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Relief as Resistance: (Re)Emergent Humanitarianism in Post-Coup Myanmar

Aung Naing

Independent researcher, Myanmar

Tamas Wells

Myanmar Research Network Coordinator, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne

Abstract

This chapter presents the findings of a recent survey of civil society organisations (CSOs) in Myanmar that examines how new forms of accountability and cooperation can lead to highly efficient emergent relief. In the wake of the 2021 coup, Myanmar has become a failed state in which the current military authorities cannot fulfil the usual criteria of statehood. Besides a politicisation of humanitarianism, in effect sidelining all attempts to claim neutrality, the coup has also created a vacuum that multiple actors, including numerous local CSOs, have begun to fill, delivering a wide range of public services in ways that are rooted in popular claims to legitimacy. The results are expressions of resistance to military rule that are less about overt opposition and more about localised, alternative islands of state-building. This chapter urges a reorientation of humanitarian policy towards Myanmar that embraces the complexity, ambiguity and latent potential of emergent, volunteer welfare groups as not only a means of delivering aid in ways that avoid entanglement and dependency on coup-controlled processes, but also enable and promote active citizenship in local communities, which is itself a critical step towards re-establishing community life and institutional integrity in Myanmar.

***

As discussed in Chapters 11 and 12, citizen organisations in Myanmar have a rich history of subversive humanitarianism. However, the impact of the recent COVID-19 pandemic and the 2021 military coup have reshaped the role of civil society organisations (CSOs)¹ in important ways. The response to COVID-19 enhanced the role of CSOs in providing services, yet public health restrictions limited their scope and voice. The frustration generated during the COVID-19 restrictions then served as emotional and organisational fuel for the widespread resistance to the 2021 military coup. In this context of state repression and vast humanitarian need, the work of local CSOs has become crucial. At the same time, the general collapse of state administrative and welfare mechanisms—due to both the Civil Disobedience Movement and the degradative effects of the military government’s mismanagement—has resulted in a vacuum of statehood.

In this chapter we draw on a December 2021 survey of Myanmar CSOs and interviews with CSO leaders in January 2022. We argue that, through providing welfare, CSOs are demonstrating a particular form of resistance. They are embodying a viable, legitimate and internally sustainable alternative to the current military government’s claims to statehood. CSOs are enacting their own form of statehood through providing consistent humanitarian assistance, using data and informal networks to ensure appropriate responses, and operating in ways that provide accountability to both international and local donors.

The first section of the chapter explores literature on failed states and humanitarianism and argues that post-coup Myanmar can be categorised as a failed state. The second section then explores the broader political dilemmas of humanitarian responses, including in Myanmar in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the military coup. Drawing on our research with Myanmar CSOs, the third section explores three specific challenges for CSOs in Myanmar: safety and security, navigating operational space and finance. We conclude that, in the context of a failing Myanmar state in which civil society groups are taking on some of the functions of statehood, donor agencies need to take steps towards deeper engagement with CSOs.

Failed states and humanitarianism

One critical consideration of the embedded politics of humanitarianism relates to the appraisal of the state, for example, whether the state is viewed as weak and in need of assistance, support and legitimacy; whether the state is seen as malign and undeserving of assistance, thus justifying explicit solidarity with those considered its victims; or whether the state has essentially failed to the point of irrelevance. In the coming sections, we explore how different assumptions of the state—as failed or not, as malign or not—are crucial to the ways in which external agencies respond to humanitarian crises.

