Climate change as an arena of wartime political struggles: Greening of military rule and resistance in Myanmar

Abstract

This article examines how climate change discourses and actions become entangled with political struggles under conditions of violent conflict. Focusing on post-coup Myanmar – marked by violent conflict, high exposure to climate risk and widespread resistance to military authoritarian rule – we analyze how competing actors deploy ‘greening’ as part of antagonistic struggles over authority, territorial control, and international recognition. We argue that wartime dynamics intensify competition over greening, turning it into an arena of political struggle over stateness in which greening simultaneously operates as a tactic of authoritarian control and as a mode of resistance by alternative state-making actors. Drawing on interviews and digital ethnography of media and social media, we examine greening initiatives advanced by three key actors: the military junta, the opposition National Unity Government (NUG), and the Karen National Union (KNU), an ethnic resistance organization with a long history of environmental governance. We show how the junta's greening performances seek to conceal violence and consolidate regime power, resembling greenwashing in other authoritarian contexts. By contrast, the NUG and KNU articulate greening through revolutionary resistance narratives that expose military violence, attribute environmental destruction to the military, and advance alternative, people-centred and Indigenous approaches to environmental and climate action as part of competing projects of state-making. Conceptually, the article bridges critical political ecology and anthropological studies of state greenwashing, environmental activism and the politics of climate change interventions. By extending these debates to contexts of active warfare and competitive state-making, we move beyond analyses that treat greening either as domination or resistance. In doing so, the article nuances dominant understandings of the climate–conflict nexus by shifting attention from climate change as a cause of conflict to how climate discourses and actions become stakes of intensified political competition under conditions of violent conflict.