A Relational and Conjunctural Approach to Civil Wars in the Postcolonial World
This talk responds to calls to decolonise the study of war by proposing a relational and conjunctural approach to civil wars in the postcolonial world. Focusing on Myanmar, it argues that conjunctural analysis – as developed in political geography – can redress Eurocentrism and state-centrism in the study of civil wars in two ways.
First, it apprehends how contemporary conflict dynamics are shaped by overarching, multi-scalar processes of colonialism and postcolonial statebuilding. In the Myanmar context, this allows us to move beyond two prominent narratives of post-2021 civil war, which I call ‘us versus them’ and ‘many against many’. The former presumes a unified democratic resistance fighting against a coherent military junta, while the latter evokes a civil war characterised by endless and irreducible fragmentation.
Second, this talk portrays civil wars as comprised of distinct but interconnected local landscapes of war – i.e. warscapes. I conceptualise warscapes as relational conjunctures: sites in which local power relations intersect with historic social processes in particular ways, as well as sites where contradictions internal to these processes come to a head.
The talk develops this argument by focusing on southeast Myanmar. It asks how the area has become associated with two seemingly contradictory phenomena in recent years: the persistence of democratic opposition to the military state and the meteoric rise of scam compounds integrated into transnational flows of illicit capital. Beyond Myanmar, the talk asks: how might studies of violence, conflict, and ‘civil war’ look if we stopped treating the nation-state as the natural container of conflict? And what conceptual and methodological tools might make this line of inquiry possible?
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dr. Shona Loong’s research focuses on conflict, foreign aid, and peacebuilding in contested territories, with a focus on Myanmar. Currently, she is SNSF Ambizione Fellow at the Geneva Graduate Institute.
She is the Principal Investigator of the project, “Governing the Revolution: Rebel Territories as a Laboratory for Foreign Aid” (2026-2029), hosted at the Centre for Conflict, Development, and Peacebuilding. She was previously based at the Department of Geography at the University of Zurich and completed her PhD at the University of Oxford. Her work has been published in Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Development and Change, Geopolitics, and Civil Wars.
