Description
This paper makes the case for the utility of complexity theory for understanding resistance in contexts of armed conflict and state violence. Concepts within complexity theory such as emergence, self-organisation, decentralisation, feedback loops, and adaption, form a framework that can help to describe and explain how a society faced with constant, violent threats, such as Myanmar, adapts to its environment through acts and patterns of mitigation and resistance. While complexity theory has been applied to sub-fields of international studies such as terrorism, peacebuilding, and conflict, applying this to resistance studies is a novel undertaking. I draw on a data corpus consisting of documentation of human rights violations and mitigation strategies in conflict-affected southeast Myanmar between 2012 and 2018, a period of political and economic changes in the country. In my analysis I argue that the more quotidian, dispersed, indeed, everyday acts of resistance, form patterns that have the properties of a complex adaptive system which is durable in times of violence and flux.
