Environmental activism and authoritarianism in Myanmar: interrogating assemblages across three political epochs

After a decade of semi-democracy, the 2021 coup returned much of Myanmar to military rule. This development provides an opportunity to understand the (re-)configuration of environmental activism assemblages across three distinct political epochs. Under the pre-2011 military junta, rhizomic environmental activism assemblages, characterised by ideologies of resistance under conditions of military rule and resource extraction, territorialised in remote ethnic minority borderlands. During the reformist interregnum, new scalar centralised assemblages territorialised in urban centres, under neo-corporatist institutional engagement and economic diversification. The assemblages deterritorialised because of the coup and territorialised into smaller-scale assemblages, driven by the exteriority of heightened state surveillance, civil conflict and unconstrained natural resource extraction. We argue that under particularly repressive conditions of exteriority – including Myanmar’s post-coup era – evolving ideological interiority in some environmental activism assemblages contributes to violence being seen as a necessary expressive constituent for achieving environmental justice.