Part 1

• Livelihood Precarity of Mon Resettled Community: Territory, Climate Change, and Security during Political Rupture in Myanmar Thang Sorn Poine Nyan Corridor

  This study examines the multifaceted security threats and compounding vulnerabilities facing a long-term displaced Mon community in the Myanmar-Thailand border. Situated within a complex governance landscape, the community navigates overlapping jurisdictions and resource competition between the state, the New Mon State Party (NMSP), and the Karen National Union (KNU). Following the emergence of a “ceasefire economy”, local forest landscapes have been converted into rubber plantation, shifting land tenure from communal access to restrictive individual property. This transition has fundamentally undermined the community’s traditional subsistence and environmental resilience. Drawing on empirical insights from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2023, 2024, and 2026, this paper explores the dialectical relationship between unsolved political conflict and environmental degradation. It analyzes how territorial fragmentation and restricted mobility intensify livelihood precarity and security during the current political rupture. By applying a political economy and intersectionality framework, the research illustrates how climate change and land-use shifts are not merely ecological phenomena but are weaponized or exacerbated by ongoing political contestation. The findings reveal that the intersection of territorial limitations and dwindling natural resources has forced displaced populations into high-risk areas, where they face lethal security threats from non-state actors despite nominal ceasefire agreements. The study highlights the urgent necessity for coordinated governance among local authorities to mitigate security risks regarding mobility and resource access. Ultimately, this research provides a comprehensive narrative of context-specific vulnerability, arguing that human security in conflict-affected borderlands cannot be achieved without addressing the underlying political economy of land and territorial control.

• Tourism, Conservation, Vulnerability, and Territorial Contestation in Wakatobi, Indonesia Ashry Sallatu University of Amsterdam

  In numerous Southeast Asian coastal regions, the climate crisis intensifies challenges faced by local communities, compounded by contemporary political dynamics that govern access to marine and terrestrial resources. This study, grounded in ethnographic research conducted in Wakatobi, Indonesia, critically examines the interplay between marine conservation efforts, tourism development, and territorial disputes in shaping climate vulnerability.

  Wakatobi, recognized as both a premier marine tourism destination and a significant conservation area at national, regional, and global levels, perceives its marine resources—such as fish and coral reefs—as ecological assets that require protection while also serving as economic resources predominantly exploited by the diving industry. Within this framework, conservation transcends a merely technical environmental agenda and becomes a politically charged territorial endeavor. State-led marine protection initiatives, along with private sector-driven conservation efforts, have reconfigured the relationships among local communities, dive operators, conservation stakeholders, and the marine ecosystem. However, sustainability initiatives often propagate inequitable access to marine spaces, livelihood opportunities, and governance over resource management.

  The research posits that the vulnerability of coastal communities arises not solely from environmental degradation but also from inequitable social dynamics that shape the interplay between conservation efforts and economic survival mechanisms. Actors within coastal communities, including those in the dive tourism sector and local fishers, encounter intersecting pressures: environmental degradation manifesting as coral reef destruction, impositions of conservation-related restrictions, and economic uncertainties tied to tourism fluctuations. These compounding pressures elicit daily tensions and conflicts over spatial legitimacy and resource access.

  By elucidating participants’ lived experiences in the marine tourism economy, this presentation seeks to enrich the discourse in Southeast Asia on the unintended consequences of top-down environmental interventions, which may exacerbate coastal community vulnerabilities rather than mitigate them. Furthermore, it offers an ethnographic synthesis of the intricate relationships among environmental governance, livelihood precarity, and climate risk within the quotidian realities of maritime communities in Southeast Asia.

• The Green Cloak of Repression: Lawfare, Nickel Mining, and the Making of Hegemony in North Maluku, Indonesia Agung Wardana Faculty of Law, Universitas Gadjah Mada

  Indonesia’s energy transition has turned nickel-rich regions into a contested terrain. The state and the extractive industry invoke a climate emergency to justify nickel extraction for electric-vehicle batteries, reframing a resource grab as an ecological imperative. Communities that resist, particularly indigenous peoples defending their livelihoods from mining encroachment, face a calculated response: criminalisation through the criminal justice system. This paper examines how lawfare — the mobilisation of law and legal institutions for political ends — operates in North Maluku against anti-mining activists. It argues that lawfare is not merely coercive repression of dissent. It is a technology of power: a mechanism for managing civil society and manufacturing hegemony under the cover of climate urgency. The climate emergency, in this reading, does not suspend politics, but it intensifies them, providing new legitimacy for old patterns of extraction and silencing.

