ABSTRACT

Myanmar’s distinctively shaped mainland borderline encloses a country that stretches from the high mountain peaks of the extended eastern Himalayan massif in the north to a narrow strip of land squeezed between the Titiwangsa mountains and the Andaman Sea in the south. The land borders constitute a near abroad for Myanmar that is politically, economically and culturally diverse, making it also diplomatically challenging for national governments: Bangladesh, India (including some of its least developed northeastern ‘tribal’ areas), the People’s Republic of China (incorporating Tibet), Laos and Thailand are all Myanmar’s immediate neighbours. Some parts of this extensive land border in the north have never been fully demarcated and every point along the borderline can be a porous interface. The official crossing points and red lines that are drawn on the large-scale national map are often subverted at a smaller scale by multiple illicit and hidden local pathways, sometimes of considerable historical longevity and significance. These land-based ‘cross-border’ routes and tracks have long sustained the various armies and militias that have made Myanmar’s ‘borderlands’ synonymous with political violence and resistance in recent decades; they have also provided pathways for the flight of civilians caught in the cross-fire between state and ‘non-state’ armed groups. Some of the armed ethnic nationalist movements that have emerged in these borderland environments have the dubious honour of having sustained the longest continuous intra-state conflicts seen anywhere in the modern world. The distinctive physical geography of the border regions, in which a horse-shoe of mountain ranges encloses a central Burmese river valley, goes some way to explaining how such movements of resistance could be upheld through decades against a much larger and more highly equipped national army.