Our Resistance and the Limits of Global Norms

I came to research through more than a decade of work in peacebuilding and political education across Myanmar. Again and again I found people apparently agreeing through the same political words while understanding those words through very different political heritages and experiences. These gaps sometimes contributed to misunderstanding, broken trust and disruptions of political alliances.

I started to research into what differences in political worldviews do to conflicts, cooperation and political relationships in Myanmar. I founded The Calling Digest three and a half years ago, and today we study these gaps in political meaning-making. We also examine how international actors and NGOs can unintentionally contribute to political harm when they assume shared meanings, priorities and categories that do not consistently exist across political communities.

We turn what we learn into tools for peacebuilding, political education and dialogue.

My presentation today is called Our Resistance and the Limits of Global Norms.

I want to begin with a situation from the field.

A local organization needed to evacuate people immediately. The donor could not transfer money fast enough. So the organization borrowed vehicles, fuel and support from an Ethnic Revolutionary Organization. They used local relationships, route knowledge and checkpoint arrangements to get people out.

Later, the activity could be reported very simply:

“Emergency evacuation support was provided.”

That sentence is true.

But almost everything that made the evacuation possible has disappeared.

Who had the vehicle? Who controlled the road? Who provided the fuel? Who accepted the risk?

This is where my paper begins.

Most international norms I discuss today are good norms. Accountability, transparency, neutrality, localization and Do No Harm. They exist for very good reasons.

My question is not whether they are good.

My question is: what happens when a good norm travels into a political reality like this?

This brings me to the basic problem.

Global norms are not meeting a normal policy environment. They are meeting a revolution.

People on the ground are making decisions under surveillance, violence, uncertainty and very unequal exposure to risk. Neutrality may not feel neutral. Transparency may not feel safe. Accountability may require protecting information rather than sharing more of it.

So the question is not simply whether people understand the rules.

The political condition itself changes what those rules mean in practice.

And that is why I became interested not only in norms themselves, but in what happens to norms when they enter very different political worlds.

This became my central research question.

Where do false alignments occur between global institutional logic and local survival realities?

By false alignment, I mean something quite ordinary.

Two actors use the same word and assume that they agree.

They may both say accountability. They may both say protection or transparency.

But the word may be asking them to do very different things.

For one actor, accountability may mean showing more evidence.

For another, accountability may mean refusing to expose the people who trusted them.

The important question then becomes: when meanings conflict, whose meaning becomes official?

That is where a difference in language becomes a question of power.

Myanmar makes this especially difficult because many international systems still carry a state-centered assumption.

There is often an expectation that somewhere behind the crisis there is a minimally legitimate state that can eventually become the main guarantor of order, protection and accountability.

For many communities in Myanmar, particularly in ethnic areas, that has never been their political experience.

The military state has often been experienced as a source of violence rather than protection.

At the same time, alternative systems of governance, education, health and security have existed for decades.

So even before we discuss neutrality or localization, we already face a prior question: who is the legitimate political actor?

There is no uncontested answer.

This is why I use the term political harm.

I use it as a working concept, not as a finished theory.

Political harm is not simply harm caused by politics.

I am trying to capture damage to people's ability to act politically.

That includes agency, recognition, trust, security, collective organization and the capacity to challenge or reshape the conditions governing their lives.

We already have strong vocabularies for physical violence, trauma, displacement and legal violations.

But a person can remain physically alive while becoming politically weaker.

A community can survive while losing trust, voice, confidence or the capacity to act together.

I wanted a concept that allows us to see that loss.

Three issues in the literature helped me frame this problem.

The first is state-centricity. International peacebuilding often gives formal institutions and states a privileged place in political analysis.

The second is epistemic erasure. Sometimes local experience cannot be expressed properly because the available institutional language does not fit the reality.

And the third is risk.

Everyone speaks about risk, but not from the same position.

For an institution, risk may mean fraud, audit failure, legal exposure or reputation.

For someone on the ground, risk may mean arrest, surveillance or somebody discovering their name.

Both are real risks.

But they do not sit at the same distance from the body.

Methodologically, this is a small interpretive study.

I interviewed fifteen people from different positions across this aid-resistance field.

They included civil society actors, frontline service providers, resistance-linked networks, researchers, international practitioners and intermediaries.

I do not claim that fifteen people represent Myanmar.

That would be too much to claim from this study.

What I was looking for were recurring moments of friction.

Especially moments when people appeared to use the same language but then described very different practical realities.

Those moments became analytically important because they showed where apparently shared vocabulary begins to break apart.

I call the analytical approach meaning-mapping.

Instead of asking only what a word means, I follow the word further.

What does it require people to do?

Why is that action considered morally important?

And what happens politically when one interpretation becomes enforceable?

Take accountability again.

For a donor, accountability may require evidence and documentation.

For a local organization, accountability may require protecting people from exposure.

So the difference is not only semantic.

Different meanings produce different actions.

And once those actions involve funding, compliance, safety and institutional legitimacy, meaning itself becomes politically consequential.