• Supra Sacrifice Zones: Rare Earth Mining in Myanmar and Its Transborder Impacts on the Mekong River Puangchon Unchanam Vienna University of Economics and Business

  Mekong River is often revered as the lifeblood of Southeast Asia, a vital lifeline for over 60 million people and the economic and cultural cornerstone of the region. Like major rivers around the globe, the Mekong is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, including severe floods and droughts. The impacts of climate change, as this paper shows, are not mitigated by, but worsened through rare earth extraction.Examining rare earth mining in Myanmar and its transborder contamination of the Mekong, this paper reveals several political and economic conditions that enable the transformation of Myanmar’s war-torn, lawless, and yet resource-rich regions into sacrifice zones. These include not only primary conditions such as capital accumulation and the ideological justification for resource extraction, but also the non-state actors and geopolitics that remain underexplored in the studies of sacrifice zones. Although the conversion of local lands into sacrifice zones initially occurs in specific and intended sites, mining waste by its nature is rarely contained within these zones. Once it is dumped into waterways, the waste transgresses the zones, extending its environmental harms into neighboring countries, and affecting millions of unintended victims, both human and non-human. This paper argues that this transnational phenomenon demonstrates what can be conceptualized as supra sacrifice zones—multiple, layered, and transborder sites that are disproportionally expropriated and contaminated for the sake of a broader economy. Given the destructive impacts of rare earth mining on the Mekong and climate change vulnerabilities in the region, this paper also exposes a key contradiction of the green transition. While promoting a global shift toward sustainable and environmentally friendly technologies, the green transition largely serves the abundant zones of the Global North and heavily relies on non-renewable, extractivist, and ecologically destructive industries and the exploitation of marginalized communities in the Global South.

Part 2

• The Heat Across the River: Indigenous Karen Experiences of Climate and Conflict on the Thailand-Myanmar Border Justine Chambers Danish Institute for International Studies

  Like other parts of the world, temperatures have been rising in consecutive years for Indigenous Karen communities living along the Myanmar-Thai river-border. Extended periods of summer are exacerbated by suffocating humidity levels and late rains which leave the land and the rice fields malnourished. While quantitative data on temperature changes alerts us to what many refer to as a global climate ‘crisis’, numbers don’t adequately capture how people understand and relate to these temperatures. As other scholars have shown, climate change can be understood as a cultural and relational phenonmenon, with distinctive spatialities and temporalities. This paper offers an ethnographic exploration of localised understandings of climate change and heat from the perspective of a community displaced by conflict on the Thailand-Myanmar border. The subsistence lifestyles of indigenous Karen communities in the mountainous Salween Peace Park are at once profoundly vulnerable to climate change, as they are to a brutal and violent conflict, which has seen high levels of displacement due to airstrikes and shellings in recent years. Amongst these communities, heat figures both as a threat to customary subsistence lifestyles, but also a manifestation of the intensifying conflict, which has come to define their lives.

• Everyday Territorial Resistance: Case Study of Communities in Thaw Thi Taw Oo Saw Yan Naing Chiang Mai University

  This paper examines how villagers in Taw Oo, particularly communities within the Thaw Thi Taw Oo Indigenous Park, enact everyday forms of territorial resistance following the Myanmar military’s forced relocations. These practices emerge through villagers’ daily struggles for survival amid violent conflict, livelihood precarity, the reworking of land relations, and long-standing sentiments attached to land. Situating these dynamics within the broader context of pre-coup frontier military-state territorialization and forced displacement, as well as post-coup grassroots conservation and ongoing territorial resistance led by communities in Thaw Thi Taw Oo Indigenous Park and the Karen National Union (KNU), the paper argues that grassroots efforts to reconfigure land relations cannot be understood solely as claims to either individual or communal land rights. Rather, in this contested territorial landscape, such efforts are better understood as “everyday territorial resistance,” a concept adapted from Scott’s (1985) notion of “everyday forms of resistance.” Using the case study of two geographically distinct communities within Thaw Thi Taw Oo Indigenous Park, this chapter explores how grassroots everyday territorial resistance is experienced and enacted before and after the coup.

• Extractive Imperatives of State-like Resistance Actors in Myanmar: A Continuum for Survival and State-making Thitsar Myat Thet Nyan Corridor

  The proposed paper looks at the extractivism of State-like revolutionary armed authorities in Myanmar. Using a Critical Political Economy perspective, the paper analyses how global capitalist structures and resource-frontier making shape the reproduction of extractive state-making by revolutionary authorities. It argues that revolutionary state-making cannot be disentangled from extractive practices within a global capitalist system driven by the need to sustain accumulation through the continual search for cheap resources. This cheapening nature of capitalist accumulations is well benefited by the ‘distress selling of the nature’ of most of the armed resistance groups in Myanmar in desperate need of financing the revolutionary state making. Processes of accumulation, resource cheapening, and state-making through extraction thus operate within the same global capitalist circuit. Among ethnic armed groups, this paper focuses primarily on those operating in Karenni State, also known as Kayah State. Armed resistance groups in Karenni, together with other political actors—including former members of civil society organisations and ethnic political parties that have long resisted Myanmar’s centralised authority and military rule—collectively formed a governing council in 2022 amid intensified armed struggle against the Myanmar military. Based on this theoretical foundation, I conceptualise wartime revolutionary extractive imperative as the structurally induced reliance on resource extraction by revolutionary state-like actors during armed struggle and contested state formation. This imperative arises from conditions of war, non-recognition, and integration into global capitalist circuits, rather than from ideological commitment to extractivism.

Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

Keywords

• Indonesia
• Mekong
• Myanmar
• Southeast Asia
• TTIP
• Wakatobi
• capitalist accumulations
• climate change
• climate mitigation
• conflict
• energy transition
• environmental degradation
• everyday territorial resistance
• extractive imperatives
• extractivism
• heat
• land relations
• lawfare
• livelihood
• nickel
• rare earth
• sacrifice zone
• security
• state-making
• tourism
• vulnerability