Gold Members: Crony Capital and Airspace in Myanmar

• In Event: Invisible Actors and Factors of Infrastructure: Ethnicity, Gender, and Work across Mainland Southeast Asia

Abstract

The recent “opening up” of Myanmar’s economy to countries formerly imposing sanctions has induced a flurry of activity in the country, including a property boom in Yangon and increased traffic within the country’s airspace. Burma/Myanmar has long been a signatory member of the International Civil Aviation Organization, although a number of conventions within it, including the Montreal Convention of 1999, were not adopted. As we shall see, within aviation logistical models, open skies are anything but: instead, the air is comprised of a patchwork of overlapping sovereignties, a tangled web of legal and logistical networks, and as air geographer Peter Adey terms is, an interlocking system of aerial geographies (Adey 2008). Some of the specific legal and economic complexities of airspace sovereignty in Myanmar offer insights to political and economic power writ large. With a number of private airlines starting up in recent decades, many observers speculate about the role of crony capital in aviation in the country. In studying both the geographic notions of air space, as well as the ways in which aircraft operations works, this paper seeks to describe how certain forms of capital fly Myanmar’s skies.

Author

• Jane M. Ferguson, Australian National University