The Nationalist Projects of Ethnic Women’s Organizations on the Thailand-Myanmar Border

• In Event: 2247 - Armed Conflict, Displacement, and Peacemaking

Abstract

Transnational mobility and displacement can create conditions that provide a foundation for women’s activism in the areas of peace advocacy. In the liminal spaces between nation-states, the borderlands that are inhabited by the transnational, change and necessity can create opportunities for women to emerge as political and national subjects. In this process, nation and gender intersect to shape activism and the ways that women are able to leverage their identities as women and as members of the collective to advance their own interests and those of the group more generally. In the case of ethnic women’s organizations, in operation in Myanmar and on the Thailand-Myanmar border for decades, women’s activist organizing has served to support the needs of women in the context of a larger nationalist projects. In this paper I use ethnic women’s organizations to bring forward a critical perspective to engage overlapping questions including: How does the transnational activism of ethnic women’s organizations mobilize the identity and socially constructed gender roles of women for the purposes of advancing nationalist projects? Further, what is the potential of such activism for generating space for women’s political participation and leadership? Finally, how might such activism be limited or have negative or unintended consequences?

Author

• Mollie Elizabeth Pepper, Northeastern University