Tag Archives: Myanmar

New paper: An everyday political economy of food insecurity in Myanmar’s Central Dry Zone

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In this new paper co-authored by RSO member Mark Vicol, the authors argue that the everyday experience of food insecurity is highly differentiated in village contexts in Myanmar (and the Global South more broadly), and develop an everyday political economy approach as a fruitful way to interrogate and understand this difference. The analysis is based on a large scale mixed-methods study of rural villages in Myanmar’s Central Dry Zone conducted between 2016 and 2019. You can read the paper for free here https://rdcu.be/d5bci, or download here (paywall) https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-024-01506-4.

Postscript: On 1 February 2021 the Myanmar military (Tatmadaw) deposed the democratically elected National League for Democracy government of Myanmar in a coup d’état before returning power to a military junta. At the time of writing, the military junta has thrust Myanmar back into a period of violence, arbitrary arrest, oppression, uncertainty and de facto civil war. Many villages in the Central Dry Zone have been arbitrarily burned by the military, and residents forced to flee, including the villages in this study. Similarly, many Myanmar researchers, academics and activists have been arrested or forced to flee the country. It is likely that the dynamics analyzed in this paper have shifted dramatically and unevenly, however further research remains impossible at present. The authors of the paper are distressed that the people interviewed for this paper are now the bearers of state-sanctioned violence and express our solidarity with those wishing to return democracy to Myanmar.

Farm labourer in Myanmar's Central Dry Zone
Farm labourer in Myanmar’s Central Dry Zone. Photo credit: Mark Vicol

Unpacking gender mainstreaming: a critical discourse analysis of agricultural and rural development policy in Myanmar and Nepal by Dawn Cheong et al.

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Dawn Cheong is PhD-candidate at the Rural Sociology Group (dawn.cheong@wur.nl) . Her first paper has just been published open access in ‘Agriculture and Human Values‘:
Cheong, D.D., Bock, B. & Roep, D. (2023) Unpacking gender mainstreaming: a critical discourse analysis of agricultural and rural development policy in Myanmar and Nepal https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-023-10502-x.

Abstract
Conventional gender analysis of development policy does not adequately explain the slow progress towards gender equality. Our research analyses the gender discourses embedded in agricultural and rural development policies in Myanmar and Nepal. We find that both countries focus on increasing women’s participation in development activities as a core gender equality policy objective. This creates a binary categorisation of participating versus non-participating women and identifies women as responsible for improving their position. At the same time, gender (in)equality is defined exclusively as a women’s concern. Such discourses, as constitutive practices, produce specific knowledge about rural women and new subjectivities that prescribe and govern them solely as subjects of development. Our research suggests that such a limited discursive practice invisiblises gendered power relations and structural and institutional issues, ultimately slowing progress towards gender equality. We demonstrate the importance of studying policy as discourse, beyond the effectiveness of policies or mainstreaming tools, and call for empirical evidence on the impact of these discourses on women’s subjectivities and lived experiences.