2/Paper_Jams
Publications
Peer Reviewed
(2022), ‘Blunt’ Biopolitical Rebel Rule: on Weapons and Political Geography at the Edge of the State, Small Wars & Insurgencies 0(0). (Special Issue on politicising the Rebel Governance paradigm)
This article analyzes the ways in which processes of weapons acquisition and armed collectives formation contribute to shape rebel polities – with their populations and attendant political geographies – in frontier spaces. It argues that the acquisition of weapons and the formation of an armed ensemble are shaped by political rationalities and techniques of governing the entanglements between humans and weapons that are diffused throughout society as a whole. Drawing on biopolitical governmentality, I also show that by governing weapons acquisition and the formation of an armed force rebel movements shape the rebel polity’s collective identity and political geographies of ‘vital’ space in frontiers. Harnessing fieldwork-based research to study Ta’ang rebel movements in Myanmar, I find that weapons acquisition and the formation of an armed ensembles have been inflected by govern-mentalities of narcotics eradication and ethnonationality. The article concludes that some forms of rebel rule at the edge of the state in Myanmar can be qualified as ‘blunt’ following work by anthropologist Elliott Prasse-Freeman. That is to say, rebel rule lacking the governmental apparatuses to intensively know and promote life at aggregate scales still operates massifications and divisions of biological populations and political space via the formation and governing of armed ensembles.
(2021), The Art of Arms (Not) Being Governed: Means of Violence and Shifting Territories in the Borderworlds of Myanmar, Geopolitics 0(0).
Predominant approaches in the rebel governance literature have looked at control over the means of violence as a prerogative of rebel-rulers, or armed/non-armed actors, somehow deterministically linked to territory. Here weapons have been understood as either autonomous technical-factors or as analytically invisible objects instrumental to human agencies and interactions aiming to territorial control. This paper challenges understandings of control over the means of violence as a central property radiating outwardly through hierarchically and geographically ordered spatial containers. It argues that the means of violence are relational networks among heterogeneous human-non-human entities – e.g. weapons, stockpiles, militarised architectures, forms, armed individuals/groups – that generate territory. These networks are controlled and stabilised via diffused techniques and rationalities of control. Drawing on the study of Ta’ang areas of Northern Shan State – among the few in Myanmar where well-established rebel movements have experienced official disarmament and later undertook a full-fledged re-armament – I find that controlling the means of violence occurs via turbulent combinations of technical objects, techniques and rationalities that relate to four main domains: narcotics eradication; institutionalisation; ethnonationality; and humanitarian security. Processes and practices through which attempts to control the means of violence are made entail alternative strategies to re-generate spatial organisational control and shape multiple shifting territories. Empirically exploring a highly under-researched case, the paper provides a view of the diffused character of controlling the means of violence and its mutually constitutive relations with territory, while illuminating also the role of weapons, other technical objects, and techniques.
(2021), Ecologies of Dead and Alive Landmines in the Borderlands of Myanmar, Italian Political Science Review (IPSR) 52(2), 217 – 235. (Special Issue on the overlaps between Area Studies and International Relations in the study of politics, security, and conflicts)
This article deals with a question foregrounded by historian Willem van Schendel in his seminal 2002 article ‘Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance’: how do arms, arms flows, and associated regulatory practices reshape the geometries of authority and power in borderlands? The rich transdisciplinary literature on borderlands has fruitfully deployed van Schendel's insights to re-spatialise areas and states but has devoted scant attention to such question. Drawing from ‘new materialist’ scholarship in IR and the concept of scale in political geography, the paper argues that fluid and fractionally coherent combinations of weapons as technical objects that come from somewhere, rationalities, and techniques of arms control reproduce multiple scales of territorial authority and struggles over scaled modes of governing violence in borderlands. Such struggles of scales and about scale constantly reconfigure the territorial arenas of authority on violence at the edge of the state. Based on fieldwork in Ta'ang areas of northern Shan State, Myanmar, the article develops an empirical analysis of encounters between explosive devices/landmines and the subjects and spaces they target. Delving into the processes and practices of ‘making’ and controlling the ‘landmine’, I find that different socio-political orders confront themselves through rationalities, techniques, and practices of humanitarian arms control via which they navigate/jump across scales, forge new ones, or mobilise multi-scalar alliances. Different types of ‘dead’ and ‘alive’ landmines nonetheless defy these attempts at rescaling territorial authority over violence by acting in unforeseen manners at the scale of their own ecologies of violence.
(2019), Armed Political Orders through the Prism of Arms: The Relation between Weapons and Insurgency in Myanmar and Ukraine, Interdisciplinary Political Studies, vol. 5, n. 1, 189-231.
What is the role of arms in insurgency? Despite growing attention to the study of conflict and non-state belligerents, the linkages between weapons and armed conflict have remained under-researched. This paper explores practices and processes of firearms availability and control in insurgencies and argues that these should be understood in mutual relation with the constitution and distribution of authority. The contributions of the article are twofold. By conceptually systematizing recent shifts in the literature on civil wars and elaborating on small arms and light weapons research, it offers a novel heuristic framework to understand weapons-insurgency relations that revolves around the concept of firearms as “meta-resources” and gestures towards non-deterministic approaches. Second, based on empirical analysis conducted through two embedded case studies, it argues that patterns of authority in the insurgencies taken into consideration in Myanmar and Ukraine dialectically emerged with processes of arms acquisition by armed non-state actors.
(2021), La Proliferazione di Armi Leggere nella Resistenza al Tatmadaw in Myanmar, Human Security, vol. 16, 16-19.