One example came from the language used for armed resistance.

Some international actors used terms such as "violent actors" or "violent action."

That can appear descriptive and politically neutral.

But one participant responded very differently.

They said: we avoided violence, we protested, people were shot, we tried other ways, and then armed resistance emerged.

I am not using this case to argue that every armed action is justified.

My interest is in the sequence.

One account begins with violence.

The other begins with repression.

The category may not be factually wrong.

But it may begin the story too late.

And where we begin the story changes how we understand the action.

The same problem appears with Do No Harm.

One participant said that harm has to be defined through conversation with the people who actually face the risk.

This sounds almost obvious.

But institutional systems often treat the principle as though the meaning of harm is already settled.

My argument is not that local actors always know better or behave more ethically.

Local actors can also produce coercion, exclusion, violence and abuse.

But people who live close to danger may recognize forms of harm that are invisible from further away.

So perhaps Do No Harm should not begin only with a checklist.

It should also begin with a question: what counts as harm here, and who is in the best position to see it?

Another finding came from what seemed to be missing.

Aid systems are very good at asking who is vulnerable, how many people were reached, who received assistance and whether outputs were completed.

These are necessary questions.

But conflict also requires another set of questions.

Who controls the road?

Who controls the fuel?

Who controls warehouses, checkpoints, banking channels, land and transport?

These are questions about material power.

And material power matters because possession can become political authority.

A truck is not only a truck if only one actor can move it through a checkpoint.

A warehouse is not merely storage if controlling it determines who receives food.

Needs matter.

But so do ownership and control.

This brought me back to political harm.

Participants repeatedly talked about dignity, trust, legitimacy, voice, mobility, political confidence, social cohesion and the ability to continue political work.

But they did not usually have one category connecting these forms of damage.

That made me wonder whether our vocabulary makes certain harms much easier to recognize than others.

If someone is physically injured, we can name the harm.

If someone is displaced, we can name it.

But if a community slowly loses trust, collective confidence, organizational capacity and willingness to act together, what do we call that?

Political harm may be useful precisely because it helps us ask about these slower forms of political weakening.

Now let me return to the evacuation case.

The important point is not only that the donor was slow.

The deeper problem is what happens to knowledge afterward.

The report may simply say that emergency evacuation support was provided by a civil society organization.

That can be completely accurate.

But ERO fuel, vehicles, route knowledge, checkpoint negotiation, informal debt, security relationships and political authority may disappear from the written account.

Sometimes there are very good security reasons for keeping those things out.

But the institutional record becomes thinner.

And then other people read those reports and design future policies from them.

So the system may slowly learn a cleaner version of reality than the one people actually survived.

Measurement can also begin changing the work it is supposed to measure.

One organization told me that they sometimes posted on social media simply because the donor counted the number of posts.

Another organization working with traumatized people had to adjust its practice because course completion and beneficiary numbers mattered for reporting.

Indicators are useful.

We need some way to know whether programs are functioning.

But the interesting problem begins when organizations start reorganizing their work around what can be counted.

Then the direction of causality begins to change.

We should ask: are we measuring the work?

Or is the measurement gradually producing the kind of work that is easiest to report?

Risk management was one of the strongest themes in the interviews.

Again, nobody argued that risk management was unnecessary.

The question was much simpler: risk for whom?

A donor may fear fraud, sanctions, audit failure or reputational damage.

An intermediary may fear non-compliance.

A local organization may fear arrest or surveillance.

A villager may fear being identified.

All of these risks are real.

But they are not equally distributed.

And sometimes the actor with the greatest institutional power has the least physical exposure.

The actor with the least power may carry the greatest danger.

So risk management cannot only be technical.

It also has to be an analysis of power and exposure.

Transparency gives us perhaps the clearest example.

From one perspective, raw data improves credibility.

It gives donors evidence and allows verification.

From another perspective, raw data may expose networks, names, relationships and locations.

One organization told me directly that they prioritize source security over transparency.

Another said they would rather lose funding than reveal identifying information about their network.

So what does accountability mean here?

Does it mean giving more information upward?

Or does it mean protecting the people downward who trusted you with information?

Both claims can be morally serious.

This is precisely what I mean by false alignment.

The word is shared.

The obligation is not.

This leads to what I call semantic camouflage.

Local actors sometimes translate politically sensitive work into language that international systems can recognize and fund.

A CDM network becomes a civil society organization.

Revolutionary support becomes community protection.

An armed resistance actor becomes a local partner.

This is not merely a matter of vocabulary.

It tells us something about institutional visibility.

Some realities become acceptable only after they are renamed.

Translation can be useful and necessary.

But when one side controls the vocabulary through which funding and legitimacy are distributed, translation can also become a form of discipline.

The question becomes: what happens to political reality when people must rename it in order to survive institutionally?

One participant described this tension very clearly.

“We know what we are doing. We know why it matters. But we cannot say it.”

If they describe the work too directly, they may lose funding.

If they lose funding, people depending on that support may suffer.