The definition and, indeed, the validity of the concept of failed states is both varied and contested (see Bøås & Jennings 2007). At what point is a fragile state considered to have failed or collapsed (Ware 2016)? Indices of fragile states express state capacity as a continuum (Fund for Peace 2021) measured in relation to the state’s capacity and will to undertake key economic, social, political and security-related functions. Rotberg (2002) locates state failure beyond issues of territorial control, seeing it as the failure to deliver political goods. That failure in turn undermines legitimacy:

Nation-states fail because they are convulsed by internal violence and can no longer deliver positive political goods to their inhabitants. Their governments lose legitimacy, and the very nature of the particular nation-state itself becomes illegitimate in the eyes and in the hearts of a growing plurality of its citizens. (Rotberg 2004, 1)

Frequently, illegitimacy fuels a cycle of oppressive policies, such that those in control of state apparatus abandon any attempt to implement policies to benefit citizens, and instead enact policies that exhibit:

favour [towards] powerful elites, few budget controls and rampant corruption, cronyism and patronage arrangements that limit opportunity and siphon off public assets for private gain, and usually a combination of punitive use of existing regulations and exemptions to benefit the favoured few. (Brinkerhoff 2005, 6)

The exacerbation of inequalities coupled with a failure to deliver essential public goods and services contributes to perceptions of impotence and illegitimacy that, in turn, impact on wider security issues, for if citizens have little hope that ‘their wellbeing will improve’ they are more likely to ‘engage in crime or be recruited into insurgency’ (Brinkerhoff 2005, 6).

Reaching the conclusion that the state has failed, and enacting humanitarian aid based on that assumption, is itself inherently political. The residual state apparatus may contest the failed-state diagnosis, which serves to both codify the lack of legitimacy and further undermine it. If the state has essentially failed in terms of legitimacy, delivery of political goods and exercise of territorial control, the possibility emerges of humanitarian spaces that do not refer to state authority. The humanitarian mandate may be justified in several ways when working from the presumption of a failed state.²

First, if the state cannot provide for its citizens, then humanitarians must. Second, the failure of the state justifies the consequences of such an intervention, at least in the short term, while also serving to further undermine the legitimacy of the state. Third, the failure of the state—particularly where there is a collapse of legitimacy or, worse, evidence of abuse of citizens by the organs of the state—justifies a humanitarian approach that not only ignores any residual claims to authority by the state but also seeks to engage with other actors whose claims to legitimacy may be, albeit, perhaps, at a more local level, more robust, credible and constructive.

The relative absence of the state does not mean the absence of authority, merely that, in the fractured spaces of failed states, alternative power loci emerge, ranging from local armed militia, ethnic or religious affiliated organisations, localised welfare groups and the private sector (Coyne 2006), operating with various degrees of competition or cooperation. The acknowledgement of such alternative loci of statehood may, to some extent, circumvent the problematic aspects of the failed-state concept, and position humanitarian action in spaces where micro-level components of community, governance and legitimacy may be located—something that we explore later in this chapter in the context of Myanmar. This turns the attention of humanitarianism to the more ‘nested games’ (Coyne 2006, 341), where legitimacy, trust, authority, welfare, public services, political goods, territorial control and aspirations are located in a variety of actors, institutions and powerbrokers. It also signals an acceptance of the process of ‘fundamental change and reordering’, which, despite the significant degree of ‘intrusion and social engineering’ involved, is seen as ‘both appropriate and reasonable, indeed, as reflecting the only realistic chance of a stable future’ (Duffield 2005, 16).

Myanmar: A failed state?

To what extent does both external evidence and measure of public opinion support the categorisation of Myanmar as a failed state? Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and military coup of 2021, Myanmar was already ranked twenty-third in the list of fragile states (Fund for Peace 2021), and the only country in Southeast Asia listed in the top 40. Pandemic control measures for COVID-19 severely impacted an already fragile economy: research conducted towards the end of 2020 indicated that over 80 per cent of households had seen significant reductions in their household income since the start of that year (World Bank 2020), and economic forecasting projects that poverty rates are likely to double from 24 per cent (recorded in 2017) to 48 per cent. At the beginning of 2021, efforts were underway to commence a national vaccination program, as well as to slowly reopen business, education and travel sectors.

