Dead-end dictatorship: Roadblocks, rural livelihoods and resilient resistance in post-coup Myanmar

Following Myanmar’s February 2021 coup, the new dictatorship – the State Administrative Council (SAC) – has remilitarised local administration by installing checkpoints on major roads from urban centers to rural areas increasingly governed by democratic resistance forces. These checkpoints control and tax the movement of goods, inflating prices for rural civilians and insurgents. Resistance forces have similarly set up armed checkpoints to cut supplies to SAC troops, tax high-value assets, and monitor troop movements. Based on fieldwork in Sagaing Region and Chin State in 2022-2023, this paper theorises the relational dynamics at and between checkpoints run by SAC and resistance forces and examines the structural shifts in livelihoods and social roles these constraints on passage have provoked. We argue that different forms of ‘fiscal contract’ emerge around roadblocks that, especially for democratic resistance forces, reflect nonstate actors' response to state coercion and extortion. A contrast emerges where checkpoints are variously used by the junta to suppress resistance and generate revenue, and in contrast by resistance forces largely to undermine the military’s supply lines and tax high-value goods. These dynamics have forced livelihood adaptation as rural households increase subsistence agriculture, deepen local reciprocity and barter practices and shift social roles – especially for women. Driven both by necessity and anti-dictatorship grievances, we find that practices of mutuality, resource pooling and adaptation, encouraged by roadblocks and the constraints they impose on movement, are deepening the structural resolve of communities to support the resistance movement in the struggle against dictatorship.