This site works as a platform for (research) ideas, notes, and other stuff that would hope to act as a reminder of the centrality of weapons and weapon assemblages in moulding space and identities.

Think about the “Technosphere”: an offshoot of the biosphere made of complex combinations of physical infrastructural components, technical artefacts, techniques and social assemblages that support and make possible flows of life and death. A strata of the planet configured for example by buildings, electricity grids, cars, railways, excavators, utensils, pens, cell phones, books.

Now think of ammunitions, ships, submarines, fighter jets, radars, conflict rubble, drones, checkpoints, armoured carriers, uniforms, landmines, explosives, or the 1013 million firearms inhabiting the planet (as of 2017) which all compose such layer of the Earth.

How do weapons relate to the environments they are part and parcel of?

How do the materialities, techniques, and logics that constitute weapons reshape the spaces they are inserted into?

How are weapons and weapon-human entanglements governed?

How does the governing of weapons and weapon-human entanglements shape space and viceversa?

What are the political effects of governing weapon-human entanglements? How are identities and spaces codified in the materiality of weaponry, and how does weaponry contribute to make the reproduction of those identities (e.g. racial and ethnonational) and spaces possible?

How are the systems of objects and actions that compose weapons governed? And how do the systems of objects and actions that compose weapons (and the ways these are governed) codify certain ways to kill, injure, maim, govern people and things?

Current – or one might say ‘re-current’ – planetary conjunctures have glaringly illuminated how weapons and cycles of re/armament rest at the core of global forces and tendencies working towards territorialisation, bordering, and a politics of (ethno)nationalism. Amidst such planetary conjunctures, disarmament – understood as a radical demilitarisation of social relations entailing the banning of all the objects, practices, techniques, and logics that configure weapons as technologies codifying violence and control – becomes key to counter such global forces and tendencies. A disarmament that requires planetary planning and praxis to be built from the bottom-up as a way of living and re-thinking lives and worlds.



Far from engaging in such a gigantic endeavour, this site works as a platform for (research) ideas, notes, and other stuff that would hope to act as a reminder of the centrality of weapons and weapon assemblages in moulding space. (Hence also the centrality of disarmament as a praxis to remould space and counter militarisation too.)

To do so, I stick to a (rather limited) engagement with the politics, geographies, and political geographies of weapons and the means of violence in Myanmar. Borrowing from geographers’ studies on the spatial, political, and anthropological limits of power, I take the margins of state authority and rule in Myanmar (and elsewhere...) as sites where the linkages between weapons, (dis)order, and space become particularly visible.

In this sense I wish to draw an analogy between, on the one hand, the centrality of the margins for the reproduction of power and, on the other hand, the centrality of what are often described as Myanmar borderlands and frontiers’ ‘forgotten wars’. Very much active, never-forgotten, remembered and lived with by many, such wars remain central to a global understanding of the geographies of armament and disarmament processes and practices. 

Bio & Research 

A bit of humbleness first, a bite of humble pie foremost. Little of what is here comes from here. A lot of what is here is a jam instead: flickering ideas over lived realities made from crushed interferences onto the frequencies of better-thought, more elegantly-written intellectual endeavours, boiled with sugar and eventually squeezed into the confined space of a virtual jar. A somewhat improvised, swinging collection of reasearch (and) interests that may or may not be workable in relation to each other, at times get stuck, at others thrust.

The main threads of this jam usually wave into the winds blowing onto Myanmar’s borderlands and frontiers at the edge of state authority. Here - ...and elsewhere at the margins too... - i am interested in the geographies of weapons: geographies (materially) inscribed in weapons as technical objects as well as geographies of the governing of weapons and their entanglements with people and the environment.

If I feel like I can say something about this jam it is because of an encounter with a book. It is a day of June when the air of Yangon is soaked with the anticipation and affects of the approaching monsoon. A kind of bright blu in the air matches with the sign towering the storefront of U Htay Aung’s book store on 37th street - “Bagan Book House” it recites. A kind of bright blue that makes the green of the urban jungle he adorns the entrance of his shop with even more lush. As he alternates guitar  and ping-pong moves practice, my nose stumbles upon Ashley South’s “Ethnic Politics in Burma”. The book’s preface takes off with a sentence I value which goes something like: if i can say something about the issues covered by this jam it is first and foremost because the vast majority of those who would be better suited to do so have not done so in writing.