Description
This paper will focus on the context and strategies used by Indigenous women’s’ activist movements in Northern Thailand and the Thai-Burma border region, particularly in the post- 2021 coup in Burma and 2014 Thai coup contexts. It will demonstrate that Indigenous women activist movements are not only dealing with harm (Tuck 2009), but also creating alternatives to neocolonial, authoritarian and heteropatriarchal ways of being through relationship-based strategies of resistance.
Based on doctoral fieldwork conducted in 2022, this paper will argue that Indigenous women activists have leveraged their relationships and networks, in particular transnational relationships, as a form of resistance and solidarity in the face of authoritarianism. These include access to funding networks in Thailand, Burma and the broader Asia-Pacific, as well as other forms of support needed to counter authoritarianism including practical support to relocate Indigenous women activists under threat, digital security training, and emotional and trauma healing support.
Focusing on Indigenous women's agency, and countering dominant narratives of invisibilization or passivity of Asian and Indigenous women (Silva, 2004), this paper argues that Indigenous women in Northern Thailand and the Thai-Burma border find ways to exert their agency, particularly through levering their networks and relationships as their strengths, in order to continue to engage in resistance to increasingly heteropatriarchal and authoritarian rule.