However, the coup d’état of 1 February 2021, and subsequent rapid spiral of violence, has instead wrought havoc on an already fragile society and economy, and, while the most recent data is yet to be published, is likely to have resulted in a negative trend in most, if not all, of the indicators of state fragility. Since the coup, leading personnel from the previously elected civilian government have either been incarcerated or are in hiding (or, in some cases, killed), removing their effective control over key levers of power. The subsequently formed Committee Representing the People’s Hluttaw and the broader-based National Unity Government (NUG) have attracted widespread popular support. However, despite the establishment of a government structure and the performance of certain key functions, including international relations, the NUG, at the time of writing, is not able to deliver necessary public goods and services to a significant extent across Myanmar.

The economic conditions have meanwhile deteriorated further. A survey conducted only two months after the coup found that the majority (79 per cent) of households reported a reduction of household income since the military coup; 25 per cent had not worked at all, while another 31 per cent had worked fewer hours since 1 February.³ These trends continued to worsen in the year after the coup: monthly panel survey data conducted by local CSO organisations in mainly urban areas demonstrated increased rates of economic vulnerability, food insecurity and problem debt.⁴

In this context, the claims to legitimacy of the junta-led State Administrative Council (SAC) do not reach the standard of a functioning state.⁵ In addition to the lack of public legitimacy, as evidenced by sustained, widespread protest and resistance, the Civil Disobedience Movement—whereby huge numbers of civil servants from key government departments such as health, education, transport and some administration departments effectively remain on strike—has severely constrained the SAC’s ability to deliver public goods.⁶ Moreover, the delivery of public goods, as described earlier, relates not only to services such as healthcare and education, but also to justice, security and the rule of law. The rapid and widespread militarisation of the administrative and justice systems⁷ has enabled the process of detention, trial, sentencing and, in some cases, extrajudicial killing of political opponents to take place relatively unchecked, which points not simply to a failure to provide such public goods, but a deliberate subversion of them. Beyond this, a mixture of strikes and mismanagement has resulted in a virtual collapse of the banking system and widespread economic inactivity in virtually every sector, effectively stalling any potential post-COVID-19 economic recovery. Armed militia groups, formed in response to attacks on protesters, and arbitrary detentions, have also significantly reduced the SAC’s ability to provide security and order, even to senior officials. Added to this, various of the ethnic armed organisations (EAOs) in Myanmar have sought to use the political crisis to regain, consolidate or expand territorial control, sometimes in support of the aims of the NUG, but in many cases as a unilateral strategy.

Aside from more than 1 million internally displaced persons, mainly those fleeing military actions in central, eastern and western Myanmar, huge urban to rural remigration has placed increased burdens on already precarious rural livelihoods. The tentative steps that had been taken to establish social welfare systems, such as cash transfers to pregnant women, have now been destroyed, which, together with the collapse of the healthcare system, means that there are no wider safety nets for the poorest of the poor. Military actions to date have shown little concern for social welfare, with reports of elderly residents being left to burn alive in villages targeted by military reprisals.

In short: Myanmar is less of a failed state than an act of deliberate and wanton destruction—a torching of any residual state institutions that, in the past, had served the public. The consequences of this are beginning to be seen as an emerging catastrophe that could be described as humanitarian, except for its political origins. The targeting of charitable organisations, as well as restrictions on international humanitarian aid has, in conditions reminiscent of the early days of post-Nargis relief, left the majority of the burden of food and material assistance to informal networks, which have continued to flourish despite harassment by military and military-aligned forces.

