‘Territorial control’ has emerged as a central concept in the study of civil wars and rebel governance. However, armed groups are driven by different aims and logics and as a consequence arrive at different sovereign formations. This working paper asks: what are the governance strategies and technologies that armed groups use to project authority? Comparing the use of checkpoints by two armed groups that operate in overlapping areas in Myanmar’s borderlands, Tony Neil and Saw Day Chit find that armed groups use checkpoints differently to achieve different outcomes that are shaped by underlying ideological and cosmological foundations. They also find that sovereignty is relational to the state and other neighbouring armed actors. These findings suggest that research agendas on order in conflict sidestep the structural determinism of the ‘territorial trap’ and instead further investigate agency-based explanations for how and why armed groups seek to project or expand their authority.
This paper is the eight in a new working paper series on Roadblocks and revenues, a collaboration between ICTD, the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), and the Centre on Armed Groups (CAG).
The working paper series is generously funded by the Carlsberg Foundation under the Semper Ardens: Accelerate grant ‘TRADECRAFT’. Read more about the project here.
- Read the first paper, which introduces the working paper series, here;
- The second one, which focuses on cross-border trade and state formation in Afghanistan, here;
- The third, on the political economy of opium flows in Burma/Myanmar, here;
- The fourth, on criminal group checkpoints governing cross-border smuggling between Colombia & Venezuela, here;
- The fifth, on how checkpoints drive increasing autonomy in the Myanmar civil war, here;
- The sixth, on checkpoints, fragmentation, and social differentiation in Somalia here;
- And the seventh, on the dramaturgy of Congo’s roadblocks, here.
