Description
Rebellion by definition constitutes a break with ordinary politics. Our conceptual understanding of armed resistance and civil wars is thus inherently linked to the exceptional, stressing violence and suffering in a context where normal norms and rules are seemingly suspended. This is amplified by the fact that most scholarship focuses on the high politics of civil wars, particularly the ideologies and strategies of elites. In contrast, this paper asks about the everyday of armed struggle, which has thus far not received much scholarly attention. Understanding the lifeworlds of ordinary rebels is important because they form the social foundation that enable revolutionary ideologies and armed resistance in the first place. To shed light on the vernacular spaces of revolutionary struggle the paper draws on ethnographic observations on sociable practices inside the Kachin, Karen and Naga rebellions in Myanmar’s borderlands. In doing so, it explores the politics of karaoke, beauty queens and fish paste as revolutionary sociability, understood as the liminal space where playful performances of revolution and the harsh realities of war meet and overlap. It is here where revolutionary subjectivities are formed and contested.
