School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses

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Author: Burgess, Bethia Jean × Start date: 2021 × Subject: Self-determination ×

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    Justice in Crisis: Pursuing community-based liberation in Eastern Myanmar, its borderlands, and beyond
    Burgess, Bethia Jean ( 2023-09)
    This thesis explores the gaps between community aspirations for justice and the possibilities offered through international law, development, and justice interventions in Eastern Myanmar and its borderlands. Grounded in collaborative and reciprocal community-engaged principles, this research was undertaken with contributions from ethnic community-based organisations (CBOs) in Eastern Myanmar and Northern Thailand. Qualitative interviews (21) and small group discussions (SGDs) (9) with 51 individuals of Karen, Karenni, and Ta’ang CBOs explored questions of identity, justice, and development from the perspective of CBOs, activists, and the communities that they worked for. I applied a grounded theory approach to the thematic analysis of transcribed interviews and SGDs, holding discussions with contributing CBOs before finalising two key findings. Firstly, this research found that activists and CBOs approached community justice needs through the specificity and groundedness of injustices that they experienced, and by exploring a holistic and interconnected conceptualisation of how justice could be achieved. Secondly, while international responses were found to enable justice through the mobilisation of resources towards, and the legitimation of, justice demands, they could also hinder justice by approaching it from an abstracted and universal perspective and through siloed approaches. These findings are explored in this thesis through a detailed discussion of how activists and CBOs conceptualise injustice, the opportunities and limitations they experience in invoking international frameworks to address these injustices, and the potential for their own conceptions of justice to form part of a liberatory justice that is not simply of local relevance but could transform the coloniality of current hegemonic approaches. By engaging with anticolonial and critical theories through a post-disciplinary approach, I seek to explain the ‘justice gap’ that emerges between activist/CBO-based justice goals and the opportunities for justice that are enabled by international frameworks of human rights, international development, and transitional justice. This thesis builds upon critical, community-engaged research on ethnicity, development, and justice in Myanmar, while bringing in wider theoretical critiques of the coloniality of international frameworks that can offer explanations for the ‘justice gap’ discussed above. In doing so, I consider how these frameworks might actively and passively uphold the very structures of violence against which CBOs work. In identifying such limitations in advancing struggles for justice, this thesis offers a compelling argument for supporting community-driven futures in Myanmar and beyond.