Description

This article examines current debates for and against Humanitarian Mine Action (HMA) in Burma/Myanmar. The analysis, based on interviews with key local, national, and international actors involved in HMA, reveals why so many of them regard the mapping and removal of “nuisance” (i.e. non-strategic) mines to pose a security threat to the peace process. These same debates also shed light on the growing role risk management approaches now take in Burma/Myanmar as a response to decades of authoritarian misrule by a succession of military regimes. The land mines, although buried in the ground, actively unsettle such good governance initiatives and the neoliberal development projects to which they are often linked, most often by re-territorializing military, political, economic, and environmental authority in overlapping and conflicting ways at multiple scales. The findings reveal why HMA actors resist labeling the crisis mine contamination poses to civilians a “crisis” that requires immediate humanitarian action.

Ken MacLean, an Assistant Professor of International Development and Social Change at Clark University, has more than two decades of experience working with NGOs on issues related to human rights violations, conflict-induced displacement, extractive industries, and territorial disputes across South East Asia. He is currently preparing a book on the impact NGO archival practices have upon human rights “fact” production related to Burma/Myanmar. He has published widely on Vietnam in addition to Burma/Myanmar.