https://weaponscapes.cargo.site weaponscapes Thu, 29 Sep 2022 09:18:44 +0000 https://weaponscapes.cargo.site en https://weaponscapes.cargo.site/Home Sun, 06 Feb 2022 10:40:15 +0000 weaponscapes https://weaponscapes.cargo.site/Home /WEAPON/SCAPES/ weapons | b/order/lands | space | https://weaponscapes.cargo.site/About Sun, 06 Feb 2022 10:40:15 +0000 weaponscapes https://weaponscapes.cargo.site/About 0/About /WEAPON/SCAPES/ weapons | b/order/lands | space | https://weaponscapes.cargo.site/About-copy Thu, 29 Sep 2022 09:18:44 +0000 weaponscapes https://weaponscapes.cargo.site/About-copy About /WEAPON/SCAPES/ weapons | b/order/lands | space | Telluric Geographies of the Means of Violence at the Margins in Myanmar [and elsewhere...] Francesco Buscemi 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 millions of firearms inhabiting the planet which all compose such layer of the Earth. How do weapons and war-related technologies relate to the environments/ecologies they are part and parcel of? How do the materialities, techniques, and logics that constitute war-related materials reshape the spaces they are inserted or built 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, military abolitionism and disarmament – understood as a radical demilitarisation of social relations entailing the abolition of all the objects, practices, techniques, and logics that configure weapons as technologies codifying violence and control – become key to counter such global forces and tendencies. A miiltary abolitionism and disarmament stance 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. Dialoguing with 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.  https://weaponscapes.cargo.site/1-Jamming Sun, 06 Feb 2022 10:40:16 +0000 weaponscapes https://weaponscapes.cargo.site/1-Jamming 1/Jamming https://weaponscapes.cargo.site/Bio-Research-Interests Sun, 06 Feb 2022 10:40:16 +0000 weaponscapes https://weaponscapes.cargo.site/Bio-Research-Interests 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.   https://weaponscapes.cargo.site/Bio-Research-Bis Mon, 07 Feb 2022 20:50:04 +0000 weaponscapes https://weaponscapes.cargo.site/Bio-Research-Bis 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 also engaged in research outside academia and 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 or francesco.buscemi@unibo.it https://weaponscapes.cargo.site/Title-2 Sun, 06 Feb 2022 10:40:17 +0000 weaponscapes https://weaponscapes.cargo.site/Title-2 2/Paper_Jams https://weaponscapes.cargo.site/Page-2 Sun, 06 Feb 2022 10:40:18 +0000 weaponscapes https://weaponscapes.cargo.site/Page-2 Publications Monograph (2025), Arms Politics. Becoming and Being a Weapon in the Borderlands of Myanmar, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Arms Politics tells the story of the ceasefire, disarmament, and rearmament of the Ta'ang movement in Myanmar's Shan State through an analysis of the formation of the Palaung State Liberation Front/Ta'ang National Liberation Army (PSLF/TNLA). With a focus on the circulation of weapons through the post-1991 ceasefire, disarmament, and rearmament years, it explores how "becoming and being" an armed force leads to the "becoming and being" of a rebel polity. The governance of arms and weaponry by rebel movements such as the PSLF/TNLA shapes historically and spatially complex relationships among leadership, rank-and-file, civilians, and civil society groups. It is through the acquisition of weapons and the governing of armed collectives that rebel movements reproduce and shape the collective identity of their polity and its political geography in a bio/geo-political way. Against the backdrop of the world's longest ongoing armed conflict, Arms Politics shows how the processes and practices of governing weapons shape social and spatial relations of rule at the edges of state authority. Peer Reviewed Articles (2025),  The Political Geographies of Community in Warscapes, Geoforum 164, 104349. This article talks about the condition of people living in warscapes, i.e. times and spaces of war in which the landscapes of the everyday are characterised by widespread violence, volatility, and insecurity. It argues that the political subjectivity of people living in warscapes is – in part – shaped by how the multiple political orders present in a place of war configure the political community and its territory by managing military violence. In this sense, the paper contributes to previous research in political geography that has provided a spatial reading of the rich debate on living with/in war developed across anthropology, international relations, and peace and conflict studies. Without discarding the importance of other intertwined dimensions, such as agency, gender and sexism, or localised dynamics of war, the analysis refocuses the geographical thread of this debate towards the linkage between body, place, and territory as the space of the political community. To do so, the article draws from Roberto Esposito’s work on community and immunity to conceptualise the role of violence and space in producing political communities as delineated groups of beings sharing some individual properties in common. Bringing this conceptual insight into empirical focus through fieldwork methods and the case of the wars in Karenni state, Myanmar, the article shows how paradigms and practices of violence produce the territory of the political community and, in so doing, produce also forms of human life considered disposable and/or expendable/extractable in warscapes. (2025), with Proto, M.  