Militarized borderlands: Resistant ecologies and refugee networks at the margins of states

In upland borderlands, militarization is a socioecological relation that stretches across generations and postcolonial boundaries. Drawing on interviews with Myanmar refugees who fled to India following Myanmar's 2021 military coup, this article demonstrates that relations to land are not destroyed by dispossession, but rather transplanted and transformed as refugees negotiate shelter, food provisioning, and social reproduction in the margins of the state. As acute violence moves people, clears new slopes, and brings old plots back into production, I demonstrate how borderland histories and transnational networks shape interlinked landscapes of danger and sanctuary and everyday practices of cultivation. Such findings suggest that scholars of militarized landscapes, borderlands, and migration networks might continue to think together in order to understand how upland geographies and diasporic networks shape experiences of conflict and processes of human-environmental change.