The picture that emerges from the current crisis is one of multiple coping strategies formed either to resist, evade or undermine military control, or, in some cases, to survive within it. One consequence is the re-emergence, or, in some cases, the re-energising, of the numerous self-organisational capacities that were present for decades under previous military rule. Such capacities result in a prolific array of initiatives: for some EAOs, a consolidation of territorial control to include judiciary and administrative functions;⁸ in areas not controlled by EAOs, the formation of local militia to provide protection against arrest and harassment by security forces under the SAC; volunteer groups providing healthcare; volunteer groups providing food aid and relief to local populations affected by the economic downturn; and numerous ingenious cooperative arrangements to maintain commerce in the absence of a functioning financial system and a cash crisis.⁹ Even in some non-EAO areas, a coalescing of protection, provision of relief and enacting of basic administration provision by volunteer groups has resulted in what looks like micro-government. The argument here is that, if these three strands are taken together (consolidation of functions in EAO areas, the emergence of localised areas of micro-government and the multiple expressions of cooperation that enable the ongoing delivery of public goods outside of SAC control), then it follows that the state and state-building are located in multiple zones, representing an emergent, rather than centrally directed, phenomenon (South 2021).

The challenge to this approach is that, if legitimacy is established in multiple, diverse and often competing spheres, how can a single, legitimate state re-emerge? Brinkerhoff (2005, 5) rightly highlights the importance of re-establishing legitimacy. However, of critical importance are the foundations of that legitimacy:

expanding participation and inclusiveness, reducing inequities, creating accountability, combating corruption and introducing contestability (elections) … re-establishment of the rule of law … institutional design … as well as civil society development. (Brinkerhoff 2005, 5)

At the heart of re-establishing legitimacy is trust. As Coyne (2006, 351) points out: ‘Trust-enhancing institutions differ in complexity and magnitude. Some, such as reputation, may be effective in smaller groups while others … may be effective at facilitating interaction on a larger scale.’ Our argument here is that, in the context of a failed state, particularly where the illegitimacy is rooted in oppression or abuse, re-establishing the legitimacy of the state requires more than a re-establishment of security and adequate public service delivery. Core notions of citizenship, governance and accountability are required, and the rebuilding of these may need to take place in sites where alternative, constructive expressions of those are possible. This points to the increased importance of locally grounded forms of legitimacy, such as CSOs, which, in the absence of a legitimate state, represent a key modality for the distribution of political goods to the Myanmar population. In the next section, we describe the dilemmas faced by funding organisations in supporting humanitarian responses in a failed state such as Myanmar.

Humanitarian response in Myanmar

In responding to both the humanitarian and political crisis in Myanmar, various international actors, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) (Chongkittavorn 2022) have proposed the establishment of ‘humanitarian corridors’ as a key element of assistance, although the nature of such a space has not been defined. Beyond this, the United Nations and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have sought to continue the provision of humanitarian assistance. However, given the already restricted nature of their activities, requiring substantial cooperation with government authorities, the continuance of such activities has, to a significant degree, been contingent on continued cooperation with government actors under the control of the military regime. This raises several issues and concerns. First, a coherent argument has been made by both activists and legal scholars that ongoing cooperation with state organs under the control of the military serves to enhance and entrench the legitimacy of what has been widely determined as an unlawful seizure of power (AMCDP 2021). Second, past experience of relief distribution in Myanmar where cooperation with military-controlled authorities was required featured a litany of obstacles, corruption and unnecessary restrictions that, in many cases, significantly hampered relief efforts (South et al. 2011). Third, the proposals by ASEAN and others argue that, for the people of Myanmar, the main priority is relief, and that the ‘people’ are by and large unconcerned with whether relief serves to legitimise a particular authority. This argument rests on an assumption that aid is viewed as neutral: an assumption that is, to a significant degree, unfounded. As Weiss (1999,12) succinctly puts it: ‘The assumption that politics and humanitarianism can be entirely separated, as if they were parts of two different and self-contained worlds, is a fiction.’

Weiss (1999, 4) proposes a ‘political spectrum’ of humanitarians with regard to their operating principles, placing at one end the ‘classicists’ who seek to avoid ‘taking sides’ and approach consent as ‘sine qua non’ whereby the needs of the poor override any political concerns. At the other end of the spectrum, the ‘solidarists’ explicitly take the side of ‘selected victims’, eschew any attempts at impartiality and are prepared to override sovereignty ‘as-necessary’. In between these extremes are ‘minimalists’ and ‘maximalists’ who tend either towards the classicist or solidarists position. While this is to some extent useful, the application of such a spectrum has a tendency towards labelling and blaming, rather than a constructive appraisal of how diverse aspects of humanitarian aid, even where politics are explicitly eschewed, nonetheless inevitably express and embody some form of politics.

