The 2021 military coup in Myanmar, followed by an ongoing civil armed resistance to the military regime, brought profound changes in the country's political, social and environmental landscape, significantly impacting natural resource governance (NRG). Ethnic Resistance Organizations (EROs) and revolutionary forces currently govern approximately over 60% of the country’s territory. NRG is a key area where claims to authority, legitimacy, and proto-state formation are contested and negotiated. Rather than observing EROs’ involvement in NRG as mere wartime extraction or survival strategy, this research conceptualizes Rebel Natural Resource Governance (RNRG) as a political institution that underpins authority-making, civilian consent, and legitimacy in hybrid and contested orders.
This research investigates how RNRG frameworks is shaped by formal/informal institutions, interaction with customary laws, symbolic ethnic claims and external actors in territories controlled by Kachin Independence Army (KIA), Arakan Army (AA) and Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA). The research also explores how RNRG is perceived by local communities in terms of EROs’ recognition and legitimacy.
Utilizing a mixed-methods methodology with stakeholder interviews, local surveys, institutional analysis and comparative case studies, this research analyses how RNRG functions as a mechanism of embedded governance and legitimacy. It directly contributes to academic debates on rebel governance, political ecology, informal state-building and offer new theoretical and empirical contribution to how EROs institutionalize authority in stateless contexts. While the focus of the research is on Myanmar, the findings have wider implications for understanding how RNRG contributes to legitimacy and state-building by informal state actors in conflict affected regions globally.