On the Natural Border: a Bio-Geo-Political Reading, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 50, e70009 This article engages in a critical analysis of the concept of the natural border. It highlights its inherently biopolitical nature by exploring how it intersects with biology, history and geography. In the last decades, critical border studies have deeply questioned the naturality of borders. As a consequence, the concept could sound today as nothing more than the relict of late nineteenth-century positivist and descriptive physical geography. However, discourses on natural borders are not as dusty as one may think: the idea of the natural border has been consistently exploited as part of new right-wing populist narratives, all the more so in a political scenario in which the reclaiming of territorial sovereignty has become a main pillar of populist discourse. While critical approaches have developed a biopolitical perspective on bordering processes, we argue that the ontology of the natural border needs to be further investigated. By tuning into the debate on Friedrich Ratzel and the biopolitical nature of his work, we investigate early twentieth-century border theories developed by Italian geographers. Ultimately, through the under-researched case of Italian geographical thought, the paper demonstrates how natural borders are conceived, and how they work, as a biopolitical dispositif. (2024),  Powers of the Gun: on Violence, Frontier, and Community, Geopolitics 30(2), 613-640 Since the mid-1990s, the Free Burma Rangers (FBR) – a self-defined ‘multi-ethnic humanitarian movement’ operating in Myanmar, Iraq, Syria, and South Sudan – has supported and trained rebel movements and civil society organisations to create spaces of relief and rescue in war zones at the frontiers of their polities. Central to the FBR’s logic and praxis is the use and governing of weapons as military means in order to ‘immunise’ communities of the oppressed from violence. Aside from their politically disputed character, this article takes the activities of the FBR as an entry point to ask: how are the relations between weapons and humans governed in war frontiers? And how does the management of military means reproduce different forms of political community with their political space? Situating these questions in political geography’s literature on frontiers, the article brings in dialogue Roberto Esposito’s analysis on the relationship between violence and (political/impolitical) community with critical approaches on weapons in security studies to show how violence, frontier, and community stand in a co-constitutive relation. Rather than looking at violence and military means as an instrument for the territorialisation of an ideological-political project at the frontier, I analyse the frontier as a politico-military device consubstantial to a political community with its biological body and political space. Drawing from fieldwork methods, I argue that the governing of human-firearms relations constitutes the political community and the human subjectivities part of it by producing frontiers as zones of distinction and encounter between the civilised and the ‘not yet’. The paper contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it empirically substantiates the co-constitutive rather than instrumental relation between violence and the frontier. Second, it shows how the immunitary apparatuses that govern the encounters between humans and weapons, in shaping the political community, shape also ‘the dehumanisation of Man’s human Others’. Third, zooming onto the life experiences of activists taking part to FBR and resistance forces, it differentiates between the political and impolitical forms of community produced by managing violence. (2024), with Proto, M.  Telluric Geographies of the Means of Violence. On Alterity, Weapons, and Space at the Margins, Political Geography 109, 103046 This article provides a critical reading of the literatures on spaces at the margins of different polities and state/non-state forms of authority in political geography asking how infrastructures of violence are governed. In this ambit, weapons and military means have been poorly defined and conceptualised, while the ways they are actually governed (beyond a mostly instrumentalist perspective), as well as the effects this govern-mentality activity generates for the reproduction of (dis)orders at the margins, have not been directly investigated. Drawing from studies on biopolitical governmentality, and Roberto Esposito's conceptualization of the immunitary apparatus in particular, we explore how relations of alterity, as well as attendant political spaces, are terraformed through violence and infrastructures of governing weapons and military means. Our approach is attentive to the role of materiality and non-human elements in shaping socio-spatial relations but it highlights also how there exists a close link between (1) weapons and armed humans, (2) space, and (3) identity/alterity which is articulated via the act of governing infrastructures of violence. Building upon empirical insights from Myanmar's borderlands and frontiers, the paper shows that weapons and war-making are governed through infrastructures made of technical objects codifying violence materially, techniques of managing human-non-human entanglements, and rationalities. Conducting the conduct of violence contributes to reproduce the political space at the margins and to construct identity/alterity categories founded on the identification of less-than-human forms of life. (2022), ‘Blunt’ Biopolitical Rebel Rule: on Weapons and Political Geography at the Edge of the State, Small Wars & Insurgencies 34(1), 81-112. (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 28(1), 282-309. 