Decolonising Civil War: Warscapes as Relational Conjunctures in Post-Coup Myanmar

This article advances efforts to decolonise the study of civil war by conceptualising warscapes as relational conjunctures. While the warscapes literature emphasises how conflict reshapes local socio-political relations, a conjunctural approach highlights how warscapes emerge from dynamic interrelations between multi-scalar social processes, producing seeming contradictions within local landscapes of war. These intersections also reveal the lasting but uneven legacies of colonialism and postcolonial statebuilding on contemporary civil wars and their spatiality. Applying this framework to post-coup Myanmar, the article challenges two dominant portrayals of the conflict – as binary (‘us against them’) or irretrievably fragmented (‘many against many’) – for being state-centric and for obscuring colonial and postcolonial continuities. Instead, the article provides a conjunctural analysis of southeast Myanmar, which has incubated both democratic revolutionary politics and criminalised economies since the 2021 coup. It links these apparent contradictions to historic social processes that continue to generate tensions within Karen's ethnonationalism.