The Kachin Tackling the Territorial Trap

The Kachin are a nation divided territorially and made into minorities in modern China, Myanmar and India by the imposition of the so- called international boundaries. The Ph.D. thesis studies the Kachin construction, maintenance and protection of their territorial and symbolic spaces against state practices of territoriality and socialization in Myanmar and China. While the State in China has focused on subtle socialization through positive discrimination, education, popular media and promotion of ethnic material culture, the State in Myanmar has opted for coercive methods and homogenization. The Kachin, virtually deprived of their territorial places in the strict politico-geographical definition of the term, rely increasingly on their (now cross-border) social space constituting family and kinship networks and their expressions of ethnicity. The latter has evolved into a self-conscious awareness of being a nation of six tribes in three countries. The study draws on inter-disciplinary literature in political geography and anthropology, history, political science and International Relations on symbolic and territorial spaces and boundaries.