The political nature of humanitarianism is determined from several angles: first, while the humanitarian agency may not possess an explicit political agenda, the practical delivery of aid is frequently enmeshed in complex processes of negotiations and permissions with either state or non-state actors. This means that decisions to deliver aid in ways that require cooperation and, to some degree, dependence on one or more group’s authority are inherently political, as they legitimise the claims of that group.¹⁰

Second, while humanitarianism may purport to be non-political, this obscures the significance of the driving forces and motivations of humanitarianism, which may go beyond the desire to alleviate ‘life-threatening suffering wherever it may be found’ to more prosaic concerns regarding organisational priorities: ‘the desire to continue operations and retain staff—or as a form of legitimization politics—showing the public that an agency is doing good work’ (Hilhorst & Jansen 2010, 1121–2). Third, and critically for the claims and proposals of this chapter, humanitarian action does, by its modus operandi, serve to strengthen or erode capacities and systems, and, in doing so, effects changes on the wider political landscape.

The local partner conundrum

The standard narratives of development organisations emphasise the need to engage with local populations, institutions and partners, although the sincerity and efficacy of such engagement has been repeatedly challenged (see Smillie 2001; Gingerich & Cohen 2015). As Gizelis and Kosek (2005, 367) observes, ‘pre-existing local institutions, structures and traditions are usually ignored in failing states, and NGOs fail to capitalize on opportunities to incorporate locals into relief work’. In considering humanitarian action in situations of conflict and failing states, the engagement of local populations and institutions is critical, not simply to enable more effective relief and development,¹¹ but also as part of the process of enabling the development and maintenance of governance functions.

However, engagement with local populations, actors and institutions in ways beyond simply using them as conduits for distribution will inevitably lead to the kind of political choices discussed earlier. In contexts in which the legitimacy of those claiming to be the state is contested or rejected, the maintenance of neutrality may be challenging and indeed unhelpful. In engaging with local organisations and populations, it is recognised that:

local organizations are highly partisan, often for good reason. Justice may be as high on their agenda as relief … and [they] are therefore likely to have opinions that exist in tension with basic humanitarian principles. (Smillie 2001, 187–8).

Beyond that, where humanitarian needs are inseparable from basic protection against either a state or another non-state party, relief becomes intertwined with protection (South et al. 2011). Survival strategies enacted by local populations, and enabled by local organisations, thus encompass a range of activities, many of which represent a form of resistance enacted in self-preservation.

Aside from more formalised political or ethnic affiliation, which represents a more tangible source of partisanship, Tim Forsyth cautions against ‘misplacing social or economic activities into pre-defined narratives of resistance’ (Forsyth 2009, 274). Attempts at a neat framing of humanitarianism may unravel in contexts where survival strategies require protection as well as material support, and where humanitarian aid and human rights are inseparable.

To summarise: the complexities of humanitarianism, particularly in contexts where the state is failing or collapsing—and particularly where the failing state is doing so due to malign intent and actions and not simply incompetence—call for a recognition that any related humanitarian space is inevitably and inherently political. In the advent of the collapse of the state, other actors and institutions become more prominent, and engagement with them is both necessary and advantageous, but also represents a choice in terms of political commitment (Décobert & Wells 2020). This presents agencies with a local partner conundrum. If such engagement is genuine, it will, of necessity, involve the humanitarian agency in the coping strategies of local populations and organisations, and, as such, offer little prospect of maintaining neutrality; further, it will require attention to justice, protection and the strengthening of systems that enable the circulation of material and political goods, even at a local level. The alternatives are either to focus on the strengthening of the displaced failed state, which can claim popular legitimacy but modest efficiency in terms of the delivery of public goods, or strengthening the in-situ failed state, which has little or no popular legitimacy and little or no efficiency in terms of delivery of public goods.

