Extractivism unleashed: Environmental justice and resistance in Myanmar

• First comparative analysis of 53 extractive conflict cases in Myanmar using EJAtlas. • Livelihood loss, cultural erosion, and displacement are highly prevalent across cases. • Over half of the cases reveal mental-health and stress-related impacts of extractive projects. • Around 17–30% of cases involve repression, criminalisation, or violence against defenders. • In multiple cases, communities mobilise through ritual, prayers, and relational worldviews as resistance. This paper examines extractivist impacts and local resistance in Myanmar from an epistemic and emotional perspective. It explores how these projects erode communities’ capacities to know, perceive, and feel their environments, producing not only material destruction but also affective and epistemic dispossession. Focusing on Myanmar, the research situates these dynamics within a broader history of colonial and militarised resource exploitation, where protracted conflict has both overshadowed and intensified local socio-environmental grievances. The analysis draws on protest narratives, songs, testimonies, community media, and a systematic mapping of 53 socio-ecological conflict cases from the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas). Findings reveal that land and water grabbing, displacement, livelihood loss, and ecological violence inflict enduring ecological and psychosocial wounds. Extractivism erases relational ways of living with nature, rupturing place-based identities and deepening experiences of ecological grief. Multiple cases demonstrate collective ritual praying as a form of resistance that embeds relational worldviews and enables collective healing, transforming grief into solidarity and refusal. Our study also finds cosmologies, sacred values, and Indigenous identities are used to mobilise alternative worldviews in which land, mountains and rivers are understood as living kin. By centring relational ties to ecosystems within resistance, the study reframes Myanmar’s struggles as part of broader global movements for environmental justice and contributes to decolonial understandings of extractive frontiers.