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.


 

My research focuses on the political geographies of borderlands and frontiers as spaces at the margins of state and non-state forms of power and rule. More specifically, I have developed a longstanding interest in the politics inherent in the processes and practices of governing weapons and weapon-human entanglements. I research how such processes and practices, the systems and networks of objects, actions, and logics that are involved in the use and control of violence are both produced by and productive of space.

A main research thread I have focused on up to now has delved into the question of how the means of violence (understood as networked human-non-human ensembles) are governed in borderlands and frontiers at the edge of the state, as environments where public authority over violence is constantly being contested, upheld, and reshaped. I have been particularly interested in how flows of weapons and the assemblages of the means of violence produce particular social and spatial relations in frontiers at the borderlands.

The border-worlds at the interfaces of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, China, India, and Bangladesh, with their resource frontiers and contested territories, have been a primary area of inquiry. Given the variety of armed formations operating here and the central role of longstanding politico-armed movements, these interests have brought me to study the politics of arms control, disarmament, and (re)armament of rebel formations and militias.

My research activities have drawn mostly on fieldwork methods (in primis ethnography, qualitative interviews, and storytelling/story-listening) which at times I had to perform in collaboration with translators (as my eagerness to learn Ba-ma-za-ga as a medium language far exceeds my actual language skills).

I am a postdoctoral researcher in Political Geography at the University of Bologna. I am also affiliated with Security Praxis and the ERIS (Emerging Research on International Security) research group based at Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, as well as with MyERN (Myanmar Europe Research Network) and T.WAI at the University of Turin. I am also engaged in research outside academia. If you are interested in, or would like to exchange on, any of the above or the below please do get in touch through my email: buscemi.francesco@hotmail.it