Assembling Drones, Activists and Oil Palms: Implications of a Multi-stakeholder Land Platform for State Formation in Myanmar

Amid Myanmar’s political transition and despite its new government’s discourse of inclusion and dialogue, land conflicts have increased across the country’s ethnic-minority areas. We argue that land plays a central role in the complex interplay of state formation, armed conflict and international development in Myanmar’s con-tested borderlands and that land conflicts can provide an entry point to make sense of these dynamics. We use ethnographic data and a framework combining Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblages with Foucault’s conception of power to pro-vide a detailed analysis of a multi-stakeholder platform (MSP) addressing land dis-putes in Myanmar’s south-east. Analysing the platform’s discourses, practices and technologies, we argue that, despite its emphasis on inclusion, participation and dia-logue, it is the operation of power that upholds this inherently conflictive assem-blage. The platform opens spaces for agency for less-influential actors, but it equally produces de-politicising and exclusive effects. While scholars have typically used assemblage thinking to analyse how state authority is disassembled by the grow-ing role of non-state actors, we aim to further post-structural reflections on state formation and international development by arguing that the central state in Myan-mar actually expands its reach into the borderlands through assemblages such as the MSP. This happens at the expense of the authority of quasi-state formations of eth-nic armed organisations. Thus, this process is reminiscent of how the Burmese state expanded its reach through assemblages of land and resource extraction during the ‘ceasefire capitalism’ before the transition