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 Volumeswith Maguire, M. (2024),  Understanding the Logics of Post-coup Resistance in Myanmar, in Jaquet, C. ed., Defiance, civil resistance and experiences of violence under military rule in Myanmar, Bangkok: Institut de Recherche sur l'Asie du Sud-Est Contemporaine. This chapter investigates the socio-political processes that legitimise armed resistance and that underpin consent for it in the aftermath of the 1 February 2021 coup in Myanmar. It looks at the logic that reproduces violence and the ways in which such logic shapes non-violent resistance practices. (2023), Ecologies of “Dead” and “Alive” Landmines in the Borderlands of Myanmar, in D’Amato, S., Dian, M. and Russo, A. (ed.s), International Relations and Area Studies, Springer, Ch.8, 129-149. The chapter focuses on the political ecologies of landmines in the borderlands of Myanmar, particularly how weapons reshape geometries of authority and power. It critiques existing substantivist and instrumentalist frameworks for understanding weapons in borderlands and introduces a new materialist approach. The analysis is based on empirical case studies and ethnographic research, highlighting the complex interactions between human and non-human entities in the regulation and use of landmines. The chapter argues that weapon assemblages, stabilized through technical properties and control practices, produce and reproduce scales of territorial authority. It also explores how different actors, including armed groups, humanitarian organizations, and local communities, navigate these complex dynamics, illustrating the intricate and often contradictory ways in which landmines are perceived and regulated. (2022), Weapons and Ethnonational Geographies in the Borderlands: The case of the Ta’ang Rebel Movements in Myanmar, in Gabusi, G. and Neironi, R. eds., Myanmar After the Coup. Resistance, Resilience, and Re-Invention, Torino: Turin World Affairs Institute, Ch. 5, 82-96. How is ethnonationalism, with its attendant political geographies, reproduced and re-perpetuated via the creation of armed forces in Myanmar? 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 (2026), Shae Frydenlund, Nicole T. Venker, Matthew Walton, Aye Lei Tun, Francesco Buscemi, Elliott Prasse-Freeman (2026), Book review forum on ‘Rights Refused: Grassroots Activism and State Violence in Myanmar, Stanford: Stanford University Press, Political Geography, 103479 (2024), Crimes in Archival Form: Human Rights, Fact Production, and Myanmar by Ken MacLean, Pacific Affairs 97(3). (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. https://weaponscapes.cargo.site/Title-3 Sun, 06 Feb 2022 10:40:19 +0000 weaponscapes https://weaponscapes.cargo.site/Title-3 3/Space_Jams (a.k.a wanna-be futures of past research) https://weaponscapes.cargo.site/Page-3 Sun, 06 Feb 2022 10:40:20 +0000 weaponscapes https://weaponscapes.cargo.site/Page-3 Becoming and Being a Weapon in the Borderlands of Myanmar (Wanna-be) Book Project I am working to transform my PhD dissertation into an academic book tentatively entitled “Becoming and Being a Weapon: Means of Violence and Geographies of Rule in the Borderlands of Myanmar”. A first draft is currently under revision with a university press house. Since decolonisation the borderlands of Myanmar have experienced various frontierisation and territorialisation projects and moments accompanied by intense cycles of militarisation. Drawing on intensive ethnographic research, Becoming and Being a Weapon argues that to better understand the fragmented, contingent, and overlapping political orders and geographies of rule at the putative margins of the state one needs to consider the ways that weapons and armed ensembles made of human-non-human dimensions are assembled and governed. Detailing the processes of armament, disarmament, and re-armament that have characterised Ta’ang areas of Shan State, the book tells the stories of weapons and armed assemblages embedded in the broader landscapes of rebellion of these Asian borderlands. Combining studies on governmentality with new materialist thought, Becoming and Being a Weapon presents a novel perspective that illuminates the constant (un)making of political geographies of rule at the edge of the state by analysing the reproduction of places, scales, and territories in the borderlands. The wanna-be book project aims to foreground two aspects: First, the ways in which processes and practices of governing the means of violence are inflected into political rationalities, techniques, and materials. Second the ways in which governing the entanglements between weapons and humans links and contributes to the shaping of individual and collective identities with their attendant political spaces.