Description
A defining characteristic of historical materialist approaches to IR is the challenge they pose to the notion that the international is derivative of states and any presumed ontological primacy of states over social relations, rather than vice versa. One corollary is a practical emphasis on internationalism as a value and a practice over and against statism or liberal cosmopolitanism. Radical internationalism can be distinguished by its emphasis on the role of collective social action in the making and unmaking of regimes, states, and even state systems, premised on the view that history is ultimately made by the “masses in motion.”
This paper explores the vagaries and contradictions of radical internationalism in the context of Myanmar’s Spring Revolution based on participant interviews and five years of documentary research. From the mountains of Kachin, Karenni, and Chin, Myanmar’s borderlands to regional metropoles, Moscow and Beijing to Naypyitaw, it outlines international dimensions of a dialectic of revolution and counter-revolution since 2021. This includes anarchists, communists, and missionaries enlisting in a people’s war against a neo-fascistic regime and a counter-revolutionary bloc confronting them with materiel and propaganda. The paper “centres the periphery” by exploring global and world-historical implications and lessons of this struggle to restructure Myanmar’s postcolonial state amidst collapse of liberal hegemony and growing contestation over the emerging multipolar world order.
