Suchergebnisse

Der Ball bleibt rund, doch Fankurve ist längst nicht mehr gleich Fankurve. Gerade die Vielfalt ihrer Subkulturen zeichnet Fussballfans heute aus. Kutten, Hooligans, Ultras, Supporter oder kritische Fans (IBM) schon die Namen für verschiedene Gruppierungen zeugen von den vielen Gesichtern der Fankultur

In 2023, revolutionary forces made significant gains in an escalating war against an increasingly embattled military dictatorship. Since General Min Aung Hlaing ousted the democratically elected government in a military coup on February 1, 2021, his junta has failed to subdue the countrywide Spring Revolution resisting the military takeover. This is despite the generals' terror campaign of atrocious violence against the population. In 2021, many outside observers gave the Spring Revolution and the thousands of young people who have taken up arms against the military regime little fighting chance. But these forces have rapidly evolved, and powerful ethnic resistance armies have joined the war against the junta. This article explains how revolutionary war has scaled up, despite a lack of international support and the diversity of revolutionary forces. It also evaluates wider implications for the society, economy, and international relations of a country on the brink of collapse.

Abstract
This article takes the 2021 military coup in Myanmar and its violent aftermath as a starting point for analysing the dominant lens through which western observers commonly narrate the country's politics as a struggle for democracy. It shows how focusing on questions of the political system is insufficient for explaining political processes and conflict dynamics, and how it risks sanitizing the country's past and presence of nationalism, ethnic conflict and genocide. A postcolonial reading suggests that finding solutions to conflict and authoritarianism in Myanmar demands questioning the role of the modern nation-state itself. This analysis contributes to recent research which has found that Conflict and Peace Studies develops theories from some conflicts over others, reflecting how western interests shape academic choices in a field that aims to inform policy and practice worldwide. This article contributes to this debate on knowledge production by arguing that this selectivity bias is not simply a function of general western interest (or lack thereof). It is also linked to the frames that govern our interest in and understanding of countries and regions worldwide. Studying 'forgotten conflicts' in the global South not only necessitates a turn to specialist literature, but also demands moving beyond Eurocentric frames of reference.

Myanmar: Im Kachin-Staat sind die ethnonationalistische Rebellion gegen die Regierung sowie die Kritik an sozialer Ungleichheit und an der Ausbeutung von Umwelt und Zivilbevölkerung politisch hoch bedeutsam. Die Performanz von Karaokeliedern zu diesen Themen hat für junge Kachin mehr als nur Unterhaltungswert.

Smuggling economies make for ideal sources of revenue for rebel movements. Their clandestine and peripatetic nature as well as borderland geographies are often compatible with the requirements of guerrilla war. To weaken armed resistance and pacify conflict, state actors seek to undercut lucrative smuggling operations by restricting illicit trade flows or reducing their profit margins by liberalising trade regimes. This chapter explores both such strategies through the lens of two empirical cases: US sanctions on so-called 'conflict minerals' in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and the liberalisation of border trade in Myanmar by which the country's generals sought to dry up smuggling revenues of rebel groups. Its findings suggest that, counterintuitively, attempts of economic pacification can increase rather than decrease violence, conflict and insecurity. This is not only because economic interventions in contexts of conflict can shift the incentives of warring factions in unforeseen ways. But also - and more fundamentally - economistic approaches to conflict operate on limited assumptions about the nature of political violence and consequently fail at addressing the underlying political drivers of conflict.

Rebel Politics analyzes the changing dynamics of the civil war in Myanmar, one of the most entrenched armed conflicts in the world. Since 2011, a national peace process has gone hand-in-hand with escalating ethnic conflict. The Karen National Union (KNU), previously known for its uncompromising stance against the central government of Myanmar, became a leader in the peace process after it signed a ceasefire in 2012. Meanwhile, the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) returned to the trenches in 2011 after its own seventeen-year-long ceasefire broke down. To understand these puzzling changes, Brenner conducted ethnographic fieldwork among the KNU and KIO, analyzing the relations between rebel leaders, their rank-and-file, and local communities in the context of wider political and geopolitical transformations. Drawing on Political Sociology, Rebel Politics explains how revolutionary elites capture and lose legitimacy within their own movements and how these internal contestations drive the strategies of rebellion in unforeseen ways. Brenner presents a novel perspective that contributes to our understanding of contemporary politics in Southeast Asia, and to the study of conflict, peace and security, by highlighting the hidden social dynamics and everyday practices of political violence, ethnic conflict, rebel governance and borderland politics.

In explaining political violence, Conflict and Security Studies commonly focuses on the rational decision-making of elites. In contrast, this article considers the everyday aspirations of rebel grassroots. Understanding their lifeworlds is important, as their interaction with rebel elites shapes the collective trajectories of revolutionary movements and, thus, wider dynamics of war and peace. This article analyzes the social practice of revolutionary karaoke music in Myanmar's Kachin rebellion as a window into these hidden social dynamics of political violence. It does so by merging a relational reading of rebel figurations with a visual ethnographic methodology that moves beyond the textual study of propaganda lyrics. Instead, it analyzes the audio-visual aesthetics and social practices of revolutionary karaoke. This critical mode of inquiry reveals the emotional dimension of rebellion, that is, its appeal to affect rather than reason. It also suggests that revolutionary cultural artifacts can be more than just instrumental propaganda vehicles for instilling elite ideologies into un-agential masses. Indeed, the article shows that many young Kachin are not just passive consumers of propaganda. In karaoke bars and music studios, they actively perform rebellion. In so doing, they coproduce their own rebel subjectivities and rebel political culture at large.