People have essentially chosen to express their citizenship, in relation to governance, in self-organised ways. Large and varied sections of Myanmar’s population, having been denied the representative government based on their vote, have resorted to measures that would establish some form of self-organised system. In other words: ‘If we can’t get the government we want by voting, we’ll just organise it ourselves.’¹² Aside from any value judgements on the competing claims to government, the reality is that this is what people are doing—a key part of everyday survival is self-organisation tactics that seek to evade central authority. The question for humanitarian assistance providers is: to what extent should humanitarian assistance work in tandem with those self-organised groups (and their strategies and tactics), given that they are posited, if not in direct opposition to the SAC, then at least in terms of evasion?

The view from below: Challenges for CSOs and the shrinking humanitarian space

This section presents findings from two sources: 1) a survey conducted in December 2021 of 40 CSOs on their operational status and challenges, and 2) in-depth follow-up interviews conducted with leaders and members of five of these organisations in January 2022. The interviews were conducted by locally recruited researchers in Burmese language.

The existence of self-organised welfare groups in Myanmar has been well documented (Griffiths 2019; McCarthy 2017). The recent decade of political reform saw a flourishing of such groups after decades of suppression by successive military regimes. However, the twin terrors of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2021 coup have served to dramatically redefine and constrain the role and operating space of CSOs in Myanmar.

The COVID-19 pandemic was, in many senses, a double-edged sword. On the one hand, local parahita (social welfare) organisations were at the forefront of the COVID-19 response, mobilising and deploying considerable human and material resources to support ambulance services, quarantine centres, special COVID-19 field hospitals and innovative welfare distribution programs. During the initial period of the COVID-19 pandemic, local organisations in many cases expanded or changed their mandates to respond to COVID-19 restrictions and needs, and, in doing so, large numbers of young people were mobilised as volunteers and donor networks established and strengthened. A generation of CSO leaders developed through this period, with older, established leadership often providing a more hands-off, guiding role.

However, this also resulted in the shift of risk and burden to local organisations, who, in turn, were rarely ‘counted’ in the wider response strategy (Trócaire 2020). While providing the bulk of human and material resources in the COVID-19 pandemic response, local agencies were ignored or sidelined in strategic planning, despite having extensive local knowledge that could have enabled more tailored local responses. Thus, local organisations frequently found themselves with both an enhanced role and responsibility but a diminished voice.

The February 2021 coup further exacerbated this, as local organisations joined protests against the illegitimate seizure of power. All the organising capacity that served the COVID-19 response was now directed towards anti-coup resistance, fuelled by the pre-coup frustrations of being sidelined. This, in turn, made local organisations visible targets for arrest by military authorities, which further diminished the humanitarian space (ICNL 2022). One CSO leader, whose organisation prior to COVID-19 focused more on civic education, described how ‘because of COVID-19, we had to stop everything … we could only restart after the third wave. By then, because of the coup, we could not do as before’ (Interview January 2022).

Despite some degree of expansion during the COVID-19 and post-coup period, many CSOs, particularly more established local NGOs, have faced considerable difficulties. Three major constraints were mentioned in both surveys and in-depth interviews: safety and security, navigating operational space and financial challenges. First, in situations in which, pre-coup, local CSOs were regarded as critical sources of human and material resources in the COVID-19 pandemic response, the vocal and vigorous response of the same CSOs and volunteers in protest against the coup resulted in harassment, arrest and seizure of property by military authorities. Humanitarian acts, including ambulance services and food distribution, were treated as hostile by the military. Previous collaborative networks became sources of vulnerability to infiltration and betrayal, resulting in a shrinking of horizons to ever more local spheres of operation: ‘Our biggest issue now is safety. Now we have to be more careful with our networks. Every action now has to be carefully calculated, because of the risk’ (Interview with staff of local CSO, February 2022).

