Based on ethnographic research conducted in early 2019 along a ‘corridor’ of the Asia Highway 1 (AH1) in Southeast Myanmar part of the EWEC (East West Economic Corridor), this blog post reflects on a presentation given at the 15th International Burma Studies Conference 2023 hosted by the Myanmar-Institut and the University of Zurich, writes Dominique Dillabough-Lefebvre

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Somewhat serendipitously, a month after I had begun fieldwork I found myself working alongside environmental and political groups who had been documenting complaints and issues around the Asia Highway construction. While my long-term focus lay in studying the groups which lived further to the North and who continued to resist the central government, my friendship with the activists who were later to bring me to these northern ‘Rebel Strongholds’ led me to spend several months travelling the length of this road alongside them, splitting my time between filtering through project documentation and speaking to local farmers who lived along the planned road. As a researcher working with a local community-based organisation, I was tasked with reporting on local grievances surrounding a large road expansion project, a stretch of partially uncompleted road between the town of Myawaddy – situated at the most economically important border crossing between Thailand and Myanmar – and the town of Hpa-An, the capital of Myanmar’s Southeastern Karen State. This brief blogpost, instead of detailing the specific grievances of local farmers along the road, is aimed to shed light on how those who interact with these institutions come to understand the functioning of such mechanisms through their interactions with project documentation, bureaucratic procedures and in their broader daily lives.

This brief blogpost, which will later be elaborated in a full academic paper, addresses the question of how a coalition of farmers, activists, civil society groups, and investigative journalists came into conflict with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) over the construction of the Asia Highway 1, a large infrastructural project and’ economic corridor due to cross Southeast Asia. It focuses in particular on a yet unfinished area of the highway which transects Southeastern Myanmar’s Karen State, an area home to one of the world’s longest ongoing civil wars. In doing so, it documents land dispossession and the displacement of social value through the framework of institutional forgetting and ignorance. It examines – through the lens of those investigating local complaints and project compliance – how the economistic institutional logics of international financial institutions like the ADB value ignorance as an organisational resource. Here, ignorance is categorised under the rubrics of both strategic ignorance – in other words willful forgetting and the formation of tactical alibis – as well as the practice of ‘structural ignorance’, a process in which the structures of institutions prioritise the naturalisation of ignorance within their functioning. Despite attempts at engagement with local populations, complex projects structures and obscured bonds between institutional and business actors have led to the Asia Development Bank inadvertently funding local militias while the Burmese military has been generously compensated for structures on their land while local residents express resentment over inadequate compensation for construction on their land. Legacies of land grabbing – and their the processes of expropriation as it occurred in a distinct ways in Myanmar, has meant that IFIs attempting to apply similar approaches employed in other Southeast Asian countries often end up as mere box-ticking exercises. The Myanmar military state had entrenched laws which gave them ultimate control of all land, ignoring customary tenure and rights of use, and land was seized and multiple times by the military, all realities ignored by IFIs in their terms of compensation and basic explanations of how land is owned, seized and managed. Optimism for prospects for peace on the part of IFIs, who have seemingly deliberately conflated tentative limited ceasefires with meaningful lasting peace has sadly led to a situation where they have contributed to aiding pro-junta groups and laying infrastructure now used to resupply junta positions in post-coup Myanmar..

By infrastructure the blogpost here refers to two kinds of infrastructure – both the physical infrastructures – development projects which attempt to evade knowledge – and infrastructure in the bureaucratic sense. Both are deeply involved in knowledge production, and therefore its inverse, the intentional production of ignorance and indifference. Roads move people and ideas, and in the case of war zones, they move soldiers and weapons at far greater speeds. As the Asian Development Bank envisioned a just-in-time delivery system for Southeast Asia – bringing 7-Eleven outlets across Myanmar and transporting manufactured goods across the continent – its bureaucracy had to willfully ignore the impact of such a road and its finances in an area of contestation.

Business functions through “the threat and exercise of systemic prevention and restriction – that is, through what Veblen called strategic sabotage” (Dutkiewicz, P, Bichler S, Nitzan 2013). While the economist Thorstein Veblen discussed sabotage primarily through the conscious regulation of output – or “conscientious withdrawal of efficiency”- on the part of industrialists to improve profits, I believe a similar logic sabotage occurs in terms of knowledge practice. In this case, the ADB and the Burmese state can avoid responsibility for land dispossession, compensation and affiliation with actors continuing to be involved in conflict through what I describe as institutional ‘alibis’ and ‘foot dragging’. Such sabotage allows these actors to pass responsibility onto other actors.

In my extended paper, I will examine the drivers and methods involved in such logics of “sabotage” and “ignorance” in relation to the road building project. My ethnographic analysis will focus on two main areas: first, how community organizations have helped villagers seek fair compensation and hold international financial institutions accountable; and second, how these institutions operate in contexts where entities such as the Myanmar government, known for their military governance and history of violence towards civilians, administer local loans and oversee projects. How can those who have seized land repeatedly be considered as responsible partners to safeguard international projects. How do international financial institutions, especially when projects must go through “at all costs” manage such risks? What are the impacts on local populations? In forthcoming publications I hope to explore such themes, especially as they connect with the wider political economy of Myanmar and ongoing armed struggles.

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*Banner photo taken from Unsplash.

*The views expressed in the blog are those of the authors alone. They do not reflect the position of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, nor that of the London School of Economics and Political Science.