Highland autonomy is no longer about the keeping of lowland states at bay, or resisting their encroachment into the hills. It is instead a relational autonomy, maintained through the management of political ties and flows of capital and people into the hills. In the highland Wa Region of Myanmar, on the Chinese border, the 30,000-strong United Wa State Army has engaged in this careful dance for over 30 years, maintaining its autonomy from Myanmar and China. In this seminar, Dr Andrew Ong will examine the process of region-making in Wa Region: how its political visions are incongruous with the language of the modern state-form, how it makes and breaks intermittent ties with neighbouring states, and how it regulates the movement of people and capital in and through its region to ensure survival. He will make some simple reflections on what the UWSA’s differing vision of autonomy might mean for Myanmar in the post-coup era.
This event will take place online via Zoom. Register to attend here.
Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Dr Andrew Ong is a political anthropologist and Postdoctoral Fellow at Nanyang Technological University, where his research examines questions of autonomy, conflict, and peace processes in Myanmar and Southeast Asia. His wider research interests include Southeast Asian politics and the futures of diplomacy and ASEAN. His academic articles have appeared in American Ethnologist, Contemporary Southeast Asia, and Critique of Anthropology. Dr Ong’s recently published book, Stalemate: Autonomy and Insurgency on the Myanmar-China Border (Cornell University Press), is an ethnography of Wa Region in Myanmar, and the United Wa State Army’s quest to maintain its autonomy from the surrounding states. He received his PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University.
Dr Hans Steinmüller is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, LSE and a specialist in the anthropology of China. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in Hubei Province (central China) and in the Wa hills of the China-Myanmar border. Publications include the monograph Communities of Complicity (Berghahn 2013), and more recently special issues on Governing Opacity (Ethnos 2023) and Crises of Care in China Today (China Quarterly 2023). He is editor of Social Analysis and convenor of the MSc programme 'China in Comparative Perspective'.