A second challenge is one of navigating the narrow operational space with regard to dealings with the SAC. Operationally, many aspects of relief, healthcare and education, as well as finance and logistics, require some element of permission or facilitation by administrative bodies. Where these are under the control of the SAC, CSOs face a dilemma: cooperation with SAC-appointed bodies and personnel may enable more effective access to deliver aid but betrays the broader wishes of the very public to whom the aid is intended. Surveys of CSO volunteers and beneficiaries confirmed this: more than 90 per cent agreed strongly with the statement that: ‘Relief organisations should avoid cooperation with SAC.’ Again, 90 per cent of respondents strongly agreed that they would ‘rather starve than accept help from [a] SAC-affiliated group’. Any sign of collaboration with the SAC at the local level risks, at best, undermining the legitimacy of the CSO, and, at worst, putting it in the crosshairs of local People’s Defence Forces. Here, though, organisations use what Scott would call ‘metis’ (Scott 2020): that is, local knowledge and networks that enable them to undertake various civic functions without reference to state instruments and institutions:

We avoid anything directly to do with SAC. With social, religious and other activities, we deal directly with the community, with people we know. In that way we can avoid dealing with SAC people. In these times, you do what you have to do, you avoid what you don’t have to do. (Interview with CSO leader, January 2022)

New registration laws published by the SAC in 2022 required all local NGOs to register or re-register, or face penalties as unlawful associations. Beyond the wider principle of avoiding the SAC for ideological reasons, local CSOs recalled the experiences under the previous military regime in which official registration was further used as a tool of coercion.¹³ Hence, all the organisations surveyed had opted for various forms of evasion, including reforming as underground associations, changing or removing names and office signboards, moving offices, switching to online/virtual operating modes, closing organisational bank accounts and switching to personal ones, or, in a few cases, suspending operations and supporting the activities of other groups. Such tactics come at a cost, particularly where donors prefer, or even require, registration, organisational bank accounts and a more visible, transparent operating presence.

Financial difficulties constitute a final challenge for CSOs. The survey of 40 organisations revealed that three-quarters had lower incomes in December 2021, compared with January 2020, and the median number of volunteers had decreased from 23 to 14. Some organisations had switched focus away from issue-specific advocacy to relief and humanitarian actions, but there was overall a 50 per cent reduction in the scale and scope of activities between January 2020 and December 2021. Along with loss of income and volunteers, the banking crisis (described earlier) also posed difficulties for CSOs, particularly those who operated with funds from institutional donors:

Our biggest problem is banking. We can only withdraw our money from the banks with some brokerage fee, like five per cent or seven per cent. We have to negotiate with the donors for that. There needs to be more ‘give and take’ around the finance issue. (Interview with founder of local CSO, March 2022)

The 2021 coup, combined with the broader impact of COVID-19 responses, has presented new challenges for CSOs. In particular, our field research revealed concerns about maintaining public legitimacy, safety and security, navigating operational space and financial challenges.

Conclusion: New spaces of statehood

We have argued in this chapter that there have been four turns for local CSOs—four transformative moments where responses have enabled a formative change. First, the constraints of COVID-19 enhanced their role while limiting their scope and voice. Second, the momentum and frustration generated during the COVID-19 period served as the emotional and organisational fuel for the massive outburst of resistance to the coup. Third, the subsequent repression of civic life and civil society by the military junta, including the targeting of charitable organisations and shooting and looting of ambulances and clinics, has once again defined the status of parahita welfare as political and therefore subject to arbitrary persecution from the perspective of the junta. Finally, the general collapse of state administrative and welfare mechanisms due to both the Civil Disobedience Movement and the degradative effects of SAC mismanagement has resulted in a vacuum of statehood into which CSOs have stepped.¹⁴ There is ample evidence of not only continued but also expanded operations by myriad, loosely formed voluntary organisations, in which the operations of larger international NGOs and local NGOs have largely stalled. Voluntary associations provide food aid, medical care, education and refugee assistance to the hundreds of thousands displaced by conflict since the coup.

