Resultantly, over the years, the gap between energy demand and supply drastically grew and now against demand of MW, we are having around MW.
Among the horrified and largely moralistic reactions in the West, some have pointed to economic factors supposedly behind these events. They are right to highlight the importance of political economy drivers of conflict, but their analysis is disappointingly superficial and crude.
This post critiques their approaches and briefly outlines a better one. Sassen penned an extremely speculative piece for The Guardian in Januaryand another for the Huffington Post in Septemberlinking the conflict to land grabs.
However, she offered no evidence for this proposition except that the government had designated 1. Many Myanmar scholars reacted with some scorn on social media. Undeterred, she rehearses these claims in her latest article, again with precious little evidence supplied—though now she also cites the Chinese port and special economic zone SEZ being constructed at Kyaukphyu.
One does not need to be a particularly brilliant political economist to recognise that these claims are extraordinarily sloppy. One can simply look at a few maps. Firstly, note the map of Rakhine below, showing the Rohingya population concentrated heavily in a few townships bordering Bangladesh.
Then note the second map, showing the latest forced displacement and burning of Rohingya villages, which have been concentrated entirely in these townships.
Almost all of the far north of Rakhine has been depopulated of Rohingya, but the centre and south have been relatively unaffected this time around. Now consider the location of the developments that are supposedly driving this forced displacement.
Kyaukphyu is in central Rakhine state, about km south of the present crisis. How can a desire to clear land in Kyaukphyu possibly explain the ethnic cleansing of townships located so far away?
Sittwe is also about 40km from the nearest violence. This certainly deserves investigation, though it is missed entirely in these recent commentaries.
However, this is not just a question of shifting the explanatory weight from one land grab to another. Ultimately, the vulgar Marxism of these accounts does a disservice to political economy analysis more broadly.
Yes, land grabs have happened across Myanmar to facilitate megaprojects like mines, dams, SEZs, ports and agribusiness plantations, and this has certainly fuelled ethnic conflict.
This is well documented by the indefatigable Kevin Woodswhose years of painstaking fieldwork and brilliant scholarship nonetheless goes unacknowledged by these authors. Nor, crucially, can it explain very similar pogroms in andboth of which occurred decades before any megaprojects and their associated land grabs.
Towards a better political economy analysis The only benefit of such crude accounts is that they do prompt us to think about the relationship of sociopolitical conflict to economic factors. I can only gesture here at the main lines of analysis one might undertake, but this is still an improvement over the commentary just described.
Buddhist—Muslim conflict over land and resources in what is now Rakhine state is not new. From the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries there were struggles between Muslim empires expanding from the west and the Buddhist Arakan kingdom of Mrauk Uending only when the area was conquered by the kingdom of Burma in However, it was British colonialism — that arguably sowed the most important seeds for the contemporary crisis.
Burma was ruled as part of the British Raj, enabling vast inward migration from the Indian subcontinent. The British particularly encouraged Bengalis to migrate to address labour shortages on agricultural plantations.
In Akyab districtfor instance present-day Sittwefrom —, the Muslim population more than tripled, while the Rakhine population grew by barely a fifth. More broadly, immigration to Burma peaked atinout of a total population of 13 million.
By then, ethnic Indians had acquired prominent positions across the Burmese economy, not just as agrarian coolies but also as skilled professionals, merchants and financiers.
In the s economic crisis, many farmers indebted to Indian moneylenders defaulted, leading Indians also to become major landlords. The reaction to this rapid influx was a racially inflected form of economic nationalism which still persists today. This is not entirely dissimilar to the xenophobic nationalism that has sometimes accompanied mass immigration in straitened economic circumstances in many Western countries.
There were anti-Indian riots in —31 and specifically anti-Muslim riots in and These were led by the majority ethnic Bamar and did not spread into Rakhine itself. To make matters worse, the British then armed Rohingya volunteer forces, ostensibly to attack the occupying Japanese, but instead these groups often raided Rakhine settlements and Buddhist monasteries and pagodas.
Recalling the trauma of the s, land was nationalised inand private lending to farmers banned a situation that largely persists todayeviscerating the remaining Indian landlord class.
Burmanisation culminated in the nationalisation of 15, businesses after the military coup, promptingtoethnic Indians to flee the country.Water is the most important single element needed in order for people to achieve the universal human right to "a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family.".
The Kargil War, also known as the Kargil conflict, was an armed conflict between India and Pakistan that took place between May and July in the Kargil district of Kashmir and elsewhere along the Line of Control (LOC).
In India, the conflict is also referred to as Operation Vijay (Hindi: विजय, literally "Victory") which was the name of the Indian operation to clear the Kargil sector. Many students find essay writing to be an especially daunting task. Depending on the essay topic, research can take anywhere from a few hours to several days and .
Today, on the first day of the new decade of 'x' years, I am going to tell you why that is. I am hereby triggering the national dialog on what the foremost challenge for the United States will be in this decade, which is the ultimate root cause of most of the other problems we appear to be struggling with.
The expansion of Chinese capital across national boundaries has been at the instigation of the state through its sovereign wealth fund—the China Investment Corporation.
46 Private enterprises only accounted for percent of total outward FDI. 47 Beyond putting in place the economic and political conditions to ensure the flow of natural resources to feed its growth machine, the ruling class.
Nov 20, · AOA, A couple of days back, I was required to make a presentation on Energy Crisis in Pakistan and its consequences. Though it was in form of powerpoint presentation, yet I initially made an essay of.