‘We have big ideas, but only small words’: The post-war geographies of civil society and community in Karen State

Scholars have argued for understanding the post-war as a liminal condition in which the war appears to be over, but where the legacies of war remain contested in everyday spaces and social relations. This article draws from and seeks to make two interrelated contributions to the literature on post-war development and civil society. First, whereas critical development scholars often portray civil society as a Western imposition on local contexts, this article advances a relational approach to post-war civil society as embedded within the local and extra-local power relations created by conflict and violence. Second, drawing from war ethnographies, this article discusses the production of positive socialities amidst war. In particular, this article proposes that warscape biographies – or how subjects narrate their lives as situated within specific times and places of war – can help scholars grasp subjects’ aspirations for redefining community through civil society. These also shed light on the tensions between donors and civil society; the former of which had a decontextualised and aspatial conception of war that did not reflect the heterogeneous and localised ways in which war had been experienced on the ground. This article draws from ethnographic research on mixed-authority in Karen State (2012–2021), shaped by a protracted conflict between the Karen National Union (KNU) and the Myanmar government. There, civil society actors sought to envision community in a way that transcended the KNU’s ethnonationalism and the Myanmar state’s ethnocentrism.