So they maintain one language for institutional survival and another for political reality.

I do not think this can be reduced easily to honesty versus dishonesty.

The participant called it survival.

And I think that ambiguity is important.

Instead of only asking why local actors are not completely transparent, perhaps we should also ask: what kind of relationship makes strategic misdescription necessary?

This also complicates the idea of a completely separate humanitarian space.

Humanitarian separation has genuine ethical value.

It can protect civilians, preserve access and restrain armed influence.

But in many parts of Myanmar, survival structures are already entangled.

Teachers, medics, local administrators, community networks, armed resistance organizations and cross-border systems may depend on one another.

“Dead people don't need receipts. We need vehicles.”

The institution needs accountability.

The person in danger needs transportation now.

Neither concern simply disappears.

The real ethical question is how to hold both without pretending that the political entanglement itself does not exist.

At the same time, I want to be very careful not to romanticize entanglement.

Resistance actors are not automatically democratic because they resist an oppressive state.

They can reproduce hierarchy, coercion, patriarchy, exclusion, corruption, militarization and authoritarian habits.

So this is not an argument that international actors are wrong and local actors are right.

That would only replace one simplistic binary with another.

The point is to scrutinize both sides.

The fantasy of absolute humanitarian purity can be dangerous.

But political entanglement can also be dangerous.

We need ways to examine accountability, civilian protection, consent and power inside imperfect realities rather than pretending one side is naturally innocent.

Localization is another area where the language can hide important differences.

We often say that power is being localized.

But what exactly has been localized?

Implementation? Paperwork? Legal responsibility? Security risk? Physical danger?

Sometimes donors still control priorities and reporting rules.

Intermediaries carry administration.

Local organizations implement.

Communities carry the consequences.

So the burden moves downward, while authority does not necessarily move with it.

That is why some forms of localization can become risk transfer without equivalent power transfer.

The important question is not simply whether a program is local.

It is whether local actors actually have more authority to define priorities, protection, acceptable risk and accountability.

This brings the argument together.

I suggest that political harm becomes more likely when three things meet.

First, meaning divergence.

People use the same words but understand them differently.

Second, power asymmetry.

One interpretation carries funding, compliance authority and institutional legitimacy.

Third, unequal risk exposure.

The people with less power often carry more of the consequences.

None of these conditions alone necessarily creates political harm.

The problem emerges when they converge.

Misunderstanding itself is ordinary.

The political problem begins when one interpretation becomes enforceable.

That is the point where meaning stops being only interpretation and becomes power.

Across the cases, I found a rough chain.

A shared word creates an appearance of agreement.

The underlying difference remains unresolved.

The reality is simplified into institutional categories.

Some details disappear because they are unsafe, inconvenient or difficult to report.

Risk begins moving downward.

And political harm can accumulate.

The disturbing part is that the project may still look successful.

The report may be correct.

The indicator may be completed.

The compliance requirements may all be satisfied.

And yet the relationship can still be harmful.

So accuracy is not always the same as completeness.

And compliance is not always the same as protection.

So I do not conclude that we should abandon global norms.

That would be a mistake.

Neutrality, accountability, transparency, localization and Do No Harm all exist because real problems required responses.

We need constraints on armed actors.

We need protection against corruption.

We need institutions to answer for how they use resources.

My concern is with a different assumption: that because a principle is morally good, its institutional implementation must also produce good outcomes.

That does not necessarily follow.

We still have to ask who defines the norm, who benefits from that interpretation, who carries the risk and what happens when political reality does not fit the template.

I end the argument with three directions rather than complete solutions.

The first is interpretive accountability.

Local actors should not only be accountable to norms. Institutions should also be accountable for how they interpret those norms.

The second is shared risk.

Actors with more resources, more mobility and less physical exposure should not automatically move the burden downward.

And the third is power to contest meaning.

If a local organization says, "This requirement creates danger," it should be possible to challenge that requirement without automatically losing the relationship or the resources.

These are modest proposals.

But they change the direction of accountability.

They ask institutions to become interpretable and contestable too.

We often ask how local actors can better adapt to global norms.

I want to reverse that question.

How can global norms become accountable to the people who carry their weight?

Myanmar may look like an exceptional case.

But I think it may be more useful to see it as a stress test.

It exposes assumptions that are easier to ignore elsewhere.

That the state is a legitimate protector.

That transparency protects everyone equally.

That localization means power has moved.

That sharing a word means sharing a meaning.

My argument is not to abandon norms.

It is to keep asking what those norms become when they meet political realities that bureaucracy cannot fully see.

Thank you.

I will not go through the references here.

They show the main intellectual foundations behind the paper, particularly work on humanitarian principles, liberal peacebuilding, epistemic injustice, structural and slow violence, metrics, accountability and interpretive policy analysis.

The empirical argument, however, comes from the interviews and from the tensions participants described between institutional expectations and political survival.

So the paper is trying to bring these two things together: existing critical scholarship, and situated experience from post-coup Myanmar.