Beyond the ‘rebel’ territorial trap: governing logics and armed group sovereignty

‘Territorial control’ has emerged as a central concept in the study of civil wars and rebel governance. However, armed groups are driven by different aims and logics and as a consequence arrive at different sovereign formations. Instead, we ask what are the governance strategies and technologies that armed groups use to project authority? Employing checkpoints as a device for comparing two armed groups that operate in overlapping areas in Myanmar’s borderlands, we find that armed groups use technologies of governance differently to achieve different outcomes that are shaped by underlying ideological and cosmological foundations. We also find that sovereignty is relational to the state and other neighbouring armed actors. These findings suggest that research agendas sidestep the structural determinism of the ‘territorial trap’ and instead further investigate agency-based explanations for how and why armed groups seek to project or expand their authority.