Organizer: Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell University

Type/Location: In person / Ithaca, NY

Description:

Burma is home to the world's longest running armed conflict. It is also the world's second largest producer of heroin and Asia's largest producer of methamphetamines. Studies of the drug-war relationship in Burma are top-down. They concern the way elite agreements, such as ceasefires between belligerents, shape patterns of drug production, peace, and conflict. In contrast, I consider these patterns from the ground up. Drawing on interviews with ex-soldiers recovering from addiction in drug rehabilitation centers in northeastern Burma, as well as public portrayals of addiction and war in Burma, I examine the role that drug addiction and rehabilitation play in the maintenance of militaries. I argue that there is a symbiotic relationship between rehabilitation and conscription. As a population that is commonly represented in Burma as the epitome of wasted male labor addicts are made into a labor pool that both militaries and churches can rehabilitate, deploy, or abandon. The social value of the addict is structured but the shifting contingencies of war and the shifting demands for military manpower. Centering the life stories of soldier-addicts shows the ways these men create and contest practices and imaginations of war, as well as their role in it. Yet the stories also reveal the way they often become ensnared in circuits of rehabilitation and conscription. These are produced by a diffuse array of religious and military institutions that hold conflicting ideologies, identities, and intentions, yet create a shared military order: the military-religious complex.

Joshua Mitchell is a PhD candidate at Cornell University in socio-cultural anthropology. His dissertation research examines the intersections of Christianity, addiction, and war in Myanmar.

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