Mentre il numero di morti dalla data del golpe si aggira attorno a 1.160 e i conflitti armati si intensificano in tutto il paese, uno spettro aleggia sull’attuale panorama politico del Myanmar: la proliferazione di armi leggere e di piccolo calibro. La questione è emersa in tutta la sua rilevanza e multidimensionalità sin dal 1° febbraio 2021, data in cui il Tatmadaw – le forze armate del Myanmar – ha espanso le sue prerogative di governo oltre i limiti della costituzione (illiberale) che esso stesso aveva disegnato nel 2008. In poco tempo – mentre le persone scendevano nelle strade per protestare contro il Tatmadaw e quest’ultimo reprimeva con la forza – pistole, fucili automatici, munizioni di gomma e non, armi artigianali ad aria compressa, ma anche granate e artiglierie varie si sono diffuse anche nelle zone centrali del paese relativamente meno esposte a settant’anni di conflitti armati nei territori di confine.
(February 2020), Le Transizioni delle Organizzazioni Etniche Armate tra Nazionalismo e Politica Militarizzata in Myanmar. Il Caso delle Insurrezioni Ta’ang (Ethnic Armed Organizations’ Transitions amidst Nationalism and Militarized Politics in Myanmar. The Case of Ta’ang Rebel Movements), RISE, vol. 4, n. 3, 9-13.
Nel caso delle insurrezioni Ta’ang in Myanmar si può intravedere una sorta di ritmo circadiano, cadenzato da picchi di violenza armata organizzata e processi di militarizzazione dell’azione socio-politica, che evidenzia più in generale quello che è l’elemento carsico che caratterizza i conflitti armati nel Paese da ormai sette decenni, fatti di costanti ritorni e rimandi[2]. Cercando di assumere le prospettive da cui questi ritmi si generano, che cosa possiamo trarre dalle innumerevoli transizioni che diverse organizzazioni politico-armate delle minoranze etniche del Myanmar hanno sperimentato nella loro storia, al di là di facili commenti che dipingono esse e i loro conflitti come l’unico scoglio alla democratizzazione del Paese? Un occhio induttivo alle singolarità caratterizzanti le transizioni che hanno portato all’attuale conflitto tra Naypyidaw e il PSLF/TNLA può forse fornire qualche elemento per rispondere a questa domanda.
Chapters in Edited Volumes
with Alessandra Russo (2022), The State Before Criminal Firearms, in Allum, F. and Gilmour, S. eds., Routledge Handbook of Transnational Organized Crime, Ch. 24, 424-437.
This chapter explores the links between forms of organised crime and forms of statutory authority in the ambit of processes and practices of governing firearms and armed violence. It looks at the connections between state authorities and forms of organised crime in highly contested contexts characterised by armed conflict. The chapter discusses the situations of governing firearms and armed violence outside of “war zones.” It discusses the processes of the regulation and criminalisation of arms and armed violence production and trade. The chapter aims to illustrate the main research areas in which topics about processes and practices of governing the means of violence have been framed and studied. It focuses on the continuities and overlaps between forms of statutory and so-called criminal actors, which allows us to suggest the limitations inherent in maintaining the study of firearms and the means of violence along categories of commerce, crime, conflict and post-conflict.
with Nils Duquet, Ekaterina Golovko, and Eric Woods (2018), Illicit firearms proliferation in the EU periphery: the case of Ukraine, in: Duquet, N. ed., Triggering Terror. Illicit Gun Markets and Firearms Acquisition of Terrorist Networks in Europe, Brussels: Flemish Peace Institute, 261-280.
This chapter analyses the main characteristics of Ukraine’s illicit firearms market and the dynamics shaping it. The study is based on the collection and analysis of publicly available seizure data and an analysis of secondary literature. In the following sections we will analyse more specifically the sources of illicit firearms proliferation, the various trafficking routes and dynamics, and the various actors involved in these activities.
Others
(2021), Arms Proliferation amid Heterogeneous Resistance in Myanmar, Trends Research, available at https://trendsresearch.org/insight/arms-proliferation-amid-heterogeneous-resistance-in-myanmar/
(March 2021), Soup Not Coup, But What Boils in the Coup’s Soup?, New Mandala, https://www.newmandala.org/soup-not-coup-but-what-boils-in-the-coups-soup/
(February 2021), La (Dé)militarisation et le Désarmement Comme Politique de Transformation au Myanmar, Le Grand Continent, https://legrandcontinent.eu/fr/2021/02/11/la-demilitarisation-et-le-desarmement-comme-politique-de-transformation-au-myanmar/ (in Italian: https://legrandcontinent.eu/it/2021/02/10/demilitarizzazione-e-disarmo-come-politica-trasformativa-in-myanmar/)
(January 2020), Missing Pieces in a Weapons Seizure in Northern Shan State, Security Praxis, https://securitypraxis.eu/weapons-seizure-shan-state/
(January 2020), From the Borderlands to the Centre: Land Travelling in Myanmar, Security Praxis, https://securitypraxis.eu/myanmar-photo-gallery/
(8 March 2019), What comes first, disarmament or peace? Insights from fieldwork in Myanmar, Security Praxis, https://securitypraxis.eu/arms-conflict-link-myanmar/
with Golovko, K. (May 2018), Politics, Conflict and Criminality: Firearms Proliferation in Ukraine, https://securitypraxis.eu/firearms-ukraine/
(15 March 2018), Mutually Constitutive State-building Processes in the Borderlands of Myanmar, Security Praxis, https://securitypraxis.eu/myanmar-borderlands/
(19 February 2018), Colonel Mathieu in the Borderlands of Myanmar, TeaCircle Oxford, https://teacircleoxford.com/?s=buscemi
(2017), Circulation Must Be Defended: Illicit Arms Proliferation and Flows in the Western Balkans, Master Thesis, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies: Pisa.