Book panel with Tomas Cole and Justine Chambers

Possessed Landscapes: Experiments in Conservation and Sovereignty in Southeast Myanmar In 2011 Myanmar emerged from what was by some counts the longest ongoing war in the world. Amid the flurry of ceasefires and constitutional reforms, Indigenous communities moved to reclaim land colonized in the preceding decades of conflict. In southeast Myanmar, the Indigenous people of Karen State, activists, and revolutionaries transformed their war-torn land into the Salween Peace Park—a conservation area that is home not only to endangered species like tigers and gibbons but also to territorial spirits and ancestors.

Set in the highlands of the Myanmar-Thai border, Possessed Landscapes introduces a world where land is understood as both spiritually inhabited and politically claimed. Karen cosmologies blur boundaries between human and more-than-human ownership, presence, and possession. Anthropologist Tomas Cole’s concept of more-than-human political ecology captures the nuanced, playful, and often deeply strategic ways in which local communities negotiate power, land, and identity amid civil war and state violence. Through vibrant ethnography and grounded political analysis, Cole illuminates how Indigenous Karen communities and their allies are defining conservation, autonomy, and peace building on their own terms.

A case study in reimagining sovereignty through ecological stewardship, Possessed Landscapes is essential reading for scholars and practitioners in anthropology, environmental humanities, and peace and conflict studies, as well as anyone seeking to understand how revolutionary politics and conservation can be inseparably entwined.

About the author: Tomas Cole is a postdoctoral fellow of social anthropology at Stockholm University and a visiting scholar at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. For the past fifteen years his research has focused on political violence, disability, indigenous conservation, and environmental peacebuilding in Southeast Myanmar. His current project explores divergent attempts to make peace with “pests”—specifically with diseases bearing mosquitoes in both Singapore and Myanmar.

 

Pursuing Morality: Buddhism and Everyday Ethics in Southeastern Myanmar (2024, NUS Press)

Pursuing Morality is an in-depth and fascinating study of ordinary life in Myanmar’s southeast, an area of the world that has long been defined by violent conflict. Based on extensive in-depth fieldwork in the small city of Hpa-an, the capital of Karen State, Chambers shines new light on Plong (Pwo) Karen Buddhists' lives and the multiple ways they broker, traverse, enact, cultivate, defend and pursue moral lives, amidst a time of profound social and political change.

About the author: Justine Chambers is a Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) in Copenhagen, Denmark. She has a PhD in Anthropology from the Australian National University and more than ten years’ experience researching and writing on Myanmar, with a focus on moral identity, ethno-national conflict and, more recently, everyday experiences of climate uncertainty.