Territorial control is a central concept in the study of civil wars and rebel governance. However, scholars often fall into a ‘territorial trap’, assuming that territorial control is either an outcome of or a precondition for armed governance. Based on immersive fieldwork in eastern Myanmar, this article traces how different spatial orderings of power can emerge either territorially or extra-territorially. The use of checkpoints as a comparative device demonstrates that sovereignty is not a geographically fixed attribute, but instead an effect of the everyday practices of armed groups, contingent upon and shaped by the presence of other violent actors. The findings challenge both dyadic models of conflict based on the technology of warfare and Weberian ontologies of power based on territorial control. The authors find alternative sovereign formations of armed group organization that operate through different rationalities, registers and practices, rather than exercising power over subjects within a bounded territory. They argue that future research agendas should move beyond the structural determinism of the rebel territorial trap and instead investigate agency-based explanations for how and why armed groups seek to govern.
This article is part of a special issue on ‘The Politics of Passage: Checkpoints and Authority amidst Conflict’ in Development and Change, and based on the Roadblocks and Revenues series co-published by ICTD, the Danish Institute of International Studies, and the Centre on Armed Groups.
