Commodifying Refugee (Re)displacement: Humanitarian Aid, War Economies and Civil Conflict in Myanmar

This paper examines the interrelation between humanitarian aid, war economies and refugees in Myanmar’s civil conflict through developing the novel conceptualisation of ‘commodifying refugee (re)displacement’. Bringing together ethnographic research at the northern Thai–Myanmar border with critical international political economy (IPE), we describe ‘(re)displacement’ – the dislocation of Rohingya from Rakhine State, translocation across the breadth and length of Myanmar amidst the civil conflict, border crossing into northern Thailand through the area at Mae Sot and subsistence in Thailand. Through analysis of the scale of actors involved in the export, management, exchange and extraction as part of (re)displacement, the paper articulates the ways in which substate, state, transnational and business interests profit from (re)displacing refugees, as well as from the more visible externalities of civil conflict, such as resource extraction through dispossession and labour exploitation. We argue, the commodification of refugee (re)displacement is an outcome of the interrelation between humanitarian aid and war economies operating within the social dynamics of the civil conflict in Myanmar, and due to the civil conflict’s embeddedness in the political economies of Southeast Asia. In this context of human crises, aid, like all other resources, is incorporated into the contest for control over power and resources taking place as part of the civil conflict, meaning, aid becomes intertwined with, and sometimes reshapes, pre-existing war economies that rely on violence, terror and coercion. In the context of Myanmar, due to the distribution, allotment and location of humanitarian resources, (re)displacement of Rohingya, and not other conflict-affected populations, is commodified. Recognising why Rohingya refugees in Rakhine State, rather than other populations, become valuable commodities for ‘(re)displacement’, emphasises the largely invisible interrelation between humanitarian aid and war economies.