodologies to map violence and resistance on the land and in the body, starting from Mi Mi’s story to advance a feminist counter-topography of war. We borrow the notion of counter-topography from geographer Cindy Katz, who poses counter-topography as an analytical and political project that examines the intersecting effects and material consequences of large-scale processes in a particular place. Our analysis brings together diverse datasets to illustrate how Myanmar’s contemporary conflict is shaped by spatial patterns and intergenerational histories of violence and endured through embodied relations to land and kin.

This chapter shows how the concept of human security entails a claim of universalism by interrogating who the "human" in human security is. We explore this assumption by drawing on the work of critical and feminist scholars to illustrate that, instead, human beings are differently located subjects of security based on their identity (race, gender, religion and so on).

This article explores the gendered dynamics of revolutionary movements through a focus on women’s bodies as tools of resistance and protest. In the Myanmar Spring Revolution, gendered relations of power articulate with military authority to engender both women’s activism and military responses. To maintain power, the Myanmar military have sought to regulate women’s behaviour – and quell the protest – through attention to women’s bodies, sexuality, and reproductive potential. In response, women activists have mobilised against both state control and the violation of women’s bodies in imaginative and transgressive ways, using their bodies as well as gendered artefacts to subvert patriarchal and military norms. This analysis shows how women’s bodies constitute both the material object of protest – in the virtual and physical spheres – and the subject of resistance, aiming to challenge gendered logics. It means that the gendered body must be taken seriously in studies on revolutions and protests. The integral yet historically overlooked role of women in Myanmar’s revolutionary movements necessitates a gender-conscious analytical lens to fully comprehend the transformative potential and the power dynamics of such upheavals.

This article explores the political space of the border through the experiences of women activists from Myanmar, for whom the borderlands in Thailand have provided refuge as well as a conducive environment for political mobilization. At the same time, the border renders refugee activists insecure and precarious. Drawing on life history interviews, our analysis expands conceptualizations of the border as a dynamic political space by illustrating its dual capacity to both facilitate and constrain the political agency of refugee women from Myanmar. In particular, the spatial and temporal fluidity and in-betweenness of the border is shown to foster both repression and resistance. Exploring the character and salience of the border as a space for activism over time, we demonstrate how the political space of the border is relational, constituted in interaction with other political spaces, such as politics and governance in Myanmar, transnational activist networks, and the politics of international aid

Between 2011 and 2021, political reforms and renewed peace efforts significantly reduced violence in many of Myanmar’s conflict-affected regions. Despite this, people living in these areas did not agree that they enjoyed peace; rather, this period is described as a continuation of the war’s many injustices, marked by discrimination, marginalization, and fear. This chapter argues that a relational analysis of peace can enable us to make sense of this gap between drastically different assessments of peace and conflict. The analysis draws on focus group discussions, interviews, and participant observation with local civilians, civil society activists, and members of non-state armed groups conducted in 2019 in two regions, Kayah and Mon States. A relational perspective uncovers the fact that the fundamental logics of key conflict relationships, between the Myanmar state and ethnic minority groups and communities, have not been transformed by the peace process but instead manifest themselves in new ways, whereby armed violence has been replaced by other forms of domination, underpinned by inequality, non-recognition, and distrust. Exploring these relational dynamics enables us to pinpoint areas and issues that prevent the emergence of a sustainable and legitimate peace, and demonstrate the importance of relational aspects for people’s experiences of everyday peace.

Putting insights from feminist political economy into conversation with the scholarship on legal identity, this article explores the use and effects of military marriages in reproducing the Kachin revolution. I argue that the organisation of weddings reproduces the revolution in both material and legal ways by creating new legal and political subjects with loyalties and responsibilities towards Kachin authorities. I suggest that the public nature of the weddings creates bonds of allegiance, expectations regarding the performance of particular gendered roles for men and women, and feelings of obligation towards Kachin authorities. These practices also stem from efforts by the KIO to encourage childbirth; although marriages across clan-lines are sanctioned, weddings outside the Kachin community as less acceptable to a leadership invested in reproducing a particular kind of Kachin citizen. This allows me to illustrate how the conferring of legal identity does not rely on documents alone, and turns our attention to how the practice of marriage ceremonies and their effects on everyday married life is generative of legal identity. This in turn shapes the organisation of daily lives in ways that both promote the continuance of the armed revolution and bind people to the nation-in-making.

Gender inequalities have persisted across macro-political changes in Myanmar. The decade of reforms provided more opportunities for women, but the 2021 military coup reinstated an almost exclusively male-dominated decision-making structure in the country. While Myanmar is home to numerous ethnic groups with diverse cultures, norms and traditions, the work of women activists and scholars has revealed widespread patterns of discrimination against women. Notably, this reality contrasts sharply with a popular official rhetoric about Burmese women’s ‘inherent equality’ with men – a narrative that has arguably done more to bolster the legitimacy of Myanmar’s governments than to improve women’s lives. This chapter provides an analysis of change and continuity in terms of both opportunities and challenges for realising women’s equality in Myanmar. Taking the situation of women during military rule before 2011 as a starting point, the analysis next moves on to exploring women’s experiences of the transition and their attempts at leveraging political openings for gender equality under the NLD government. We then explore the effects of the 2021 military coup on women, before concluding with a discussion of future challenges and opportunities for women’s rights in Myanmar.

It is well established that women’s sexual and reproductive health (SRHR) is negatively affected by war. While global health research often emphasises infrastructure and systematic factors as key impediments to women’s SRHR in war and postwar contexts, reports from different armed conflicts indicate that women’s reproduction may be controlled both by state and other armed actors, limiting women’s choices and access to maternal and reproductive health care even when these are available. In addition, it is important to examine and trace disparities in sexual reproductive health access and uptake within different types of wars, recognising gendered differences in war and postwar contexts. Adding feminist perspectives on war to global health research explanations of how war affects women's sexual and reproductive health might then contribute to further understanding the complexity of the different gendered effects war and armed conflicts have on women’s sexual and reproductive health.