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Surviving the State

Land and Democracy in Myanmar

Cover of Surviving the State a solid forest green. The bottom half of the cover features a photograph of an individual walking down a path in a field.

Global and Insurgent Legalities

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Book

Pages: 244

Illustrations: 21 illustrations

Release Date: July 28, 2026

Author: Hilary Oliva Faxon

In Myanmar’s Kalay Valley, a rice-growing region near the Indian border, farmers have long been subject to violence and neglect. Surviving the State considers how these farmers’ everyday, land-based practices enable them to endure successive authoritarian regimes. Through robust ethnography, Hilary Oliva Faxon describes how Burman and Chin smallholders treat land not only as a source of food, but also as a living thing entwined with the families it supports. She considers the centrality of land both to state efforts at control and to inhabitants’ ability to articulate claims, looking at how locals evade, obfuscate, and reinvent legal boundaries in the face of seizures, redistribution, and revolution. Providing a feminist ethnography of land politics, Surviving the State is a testament to the daily work of survival in the face of political violence.

Praise

“Americans are beginning to sense that we need to understand how authoritarianism works—and more importantly how resistance works. No place offers perfectly adaptable lessons, but every place has stories to tell—including, in this fine volume, Myanmar. It is a testament to brave people, which we increasingly need to be.” - Bill McKibben, author of Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization

“Surviving the State is an eloquent and risky (in all the best ways) ethnography of struggles over land during times of authoritarianism, democracy, and beyond in Myanmar. Faxon develops a compelling frame—surviving the state—to develop a way of comprehending how Chin and Burman farmers and activists create meaning in seemingly hopeless times.” - Tyrell Haberkorn, author of Dictatorship on Trial: Coups and the Future of Justice in Thailand

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Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

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Hilary Oliva Faxon is Assistant Professor of Environmental Social Science at the University of Montana.

Table Of Contents

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Preface  ix
Introduction  1
1. Securing Subsistence  25
2. Making Meaningful Life  54
3. Learning Risky Rights  85
4. From Cultivating Ambiguity to Demonstrating Deservingness  115
5. Fleeing Home and Fighting Back  145
Conclusion. Seeking Justice  167
Acknowledgments  173
Appendix: Methodology  177
Notes  183
References  205
Index

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Sales/Territorial Rights: World

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Additional Information

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Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3884-9 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-3398-1 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6250-9 /