Powers of the Gun: On Violence, Frontier and Community

ABSTRACT

Since the mid-1990s, the Free Burma Rangers (FBR) – a self-defined ‘multi-ethnic humanitarian movement’ operating in Myanmar, Iraq, Syria, and South Sudan – has supported and trained rebel movements and civil society organisations to create spaces of relief and rescue in war zones at the frontiers of their polities. Central to the FBR’s logic and praxis is the use and governing of weapons as military means in order to ‘immunise’ communities of the oppressed from violence. Aside from their politically disputed character, this article takes the activities of the FBR as an entry point to ask: how are the relations between weapons and humans governed in war frontiers? And how does the management of military means reproduce different forms of political community with their political space? Situating these questions in political geography’s literature on frontiers, the article brings in dialogue Roberto Esposito’s analysis on the relationship between violence and (political/impolitical) community with critical approaches on weapons in security studies to show how violence, frontier, and community stand in a co-constitutive relation. Rather than looking at violence and military means as an instrument for the territorialisation of an ideological-political project at the frontier, I analyse the frontier as a politico-military device consubstantial to a political community with its biological body and political space. Drawing from fieldwork methods, I argue that the governing of human-firearms relations constitutes the political community and the human subjectivities part of it by producing frontiers as zones of distinction and encounter between the civilised and the ‘not yet’. The paper contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it empirically substantiates the co-constitutive rather than instrumental relation between violence and the frontier. Second, it shows how the immunitary apparatuses that govern the encounters between humans and weapons, in shaping the political community, shape also ‘the dehumanisation of Man’s human Others’. Third, zooming onto the life experiences of activists taking part to FBR and resistance forces, it differentiates between the political and impolitical forms of community produced by managing violence.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge that the article’s title is a reference to Mike Bourne’s 2018 paper entitled “Powers of the Gun: Process and Possibility in Global Small Arms Control” (International Politics 55(3-4), 441-461). I also would like to thank all the interlocutors and friends who made the research possible by donating their time, knowledge, and openness. I am also grateful to Matteo Proto for commenting and engaging on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. *= Pseudonym.

2. I use this phrasing to refer to the FBR because it is the way they define their group. Their use of the adjective ‘humanitarian’ to qualify their activities is nonetheless widely disputed. For a problematisation of the FBR activities and their political implications I direct the reader to the work of Alexander Horstmann (e.g. 2019).

3. Ordinary people often call the Tatmadaw, sit-tat – a more general Burmese term meaning armed group/military force.

4. Fieldwork conversations, Chiang Mai province, June 2022. (The whole vignette.).

5. ta-ya-daw-siq’ .

6. Interview, Ta’ang activist, June 2022, via signal.

7. The origins of which some trace back to the Japanese forces’ ‘three all’ (sanko seisaku – ‘kill all’, ‘burn all’, ‘destroy all’) (see Stella Naw 2017); while others to British counter-insurgency campaigns in Malaysia (1948–1960) (Seekins 2007), or colonial violence in Myanmar (MacLean 2022).

8. Interestingly, after independence the Ka-Pa-Sa (the Myanmar armed force’s Directorate of Defence Industries) managed to secure in-country licenced production of foreign assault rifles and machine-guns models. In particular, key for the Tatmadaw’s campaigns in the borderlands were weapons such as the so-called Ne-Win Sten modelled on the base of the Italian TZ-45 submachine gun; the BA series rifles and submachine guns modelled on the base of the Heckler & Kock G3 and the Israeli UZI; or the MA series assault rifles modelled on the base of the Israeli Galil rifle.

9. Interview, June 2022, Chiang Mai province.

10. Ibid.

11. Interview, September 2019, Chiang Mai province.

12. Interview, Wan Hai, November 2019.

13. For a thorough discussion of the highly debated and problematic aspects of the FBR’s activities as well as their embeddedness into larger political and religious constellations at different local and global scales see (Horstmann 2019).

14. Interview, September 2019, Chiang Mai.

15. Interview, November 2019, Wan Hai.

16. Ibid.

17. Personal conversations, December 2022. (All the quotes in this section.).

18. The older Ta’ang ERO. (Palaung being the exonym with which the Ta’ang have been designated in the thaingyintha system.)

Additional information

Funding

The research that led to this work was funded by Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy, as part of the author’s PhD, as well as by the Einaudi Foundation in Turin and the University of Bologna.