Communities of care: Public donations, development assistance, and independent philanthropy in the Wa State of Myanmar

Abstract

If there are any charitable, philanthropic, or welfare-state activities in the de facto states of insurgent armies, they are generally interpreted in terms of utilitarian motives and the self-legitimation of military elites and their business associates. However, development and philanthropy in the Wa State of Myanmar have more extensive purposes. We argue that a framing of care rather than of governance allows for ethnographic attention to emerging social relations and subject positions – ‘our people’, ‘the vulnerable’, and ‘the poor’. In this article we describe ‘communities of care’ by analysing public donations, development assistance and independent philanthropy in the Wa State as categories of care that each follow a different moral logic, respond to different needs, and connect different actors and recipients. Zooming in on the ways in which communities of care reproduce moral subjectivities and political authority allows a re-imagining of everyday politics in the de facto states of armed groups, no longer wedded to notions of control, legitimacy, and ‘rebel governance’.