Following these turns, the space in which CSOs operate is not so much defined in terms of direct opposition to the state, but as a substitute for an absent or illegitimate state. This is nothing new. A key strand of the narrative of many of the parahita organisations that emerged under military and later quasi-military rule was self-organisation as legitimacy (Griffiths 2019).

In the post-coup environment, the absence of state provision is framed less in terms of benign neglect and incompetence, and more in terms of the wilful destruction of both the rudimentary welfare apparatus of the state and the emergent welfare organisations that were plugging the gaps. Our point here is that, in the process of providing welfare, CSOs are demonstrating a particular form of resistance: that of embodying a viable, legitimate and internally sustainable alternative to the state’s claims to statehood.

However, statehood is contested by those who lay claim to the right of it by dint of force and by those whose claims are rooted in popular legitimacy and locality. These have different visions and means for development, and, as such, different trajectories and outcomes. Hence, what is important is not simply the role of local knowledge contra the state’s organising power, but that the deployment of different organisational paradigms will result in different forms of development in the contested spaces of the ‘local’. What this does is frame the welfare activities of CSOs, particularly under the current constraints, not simply as desperate attempts to ameliorate tragedy and suffering, or explicit/direct resistance to military rule, but as the implicit claiming of ‘state space’ and the embodiment of elements of statehood (especially the delivery of welfare and essential services). However, contesting such space involves many risks and challenges and requires extraordinary levels of adaptive capacity.

To that end, international cooperation needs to recognise three key principles as it seeks to engage with the process of ending violence and rebuilding society in Myanmar. First, humanitarian aid is not ‘neutral’ or ‘apolitical’; to the contrary, it either explicitly or implicitly contributes to the enabling or constraining of alternative visions of society. Second, the ideal of a single, unitary and reproducible model of society implemented from above should be abandoned in favour of the kind of ‘“bottom-up federalism” that is emerging from the existing and actual local structures and practices of autonomy’ (South 2021, 457). While South refers mainly to EAOs, we would argue here that the same principle applies to more central areas, where CSOs are also carving out small islands of statehood. The third principle is one of commensurate adaptation: if CSOs are adapting their modus operandi to continue to deliver humanitarian aid, then international donors should follow suit. In particular, issues around accountability frameworks being rigidly structured around financial audits rather than operational information should be addressed, and examples are emerging of how this could be implemented in practice, including through volunteers.¹⁵ In practice, this would require humanitarian donors to adopt more flexible approaches, including working with unregistered entities, allowing more creative means of transferring funds, such as the use of informal networks and hundis, and allowing leeway for local groups to address urgent, emergent needs without fear of incurring financial audit sanctions. Also, rather than predominately relying on international NGOs and the UN as financial intermediaries, bilateral donor agencies could enhance the role of large local NGOs as intermediaries who could channel funds to smaller local groups. Local intermediaries are, on the whole, far better placed to navigate the local politics of humanitarian aid in Myanmar than international agencies, as well as being more cost-effective. For this to occur, however, there will need to be significant growth in the operational flexibility and capability of bilateral donors.

In many cases, groups of volunteers are, in a small way, enacting a form of statehood: that is, providing humanitarian assistance in a consistent and transparent way, using data and informal networks to ensure appropriate responses and operating in ways that provide accountability to both international and local donors. In this way, recently displaced slum dwellers, people with disabilities, unemployed migrants and other vulnerable citizens are identified, a form of social contract is enacted and small steps are taken to maintain the essential conditions of life, for a few at least. It behoves the international donor community to consider its own capacity to adapt to the needs of local organisations and support the creation of multiple, alternative spaces of citizenry, from which a new state, or states, can emerge.

References

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