Property, Citizenship, and Invisible Dispossession in Myanmar's Urban Frontier

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3948809
AutoresElizabeth L Rhoads (0000-0003-0390-7217, King's College London; University College London)
Año2023
Volumen28
Número1
Páginas122-155
Fecha de publicación2023-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaGeopolitics (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1465-0045 • E-ISSN: 1557-3028
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14650045.2020.1808887
OpenAlexW3115253325
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas14
Referencias citadas58

Myanmar’s systematic dispossession of religious and ethnic minorities is well-documented as a tool for counterinsurgency through territorialisation. However, the specific contours of the relationship between minorities, territorialisation, and urban dispossession remain underexplored. The article argues that legislative changes linking identity, property, and belonging led to widescale invisible dispossession of minorities, through the mechanisms of law, citizenship and bureaucracy. Such dispossession gave birth to multiple urban frontiers – temporal spaces that break down existing property relations and create new ones through territorialisation. This article explores one such moment in Myanmar’s largest city and former capital, Yangon, through the lens of Islamic pious endowments, or waqf. By positioning Yangon’s post-1988 landscape as an urban frontier, the article shows how legislative changes serve to actively create frontiers in urban centres through legal dispossession and the transformation of property relations. The article develops the concept of the urban frontier as inextricably tied to territorialisation and dispossession, positing that a frontier, as a spatialized moment in time, can exist at geographical centres as well as peripheries

Citizenship · Frontier · Geography · Legislature · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Property (philosophy · Property rights · Real property · Right to the city · Sociology · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Cambodian History and Society · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Law